Pretty colors and bullshit

I am almost certain I have written this post before, but fuck it; when you’ve been blogging as long as I have you get issued an actual certificate that allows you to repeat yourself as much as you want to. So I will say it again: Super Smash Bros Ultimate, and all of its ilk, are not games. They are pretty color simulators. If this was a game, I would be able to play it, and the fact is that I am still completely unable to achieve even basic competency in this nonsense despite multiple attempts over multiple iterations of the game and I’m pretty sure more than one console. I remain resolutely unable to even vaguely comprehend what the fuck is going on whenever my son decides we need a “family Smash night.”

Which he did tonight.

I don’t know how to describe my level of confusion here, guys. I eat difficult games for lunch. Hearing that a game is amazingly difficult, especially games with one difficulty level, where you git gud or you just quit, is like catnip to me. SSBU isn’t difficult so much as incomprehensible, where even the minor skill of keeping track where the fuck my character is on the screen is borderline impossible half the time. The control inputs make no fucking sense at all and no attempt to learn them has ever stuck. About half the time I’m shooting in the wrong direction if I’ve figured out how to shoot at all, and I think midway through most matches the game scrambles what buttons do what just to fuck with you. I am at the point where I’m entertaining the idea that the entire franchise, which, to be clear, involves actual “professional” competitions, is an elaborate hoax directed at me personally. I’m not sure I was even playing. You could tell me that the game was just playing a video and my controller wasn’t even connected and honestly I would probably take it as a relief.

I have watched so-called high level players playing this game, in front of large crowds. Every so often the crowd reacts as if something amazing has happened. Never not once while watching these videos did I have even the slightest idea what the hell had just happened that was more worthy of applause than any other pixelsplosion at any other moment in the game.

(Autocorrect just rejected “pixelsplosion,” which, okay, that’s fair, but it replaced it with “pixels-lotion,” which is even less of a word than “pixelsplosion” is.)

Also, despite having been a Gaming Person for most of my life, I don’t have the slightest idea who about 2/3 of the characters in the game are, and I don’t even know what giant swath of culture they live in that I’m missing out on.

Anyway, I’m so far behind at school that it’s made me functionally immortal, so I’m going to go try and get some work done. The final episode of Horizon: Forbidden West finally, finally, finally airs on the YouTube channel tonight, so we’re gonna take a couple of days off and be back with something else on Friday.