I was talking yesterday about how I really don’t like most of pop culture. I meandered through music, movies, and TV shows, before talking about video games. But I quickly latched onto the indie games I didn’t like instead of sticking with the more mainstream ones, even though I did touch on a few more mainstream games. but I didn’t like the fact that I focused more on indies because at least they are trying to do something different.
So. Some of the mainstream games I didn’t like. Rockstar Game’s GTA V and their Red Dead Redemption. I did not play either because neither appealed to me. The latter because I don’t like cowboy stuff and the former because I don’t like psychotic narcissists. I don’t find them amusing or entertaining, and I definitely do not want to play as one. Plus the whole sexist, racist, other ist bullshit in that game. It just did not appeal to me at all.
The same is true for games like Assassin’s Creed. Now, I have to say fuck Ubisoft. They are mired in sexual abuse accusations, which they have swept under the rug. That said, I never really cared about the AssCreed games. I didn’t try any of them until the one with the twins was free on Game Pass (or Epic Store? Or Origins? Whatever. I got it for free). I fired it up and really enjoyed playing as Evie, the female twin. Jacob, on the other hand, was a loutish buffoon. I loathed him and refused to play as him except on the quests when I couldn’t play as Evie. And for the fight club stuff. I enjoyed it for many hours, 100%ing each area until they opened a new area with a new protagonist, and I suddenly lost all interest. I tried to play AssCreed…the one in Egypt, but it would not run properly on my computer. I had a well-known bug and none of the fixes for it worked.
I don’t like multi games at all so I’m not going to talk about them. I do want to mention another indie because I really think it’s a long troll. It’s Undertale by Toby Fox and it’s a critical darling. So much gushing over it in the indie circles. I went into it not knowing much about it and was eager to see what all the fuss was about.
I HATED it from the very start. I tried to push my disdain aside because I wanted to see the charm, but after forty-five minutes, I admitted defeat. I shut it down and never touched it again. Ian also tried it and did not like it so we could commiserate over our mutual dislike of a beloved indie game.
I think I just don’t like most pop culture in general–that includes novels, by the way. I tried to read The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown and could not get past the first chapter. I tried three times before finally giving up. Same with Gone Girl by….Gillian Flynn. I could not make it out of the first chapter. When I was getting my MA for Writing & Consciousness (yes, that was the program’s name), we had to read James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and I loathed it with every fiber of my body. What a whiny, sniveling, self-important asshole. When I finished reading the book, I threw it across the room and screamed in frustration. Up until that point, I made a point of finishing every book I started. After I finished that book, I immediately released myself from that because life is way too short to read a book I didn’t like at all.