January 19, 2025|

Filed under: Editorial, Featured

Passing the Buck Chapter 3: The Microsoft Kids’ Table

In “Passing the Buck: A Game Pass Study,” Wolfman Jew has bought a three month subscription to Game Pass. With only ninety-one days he can’t get back, it’s on him to try as much as he can. Every day he’ll play something, anything, even if it’s only for half an hour, and write down his thoughts. How many games will he play? How many will he finish? How many revelations will he find? And how much of his sanity will be left by April Fool’s Day?

While I’ve used formal introductions in several writing projects, it’s actually pretty inconsistent when I write them. Sometimes it comes in early, sometimes I only get around to it at the end, and often it’s changed to reflect the content of the article. Not today. With the exception of edits, I’m writing this on the Saturday night before the last chapter was published and giving myself some tasks for this week. To wit: I can play Persona 3 Reload, but not on Sunday, and it can’t take up all my time. In addition, I’m going to finish Chants of Sennaar and keep progress going on Dead Space, but I also want to add three new games to the rotation. Maybe one that I can beat in a day, one more substantial game that complements what I’ve been playing, and something that’s out there.

The point of this series is not necessarily to beat games (although I do want to beat the games I like), but to introduce me to them, and I’d like to keep a steady stream of new material. If I’m just spending all my time talking about a small selection of games, that’s not gonna be interesting for you to read. It’s better for the project and for me as a writer to diversify. Plus, this is my last week before the end of my winter break, and while I intend to use the rest of the three months to their fullest, it’s important for me to get as much out of this time as I can. How did I end up doing? Well, again, this part is from before the last one was even published, so at around 12:35 AM I have absolutely no idea. I guess we’ll both only find out by going down the page.

…Though, and this part is from the Saturday night where I’m preparing this article for publication, you should be warned that this one is somewhat longer than normal. The sheer number of games I tried should help explain.

What I played:

Chants of Sennaar: After having seen the lives of the Devotees and Warriors, the explorer walks through the rungs of the tower holding the Bards and Alchemists, who live over them physically and metaphorically. But although our hero brings each society together as a translator, it’s only by rising to the highest strata of the tower that we finally uncover its secrets.
Gears of War: convicted ex-soldier Marcus Fenix is broken out of jail to battle the Locust, a subterranean race that has ravaged the Earth. As he and his friend Dom fight through the ruins of a large church, they shoot enemies from behind debris in the combat that helped define the cover shooter genre.
Crash Bandicoot: N. Sane Trilogy: Crash Bandicoot saves Wumpa Island, collects crystals, travels through time, and battles the evil Dr. Cortex in a remake of his first three pioneering, Nineties-era 3D platformers. This comes in the form of exploring levels that move towards and away from the camera, almost as though you’re seeing a sidescroller from the hero’s perspective.
Persona 3 Reload: SEES gains three unexpected allies in the fight against the Dark Hour: loyal dog Koromaru, child prodigy Ken, and reluctant former member Shinjiro. But although they fight off three powerful shadows, they also wind up targeted by a rival crew of Persona users—ones who aren’t too keen on anything that might take away their powers.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: A year after the events of Raiders of the Lost Ark, a depressed Indy is called to action when an artifact he uncovered is stolen. Jetting to the Vatican on the trail of the enigmatic thief, he solves puzzles, whips Blackshirts, scrambles over roofs, and hides as a priest to uncover a giant’s tomb.
Dead Space: Isaac’s attempts to fix the rapidly collapsing Ishimura leads him to meet Dr. Challus Mercer, a member of the Church of Unitology and apparent architect of the station’s outbreak. After evading Mercer’s regenerating Hunter, he helps a scientist protect the air quality by fighting a gargantuan Leviathan, which has begun poisoning the atmosphere from inside the station’s food storage.
The Walking Dead Episode 2: Starved for Help: three months have passed since the events of Episode 1, and the Travelier Motel is out of food and flush with ornery survivors. An exchange with a nearby family farm goes south as Lee contends with bandits, infighting, a violent stranger with some connection to Clementine, and their new neighbors’ dark secret.
Crackdown 3: a member of the elite police force known as the Agency is dropped into a city of the future whose technological advancements mask widespread abuse and attacks on the rest of the world. To bring down the state, this soldier fights corporate phalanxes, liberates jails, and scrounges for collectibles in a large urban sandbox.

Sunday, January 12: reached the third, fourth, and fifth tiers of Chants of Sennaar, and started and completed Act 1 of Gears of War.

I laughed. God, I laughed, and a lot. I was not expecting to enjoy Gears of War, and on a mechanical level, I really did not. In general I find cover systems to be like mayonnaise: very good as a coagulant and tasty when you add sriracha, but not something that should ever be the main event. And it is the main event here. Kinda has to be, seeing as this was the game that codified the thing. There are interminable turret sections, as was the style at the time, but other than that this is a very basic shooter. In fact, after playing through multiple projects in “Gun Metal Gaming” that aped this genre and style, seeing it now and unvarnished feels kinda meaningless. The world is gray and dull, the levels boring, the characters miserable, Cole shockingly racist, the shooting largely unsatisfying, and while the Hammer of Dawn and Active Reload are indeed great, it’s perhaps symbolic of the problem when the most engaging bit of a shooter is the part when you reload. The boss fight based around goading a blind monster into rushing you was interesting, but not enough. I haven’t uninstalled it yet, but I can’t imagine wanting to go further and see what twists the game is hiding.

Image: Source Gaming. Dom on the left looking ashamed, as anyone in Gears of War should.

But, holy hell I could not stop cackling every time the game focused on Private turned Sergeant Marcus Fenix. The teeny tiny soul patch. The name. The Little Steven van Zandt bandana. The fact that John DiMaggio, an actor with so many boisterous characters under his belt that a full list would make this paragraph too long, is fully coasting here. The squatting dash—oh, I’m sorry, the “Roadie Run.” And more than anything else his chunky, almost Liefeldian body, which always takes up twenty percent of the screen and is always funny. The men of Gears of War are giant armored Muscle Toys with hard man names like Braid and Cole and Dom, and it’s hilarious watching them scurry across these bespoke ruins. I kept expecting diesel smoke to waft out of their suits. There’s this overwrought scene where your hard as nails boss Kim sacrifices himself to let you escape, and it’s meant to be sad, but my main takeaway is wondering if he would’ve needed to use a giant can opener to take off his costume after each battle. This was considered the height of cinematic gaming in 2006, and it’s so utterly ridiculous today. For the first few minutes, I was in stitches.

In fact, this is giving me a Plan. A big reason for doing this project was that I wanted an opportunity to play stuff like Gears, i.e. Microsoft franchises that are repellent to me from afar. They’ve bought so damn many IPs—even Gears and Halo were things they acquired—that I should at least try, even if I don’t want to commit actual money to them. So maybe we throw out my Week 3 idea already and make this the theme. Let’s go with four games owned by Microsoft that I’d ignore were it not for Game Pass, that way the header can have all four new ones. I’ve already downloaded Indiana Jones (so a Bethesda via MachineGames) and the N. Sane Trilogy (so an Activision via Vicarious Visions), and I’ll figure out the fourth one by the end of the night. This doesn’t mean I’m ignoring the games I’ve committed to finishing; clearly I’m invested in beating this one delightful indie. It also doesn’t mean I’ll be shooing away other Microsoft games, especially not with Avowed coming out at the end of the week. This’ll just be a fun shift in priorities. Now, and ignoring the fact that you the reader have already seen the header and know the fourth game, what to pick, what to pick… ?

Monday, January 13: started and completed the first several levels of Crash Bandicoot in Crash Bandicoot: N. Sane Trilogy, translated all five conversations in Chants of Sennaar, made a Social Link with the Devil Arcana in Persona 3 Reload, and started and completed Marshall College in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

And for a case study of The Plan, the N. Sane Trilogy. See, I have always thumbed my nose at Crash Bandicoot. As a mascot, he’s ugly and dated. How his games functioned as early 3D platformers—unlike Super Mario 64’s intricate gardens, his most famous levels are essentially sidescrollers where the “scrolling” is to to and from the camera—seemed suspect. They appeared to ignore the things about the genre I love, like exploring a cohesive space, in favor of something linear, hard, and directed. And in general, the work of his original developer Naughty Dog has never spoken to me, whether this or Uncharted or The Last of Us. The first Crash Bandicoot came out in 1996, an absolutely stacked year of classic after classic. And among early 3D trailblazers like Mario 64, Tomb Raider, and Resident Evil, it’s always seemed like an also-ran. Historically important and not something I’d ever want to buy? It’s a perfect subject! And while his original PlayStation games are unfortunately lost, their rather impressive “all in one” remake from 2017 by Vicarious Visions (who were turned into a support team at Blizzard in 2022 because if you work for Activision you will be sacrificed) is here.

Image: Source Gaming. It’s interesting looking at Crash from a historical perspective. The original game was an attempt to reimagine platformers in a 3D space that didn’t exist. In some ways it’s kind of a predecessor to stuff like Super Mario 3D World. But 3D World is fun, and this ain’t.

Although it’s not a perfect recreation of the originals and has some wonkiness of its own, the N. Sane Trilogy largely confirmed these assumptions. In the first six or seven remade levels of Crash 1, I repeatedly died to jumps that felt unfair because it was hard to gauge the distance or even see the other side. The game feel was nonexistent; Crash’s run, jump, and iconic spin attack had no weight or heft. Controls felt imprecise in a way that was often acceptable back when 3D was still new (though this also, again, might be specific to the remake) but doesn’t make the grade today. I don’t hate lives systems, even if I think they almost never add anything, but the one here felt unduly punitive. Beyond that, though, there was no sense of real adventure or discovery. A lot of platformers are built around memorizing patterns over allowing different kinds of player expression, and they’re my least favorite. I mean, if we treat this as a new game, it’s one that came out the same year as Super Mario Odyssey. An unflattering comparison on the best of days, and this ain’t the best of anything.

So, another day, another game to give up on an hour in, right… ? Wrong! Remember, this thing took the opposite approach of Final Fantasy VII Remake and redid three games: Crash Bandicoot, Cortex Strikes Back, and Warped. And Crash 2 especially is considered a big step up over the first game. When I booted this up this morning, I instantly fretted about The Plan, about sticking all these Microsoft games right at the start and flaking on them. Instead, this has become an opportunity. I’ll do an hour or so of Crash 2 on Wednesday and Crash 3 on Friday, more if I enjoy them. That way we’ve got the games spread out, it won’t be a time sink if I bounce off them and will be fun if I don’t, and you won’t spend a week that’s mostly about games I’ve already played and also Indiana Jones. Because after walking around in an immaculate college office for like thirty minutes finding the one thing I needed to pack up a suitcase, I’m confident saying that yeah, I’m gonna be sticking with that one for a while.

Tuesday, January 14: found the Formula in Chants of Sennaar, defeated Justice and The Chariot, recruited Koromaru, made a Social Link with the Star Arcana, and reached the fifth blockade in Persona 3 Reload, and completed Chapter 5 of Dead Space

Okay, just a minor stumbling block with The Plan. I intended to focus on Indiana Jones today, but I ended up neglecting it and all the Microsoft games I wanted to prioritize. It’s all on the three games from last week that I didn’t want to abandon but did want to deprioritize a little bit. This is totally fine. I made important progress in today’s games—okay, only two of them, but that’s just because this seemingly final Chants of Sennaar puzzle is way too hard. I mean, the scales and this calculator device… ? This may take longer. So instead I’ll just take tomorrow to play Indy, Crash, and maybe return to The Walking Dead. At least, after I buy a set of reusable batteries. This project is more power-intensive than I expected. I mean, I already replaced the batteries on this controller just a few days ago.

But on the note of Indiana Jones, that game’s hyper-detailed levels and optional collectibles are making me think of this chapter of Dead Space. As was the case with the last day I played the game, this is a sizable improvement over the original Dead Space’s fifth chapter. This introduces the Hunter, a boss who… well, he’s a knockoff of Resident Evil 4’s Regenerador, the shambling monster who doesn’t stay down. You spent a bit of time evading him before freezing him in a cryo chamber before he comes back in Chapter 10. But the experience is limited; it feels out of nowhere, ends quickly, and the Hunter looks exactly like the game’s basic enemy. It’s a pretty bland attempt to liven up the game, and the remake improves it in every way. While the introduction is a bit better for the Hunter, it’s actually an even better glow-up for the main antagonist Mercer that gives us a deeper glimpse into him and the Unitology cult. The chase lasts a lot longer, even including a puzzle where you have to move a giant battery around. There’s more context for this creature. Most important of all, though, is his design. The new Hunter is much larger, heavier, and red. Admittedly, it’s hard to see these changes due to the game’s much more evocative and limited lighting, but this is good.

Image: Source Gaming. Okay, looking at this now, he does kinda look like a different Resident Evil 4 bad guy. Still, it’s an improvement.

One downside of moving so fast through Persona is that at a point, it all blends together. I keep pressing the skip button whenever I’m talking to Kenji or Junpei or hearing a school lecture. I keep using Rewind to fix minor errors and fighting in Tartarus for Personas to fuse. I keep doing everything to interact with Confidants and build their links, but only for their very, very useful stat bonuses. Unlike Dead Space, which has begun seeding in fun optional sidequests that let you see more of the Ishimura, this does have the sense of busy work that’s ultimately endemic to every RPG this long. It was certainly part of Persona 5, and perhaps it’s exacerbated here by the feeling that I want to record some kind of notable progress each day I play it. For some reason, I feel kinda odd just saying “played a few in-game days” in the writeup.

Wednesday, January 15: started and beat the first boss of Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back in Crash Bandicoot: N. Sane Trilogy, started and explored the camp in The Walking Dead Episode 2, reached and began exploring the Vatican in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and recruited Ken in Persona 3 Reload.

Like I said, the disruption wouldn’t be big. I’ve had my (definitely better but still quite distasteful) fill of Crash 2, made a bit of progress in Persona without having it be disruptive, gotten back into Walking Dead, and had a good fill of Indiana Jones. All that, and I got myself two sets of reusable batteries! Granted, I still used a new pair of disposables since these needed to be charged, but still.

Great Circle is the big one here, of course. 2024’s last great game also fits our theme, as I dismissed it for much of its development. I loved MachineGames’ surprisingly sorrowful Wolfenstein: The New Order, but the reception to its sequels was mixed. I’m also not a fan of the Indy movies, and the story focus makes that a bigger hurdle than, say, Shredder’s Revenge. And though I hadn’t thought of it at the time, while Indiana’s been in plenty of games, this was coming out after Uncharted, several Tomb Raider reboots, and decades of games pilfering all his iconography. This wasn’t even the first game I played this week to feature that giant stone ball. Fortunately, my suspicion was unwarranted, and while that’s due to a ton of things, it boils down to this: Great Circle‘s best counterpart is not Uncharted or Wolfenstein but Hitman, and this changes everything. The Vatican is a massive, nonlinear sandbox, one filled with tons of optional collectibles and missions and at least one puzzle box. It also ensures that Indy, a man known for throwing sand into people’s eyes and bringing a gun to a sword fight, stays weak, cagey, and improvisational. The sheer number of things you can pick up and use to whack fascists in the back of the head is staggering. Unlike Hitman, there’s not a lot of cleverness with how you use them, just pummeling, but it makes up for that with game feel. It’s all very playful. I’m naturally in the less guided exploration mode, and I’m noticing all sorts of alternate routes and shortcuts. Movement is fun, and it does make you feel like more of an archaeologist stumbling onto collectibles, side puzzles, and entire optional quests. It feels great having this surprisingly huge space to uncover.

Image: Source Gaming. So far, Indy also has an incredible command of tone, which is really important. This weapon is a powerful one-hit stealth takedown, but it breaks when you use it and has to be used judiciously, and also it’s a violin.

Look, I’m not entirely dismissive of linearity or more structured play. I remain in awe of Walking Dead for just how many ways it finds to ruin Lee’s day, and Persona needs its ticking clock (one halted for another sojourn into Tartarus. I couldn’t abandon the trapped kitty, but it was also good to see what Ken’s capable of. Still, I need to limit my trips here). But there’s something very important to me about player characters and worlds that feel tangible and tactile. The way Indy moves and the places he goes are like this. Dead Space, too; the game repeatedly gives you missions that mostly consist of hitting certain goals in whatever order you’d like, your movement feels heavy and powerful, and for all the horror there’s a playfulness in how the stasis and Ripper work. Indy isn’t perfect, but it’s really fun. Which is unfortunate, because it’s apparently also really long, which means this might be another one I have to take slowly. Let’s hope I find a few more small games to take to the end along with it.

Thursday, January 16: Started and played about two hours in Crackdown 3, completed Chants of Sennaar, and rescued another trapped person in Persona 3 Reload.

And here we have perhaps the single least appealing Microsoft series for me, Crackdown. I mean, it’s an open world game about the fun of police brutality. GTA where you’re the fuzz. The sandbox is large, dull, filled with waypoints and stupid missions and terrible car physics, and oh dear lord, the tone. This wacky neon city feels painfully indebted to Borderlands and Saint’s Row and Blood Dragon without contributing anything of its own. Better than Gun Metal Gaming, but this art style is nothing. The jokes are basic, as is the serviceable gunplay. Perhaps the best example of all of this is Terry Crews, who, after being the main focus of the game’s entire marketing campaign, shows up in the opening cutscene as a guy named “Daddy Duck” only to get killed within a minute of his introduction. How wacky. You remember that British soldier from the CGI Mass Effect 3 trailer who gets a cameo at the very end of the game, and his presence doesn’t make any sense unless you watched it? Somehow we have a dumber version of that here. But even that wackiness feels sanded down to nothing, like everything else. Even the copaganda, the element of this franchise I find most distasteful (you’re normally a supercop heroically assaulting people), has been softened, as you’re fighting the power in the most noncommittal rebellion imaginable. That’s not exactly a bad thing; it’s just symbolic of how little identity there is here. The gameplay drags right off the bat whenever you stop climbing things, but it barely makes a mark compared to the aesthetics.

Image: Source Gaming. If it wasn’t in first-person, it could be Borderlands. If the HUD slightly less “tactical” it could be Saints Row. These are not tastes I like, but they are tastes, and this one felt like an attempt to appropriate both at once. No thanks.

Let’s talk about something fun. After today’s news, I think we can make time. It took a few hours to do it due to an unexpectedly long end game and I did have to throw out my plan of beating Walking Dead Episode Two today, but damn, was Chants of Sennaar fine. I loved those final puzzles, from the horribly brutal weighted scale test to the weird constellations to all those wonderful translations. Again, not perfect. Having several stealth segments in a row is pretty rough. But an incredible, incredible game nonetheless with a surprisingly impactful story I will absolutely not spoil, and the exact kind of thing I’d hope Game Pass would support. Ideally, next week will give me room for another one of these. But perhaps I’m overshooting. As for a longer term plan, once this is done, I fully intend to buy Sennaar—on Switch, or perhaps the finally, finally just revealed Switch 2. And until then… I dunno, maybe I’ll try to get the last two Achievements. Yes, Achievements are dumb and uninteresting and Microsoft’s introduction of them made the industry slightly worse, fight me, but I think I can show the love for this one. The way the autosave works might mean I’ll have to replay it, but hell; if I need to use my notes and walkthroughs to speedrun, I’ll do it. I’ve got two and a half months.

…You know what, I will give Crackdown 3 this: it’s appreciably old school. Not unlike Prototype, there’s a bluntness to the world that I appreciate. There’s no attempt to hide that all the Skinner box tricks of open world games exist just to give you something to do. Your character has no voice or personality, mostly to support the co-op but in a way that reminds me of the losers from the likes of GTA3 and Oblivion. When the boss who sounds like Stacy Keach calls you and starts rhyming “skill” and “kill” like it’s the Gymkata poster, it’s so blatantly trying to be both a guide and an ego boost that it’s disarming. When this came out, two years after Breath of the Wild, the world had definitively moved on from the its core design philosophy. For the better, I think. But the retro leanings are charming now, especially when you’re just running around looking for the giant green orbs. You get points for them! I don’t know what those points do, but it’s gotta be good, right? I’m not going to play any more of Crackdown 3, and the appeal of the franchise is largely lost on me, but I’ll respect its willingness to provide more of that flavor.

Friday, January 17: finished The Walking Dead Episode Two, started and beat the first area in Crash Bandicoot: Warped in Crash Bandicoot: N. Sane Trilogy, recruited Shinjiro and defeated the Hermit in Persona 3 Reload, and entered and escaped the Necropolis in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

I have now finished my experiment with the N. Sane Trilogy—and with it, this week’s experiment (to be clear, I’m obviously keeping on with Indiana Jones). And for the most part, the tastes of Crash 2 and 3 haven’t changed my feelings on the remake. The levels are filled with leaps of faith, the difficulty is all over the place, controlling Crash feels bad, the perspective often feels more irritating than engaging, and the remake retains that fundamental platformer design that I don’t like. This is just not a vision that speaks to me. Because of that, and the overriding finickiness of the remakes, it’s hard to view these games as more than distillations of an idea that was flawed from the start. But in the interest of fairness, it’d be wrong of me to not highlight many improvements I noticed right off the bat. Crash 2’s levels have much more varied architecture that obscures the linearity, Warped has extra gimmicks thanks to the admittedly pretty bad levels with Crash’s sister Coco, and even though I suspect you have to do them all anyway, both allow you to pick the order in which you do levels. I even enjoyed the first level of Warped before running straight into a wall with the others. If Crash 4 makes it onto Game Pass before the end of March, I might try it. See how a fully new entry by a new studio works.

Image: Source Gaming. Dinner at the St. John’s Dairy Farm is about to turn sour.

But damn… Episode Two. That was just exquisite. I mentioned it a couple days ago, but The Walking Dead is fantastic at finding organic and surprising ways to ratchet up the tension. The idea of the “good” or “best” ending just doesn’t exist, primarily because the game refuses to give you one but narratively because your options are always compromised. There isn’t a way for Lee to find food that doesn’t exist, just like there isn’t a way for him to stop Larry from being a world class jerk, dying, and potentially coming back to life as a zombie. And while it has outside instigators like a lack of food and spooky new characters, you’re always dealing with this internal squabbling that’s obnoxious and self-destructive but also entirely realistic (bonus points to having Kenny, Lee’s closest ally thus far, be problematic and outright dangerous in very natural ways). Because of that, these feel less like moral choices in the RPG sense or the crappy BioShock / InFAMOUS / Shadow the Hedgehog sense and more like natural extensions of a tragedy. But also, the game gets a lot out of the downtime between these, where it’s just you looking at the bad hand you’re about to deal.

Today’s session of Great Circle ended up somewhere in the middle. A lot closer to the upper echelon, I wanna be clear, but the underground tomb was the game at its most restrictive and directed. There are ways you can go about it, but they’re mostly varying flavors of the same thing. Even with the fun optional puzzles, I was mostly itching to go back up. Perhaps the most accurate comparison for the game isn’t Hitman but Batman: Arkham Asylum, as they’re both light stealth games based on Hollywood properties that give you very powerful tools, but Indy had been a lot more open once we got through the tutorials. There’s a very distinct immersive sim quality to how the Vatican has functioned, and that being in a Bethesda-produced Indiana Jones game that dominated Microsoft’s marketing last year is as shocking as it is great. But it snaps tight in the Necropolis. This kinda thing was probably inevitable, especially since consumers probably do expect crazy setpieces from this property, but it’s also definitely less fun. Because of that, I think I’d like to finish the Vatican stuff soon and move to the next destination. Assuming that most of the main plot stuff is done, which it seems to be.

Saturday, January 18: completed Chapter 6 in Dead Space, made a Social Link with the Priestess Arcana and reached the sixth blockade in Persona 3 Reload, and explored more of the Vatican and did several quests in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

Turns out that nope, it wasn’t, and I ended up solving an optional puzzle based around astrological signs for the planets and an optional quest that at least seems adjacent to the main story. It’s the first time Indy has said “great circle,” so if this mission to rescue someone and steal a fragment was fully optional… well, I guess that’s more evidence than anything else that this is an immersive sim. Jolly good show, MachineGames. I’m still itching to leave for the next location, but I can’t help but follow at least some of the breadcrumbs the game relishes in dropping.

Image: Source Gaming. The battling remains quite fun. I died to an earlier boss today for the first time since I lowered the difficulty at the very beginning, so even though I’m still on Easy I do have to take the required fights a bit more seriously.

The Plan, and the fact that I was covering a lot of new games, meant that I only focused on the older ones a bit each week. So let’s take the time to focus on Persona, now that I’ve gotten three new teammates and a whole set of new Personas. My wonderful team leader Sati has been fused into Parvati, I’ve got Nidhogg and Hecatoncheires and so many recipients of the Growth skill—which, according to the Megami Tensei Wiki, doesn’t actually affect Persona 3 Protagonist’s growth at all, what the hell!?—and Succubus has really opened up my skills through her indispensable Spirit Drain and Drain Ability. And I have been enjoying the story’s twists and turns, especially with our evil counterpart team Strega. There’s a great sense of overwhelming insecurity. But also, there are issues. Persona 3 Protagonist (lemme tell you, I was shocked when I learned that Nintendo was selling a Super Smash Bros. costume with that name) is boring, and the fact that it’s most advantageous to tell your Confidants exactly what they want to hear doesn’t make him feel any less of a cipher. The series’ iconic shift from dungeon crawling pain to life simulator calm is great, but some of the time between months can feel a bit of a blur. I think that’s largely because I don’t really care about a bunch of my Confidants. The student council president is a gigantic narc, the elderly bookstore couple are sweet but dull, and the classmate who’s in love with his teacher would feel like a parody of Persona writing were this not a remake of the third game. Perhaps it’s not coincidental that the Confidants associated with the worst Arcana, the Devil and the Tower, are the most fun by far, which is why I’d rather hang out with the hard drinking Buddhist monk whose family hates him or the sleazy businessman who brags about how he ripped you off.

That being said, the groove of Persona has often stood even when its character writing falters. The experience of going though those few weeks between each boss fight has a very relaxing, meditative quality to it. You’re trying to hang out with Confidants, hang out with your friends, build those social stats, limit how many times you go to Tartarus and stretch how long you’re in there every time, all while knowing that every single commitment is going to coming at the cost of all the others. And sometimes you do find something unexpected in the dozens of stories they’re seeding all at once. Persona‘s an acquired taste for these reasons, but for someone like me, it’s both exciting and comforting. It’s also a great game to have on for phone calls or just some free time, which is why I’m primarily playing later in the afternoon. So this may seem like a list of complaints, but I’m still very happy hanging out with Yukari and Mitsuru and Koro-chan and really, everyone on the team who isn’t Junpei.

Outro: As I’ve said several times, my time is going to be more limited from here on out. Not a huge amount, but I won’t have free reign for every day of the week. What this means is that I’ll probably be incorporating more shorter games I can beat in a day, or only playing one game on the days I work. But I still intend to play more, to beat more, and to interrogate this subscription service in new ways.

Image: Source Gaming. The first level in N. Sane Trilogy‘s remake of Crash 3. The basic issues remain, though you can see the way the level itself moves in more naturalistic, dynamic ways.

Beyond their lack of appeal to me from afar (and I guess not appealing to me after an hour or two apiece save one), there’s little connecting these four games. They are all simply products that exist in the increasingly massive Microsoft orbit. By this point, the idea of Xbox having any kind of defining, clear brand identity is fully dead. There’s nothing that creatively or historically links a stealth-focused Indiana Jones immersive sim, remakes of the first three Crash Bandicoot games, some neon-soaked cop shooter, and the Roadie Run. But I don’t know if there was ever a clear brand identity. For years, my theory was that it was “power.” A sense of technological superiority, resources, and breadth. The House of Master Chief was this efficient, unflappable machine. But this is all a lie. Xbox’s time as a cultural leader has been fairly limited, largely consisting of the first three Halo games and helping to build the indie scene. The great things they made, not just bought partway through or after the fact, would fill a short list. Almost every entrant in the canon under their ownership came from acquisitions they made over the past five or so years, even though they act as though it’s always been part of the family. And that’s why their actual brand is capital: the ability to buy up several of the world’s largest publishers, put up insane subscription deals, and sustain constant shifts in direction. They can do these things not out of artistic need but because no one else has their resources. I’d compare them to a company like Bethesda or Activision, but they’ve made that analogy redundant.

If this sounds too negative, it’s not supposed to. Indiana Jones, a game I had fully not cared about, is absolutely one of the best games of last year. I’m looking forward to pushing on with it. And there are a lot of other Microsoft games I want to try, most notably Fable II, Broken Age, and the Spyro trilogy. I expect to like that last one more than Crash. But even these experiences weren’t bad, just not satisfying (okay, some of the Crash levels were bad). One of the strange benefits of a subscription service is that you have the ability to experience stuff you don’t expect to like with little cost. I don’t just mean the cost of money, although that’s certainly a big one, but also the costs of time and investment and that emotional hurdle that comes with actively trying things. What this week taught me was how easy it is to just try something and stop, and Game Pass is designed to make that as easy as possible. That being said, I’m not sure how many other negative experiences I necessarily want or expect to have again. I am mostly interested in playing things I want to play. Hopefully a few more of these’ll be sprinkled in. You know, for the sake of the project.

Image: Source Gaming. Though I guess to dip down into negativity for a sec, and I’m sure I’ll think about this more in other weeks, but the actual financial security of this seems suspect. I imagine I’ll buy Indiana Jones by the end of the project, in physical ideally, but a lot of people loving this on Game Pass won’t. And this is a really big budget game.

As a side note, I think I need to shift priorities again. Part of that is me wanting a Week 4 with more than just the three big games I’ve been playing and maybe one or two new things, but I’ve become concerned about a different kind of deadline than the end of my subscription. I worry that Persona 3 and Resident Evil 3 might be leaving the service soon, and while the latter shouldn’t be too long—it was dinged for being a shorter sequel to a game that should take you like eight hours on your first playthrough—both are ones I really want to play and beat. Of course, other games might be on the chopping block, and I’ll try to keep abreast of news about what’s coming off and on. But hey, jumping from one thing to another is just the “Passing the Buck” way, right? Dear lord, I played eight video games this week, ten if you count each Crash game as separate. So maybe let’s try to finish at least one game next week, and add a few more to the rotation. One big or medium one, two much smaller ones. But I’d like another header with mostly new games on it, which makes me realize that Phantom’s template might actually be my secret weapon.

Still, though. I think this was a pretty successful experiment, and it makes me confident that I’ll find new themes. Not always as big or coherent as The Plan, but a few. I downloaded two indies and an RPG on Friday night; maybe we’ll see any of them in a day or so.

Read all of “Passing the Buck” here!