When I was a kid, I was only allowed to play video games on Fridays and Saturdays – an attempt by my parents to keep my gaming passion under control. (Narrator: it did not keep it under control.) For the rest of the week, I was happy doing other things and reading my Nintendo magazines, but come Friday evening, I was ready to pick up a controller. I would stock up on Haribo and fizzy juice on the way home from school in preparation for an evening in front of the TV. My parents, presumably grateful for a few hours of peace, would throw a Pizza Hut delivery through the door of the spare room where our games consoles lived and leave my brother and I to it.
We would sit and play Zelda or Diddy Kong Racing or another parent-approved, non-violent obsession of the day until we were commanded to go to bed. Once my mum pulled the cord out of the wall while we were in the middle of the final Bowser boss battle of Super Mario 64, causing a meltdown still spoken about in our family. I still think my behaviour was justified; pulling the plug is the equivalent of blowing the whistle moments before you’re about to score a winning goal.
I carried on my all-night gaming binges into young adulthood. In the week before I started at university, I did very little except wake, shower, play The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and go to sleep. The first time I completed Demon’s Souls, when I was a student, I did it in two 13-hour stints, interrupted by a few hours of restless sleep. My memories of Mass Effect 2 and the original Bioshock have the fractured nature of all-night benders, random images of Garrus’s weirdly handsome alien face or enemies floating in telekinetic bubbles. One weekend in my 20s I fired up XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the superb strategy game in which you struggle against an encroaching enemy invasion, and came round after the final battle at about 2am on Monday, having dramatically saved the Earth in a last-ditch suicide mission in which all but one of my soldiers perished.
When my children were tiny and I was staying up feeding them, I was also spending six or seven hours a night playing Breath of the Wild, Stardew Valley and Persona 5 (and Animal Crossing with the second kid) – so my memories of the sanity-obliterating hormonal rollercoaster of early parenthood are tied up with methodically digging seed-beds and milking cows with a baby asleep on my chest, or wailing in a carrier while I walked up and down my living room, trying to navigate Persona 5’s surreal mirror-realm Tokyo. It might have been the exhaustion, but night-time felt like another dimension. Video games were a lifeline to my former self, as well as parallel realms to lose myself in.
I rarely get to play games like this any more. Occasionally I get to experience the late-night game binge again, though, when I’m reviewing a game and need to hit a deadline. It took me 40 hours to finish God of War Ragnarök, and I played probably half of those hours while everyone else in my house was asleep. As the deadline approached and the ending seemed nowhere in sight, I finished the game in one eight-hour-long marathon session. I had a headache afterwards, and I couldn’t sleep that night because my brain was still busy throwing axes through the heads of undead Helheim armies. Although my nervous system can’t take that kind of stimulation any more, it was still a wee thrill to look at the clock after being absorbed in a game for hours and see that it was 2am.
These days I snatch gaming time where I can, usually an hour here or there. When my life next allows me the time for proper all-night binges, I will sure as hell appreciate them more than I did in my teens. Anyone rate the chances of my family leaving me alone for several days over Christmas so that I can finally get properly stuck into Elden Ring?
What to play
So, God of War Ragnarök is really, really good. It’s a technically and narratively astounding journey through the lost realms of Norse mythology, a work of fantastical reconstructive archaeology in which you can walk among the gods. The combat is ridiculously fun – retired war god Kratos and his son Atreus have a lot of weaponry and flair between them – and some of the sights I saw across the Nine Realms had me slack-jawed. The scale of it is incredible. It’s a long game – I was rushing through the last third – with a lot to explore, but it’s free of open-world bloat. Every mission feels intentional, and worth your time. I love that the gods here are screw-ups with superpowers, the most believable and relatable type of deity: their personality flaws are only magnified by their immortality.
Available on: PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5
Approximate playtime: 30-50 hours
What to read
Rick Lane meets the creators behind a recent spate of games lampooning the absolute clown-show that is modern British politics, including contemporary satire mod Duke Smoochem 3D: “The country is falling apart faster than I can hope to depict.”
Sony’s next PlayStation VR 2 virtual reality headset will be on sale next February at –wait for it – £530, more expensive than the PlayStation 5 that you need to play it on. I am at a loss. The original PSVR was the most accessible and least pricey entry point to VR back in 2016, when the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive were the other two options, both tethered to very expensive PCs. The forthcoming PSVR is much more expensive than Meta’s cable-free Quest headset, and it only has a few exclusive games. I suspect that this is some creative and technological proof-of-concept thing for Sony, rather than something it expects to actually sell. The company has been known to indulge in plenty of beautiful, innovative but impractical hardware over the years (hi there, PlayStation Vita).
Nintendo Switch sales have hit 114m, though they are slowing down. It might almost be time for a new Nintendo console, or at least a more powerful model. Its best-selling game, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, has sold more than 48m.
Netflix is adapting yet another video game series: Gears of War is getting a film and an animated series. Hold up a minute: does anyone genuinely love Gears of War? I get Halo, but Gears always seemed entirely devoid of meaningful personality to me. I’ve yet to make it more than a couple of hours into any of them.
Final Fantasy XVI’s producer dropped a clanger, claiming that the game’s medieval (fantasy) setting is the reason why there’s so little racial diversity in its cast. “It can be challenging to assign distinctive ethnicities to either antagonist or protagonist without triggering audience preconceptions, inviting unwarranted speculation,” he says. The thing is that not featuring racially diverse characters also feeds into audience preconceptions, and not in a good way.
I won’t link to a leak, but purported footage of one of Kojima Productions’ new game made its way on to the internet last week, via a topless man filming it on a phone screen. You can see his nips reflected off the screen, which rather ruins the magic of a game announcement, doesn’t it?
What to click
Which Pokémon game should you get for your kids – or yourself?
God of War Ragnarök review – walk among gods in a mythological epic
A Little to the Left review – a supremely rewarding ode to neatness
The five best gaming headsets of 2022
Question block
Reader Liam provides this week’s question: With the holiday season coming around it’s going to be time for cosy activities and games. Do you have a particular cosy gaming memory?
Cosy games (or wholesome games, as some people call them) have become a distinct subgenre since about 2016. I like to think they’re a response to the scary times we’ve been living in. Animal Crossing is a cosy classic – it leans into autumnal vibes with its seasonal events and colour palettes, and makes you feel as if you’ve just put on a big warm jumper. I have lost several friends to Disney Dreamlight Valley, which has a similar vibe. Spiritfarer, the Studio Ghibli-inspired game about helping people to move into the afterlife, has you building a big lovely houseboat for lost souls, and has a comforting feel despite its sometimes heavy subject matter. Chicory: A Colourful Tale is also cosy: it’s a game where you’re slowly restoring things to the way they should be, by applying paint.
