Easy Games
Today I had a talk about Noita with a friend who was doing some very convoluted (and I think secret) stuff in that game on stream. I checked out mentally towards the end because it seemed to get spoilery and also I did not understand what has was happening anymore anyway. Before that was a couple of hours of strange grinding to get comically absurd levels of power, which I'm assuming is at least partially a "because I can" thing. The last few Noita streams that friend had done didn't result in any run getting very far, so if you get one really going you might as well make it game-breaking ridiculous.
I haven't played Noita for a couple reasons. One of them is that it is a roguelike, and those tend to be very difficult because otherwise the selective persistence doesn't become important. They're often punishing to the point that you can't get sloppy when you're skilled or just frustrated with 10 dud runs, and that happens to be natural to me. The second is precisely that it's cultivated an impression in me of being extremely convoluted and layered even for the genre. There's just no way I'd ever scratch more than the surface of it even if I do manage to get some good runs.
---
For one reason or another I've been watching a lot of videos on Age Of Empires II lately, filled with minutiae of that game's mechanics. What I've learned in a short time is that AoEII is a very complicated game, and also made by a team that was very aware of (if not in direct conversation with) the competitive community of the first game. I think that may be why as a kid I bounced off it so hard, despite liking faffing around in the first one. The first thing is that building are much, much beefier in the second one, so doing straightforward kid strategies is going to run afoul of not being able to kill opponents effectively. The second problem is that much of the damage calculations involve hidden armour groups and bonus damage types, so it's very difficult to understand the relations between units and buildings.
Beyond that though, the current version of AoEII is Definite Edition, which itself recieves patches every few months or so as well as new DLC expansions. There are currently upwards of 40 civilisations in the game, and many parts of the game have been altered since release 20+ years ago in response to the multiplayer community which no doubt includes some very old blood. (The game is probably noteworthy in its own right for inheriting a 20 year old playerbase like that. Even StarCraft 2 does not match that longevity.) The result is a culture that is extremely honed to all of the many tiny differences between factions and their units, to the point that one of the videos suggested "you're ready to begin ranked play when you can beat the extreme AI". I am tempted, but it's also very daunting from the outside.
---
For a while I've been thinking I might just like easy games better these days, but that doesn't feel entirely right. I've been thinking I like playing short free games to get a wide range of impressions, but then I don't actually do that much anymore these days because a lot of short free games are similar in conception if not siblings of the same template. (The last of those I can remember is a ton of unity games where you steer a rocket through an obstacle course. The template use was not subtle.) Part of me keeps wondering why I won't commit to any game anymore these days, and that is demonstrably not true. I think what's really tying all of these together is that modern games are more prone to assuming you're ready to dedicate a very large amount of time to learning them properly, and that is just not something I can be bothered with. Whether it's a roguelike that wants me to experience the first couple regions hundreds of times or a game with so much fine-tuned variation that playing it effectively requires study, it just doesn't sound like a worthwhile hobby to me. It feels like a fashion of these times that games are often like this.
That's where easy games shine. They can be long, but you'll get through them anyway. And short games can be hard all they want. I think the NES mega mans might still have a reputation for difficulty, and I like at least half of those.