March 16, 2025|

Filed under: Editorial, Featured

Passing the Buck Chapter 11: Simulation Simulator

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?

In my continuous goal of making “Passing the Buck” a hurricane of gaming overwhelm—with me at the center of things chucking pieces of gaming debris at you—I have tried several gimmicks. Microsoft games! New games! Occasionally, you know, actually finishing games! Adding more games than I probably should! These are helpful ways for me to constantly try new things and explore the intricacies of Game Pass. They’re also often silly, arbitrary, nakedly artificial, or only there to help me overcome some kind of creative irritation. For whatever reason, staying the course on this project without at least a few mild upheavals gives me hives.

But I think I’ve broken the mold on this one. For this week, all our new games will be, in some way, simulation games. Games where you try out a real world job or ascend to the role of king. Games that task you with something as routine as daily life or as complex as making a world. Their graphics, genre, mechanics, and look are all different, but they pride themselves on their ability to simulate something, anything, so long as it feels true. Oh, and also, there’s six of them. Six games on top of the six I’m already working on: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Minecraft, Avowed, Day of the Tentacle Remastered, Hi-Fi Rush, and Dead Cells. Two of these are dramatic remasters of games I played as a kid. Now, this may sound insurmountable, and it probably is, but I’ve got a secret weapon on my side: I don’t have to play any of these for very long. Some I’ll stick with for a few days, even after this week is over, but a few—and by “a few” I mean at least “two”—will probably not last longer than an hour. Plus, the very nature of these games means we don’t have to care about “beating” any of them.

Huh. Writing that last sentence really hit me with some deja vu. Eerie.

Image: Source Gaming. One of my first, if not my first, town centers in Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition. From such a tiny home would spawn a mighty empire.

Anyway, what I mean is that although some of these games may have conventional endings, it’s only some, the ones that exist often have long and onerous single player campaigns, and the process of beelining it to get to those endings isn’t the point. It’s more about the experience of the simulation itself. When I beat Day of the Tentacle Remastered, I’ll get to see the entirety of its comedy, its storytelling, its galaxy brain logic. The ending may color how I see the whole or bring its delightful plot full circle. There’s no such revelation to be gained from Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition whether I completed one campaign or thirty-seven (and I confirm this because I only did beat one campaign).

I should also note that this is yet another large chapter; I played eleven individual games this week (one of the six in rotation didn’t show up)! Because of that, I’ve decided to add in more pictures than normal. It’s the only way I can comfortably show off more things. Honestly, I probably should’ve considered doing that multiple weeks ago when this project started getting really unwieldy, but this is a learning process.

What I played:

Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition: This remaster of 1999’s premiere real time strategy game places you as the leader of a Middle Ages civilization, building up a society to feed your imperial ambitions. While it has a substantial venue for one-off battles against a CPU, it’s more well known for a bevy of campaigns that recreate the most famous battles of leaders like Saladin, Joan of Arc, and Montezuma.
Dead Cells: Against all odds, the Prisoner defeats the first boss, the deadly Concierge. They continue on their expedition, only to be felled at the grim Clock Tower.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: Indiana rescues Gina from a Nazi dig site at the Ziggurat of Ur, discovering that it houses the ark at the center of every flood myth—one whose power source is the stones of the Great Circle. Voss’ attempt to repurpose it leads to his own demise, Locus transports the ship to some unknown land, and Indy and Gina go their separate ways.
Day of the Tentacle Remastered: After searching and experimentation, the three kids fix the Chron-o-John: Hoagie gets a jolt out of Ben Franklin’s kite, Bernard tricks the IRS and buys a diamond, and Laverne makes use of a time-displaced hamster and dryer-displaced sweater. United in more ways than one, they finish their plan to stop Purple Tentacle and his alternate selves from across the timeline.
Terraria: In this strange and inscrutable survival adventure, you mine resources and build structures out of them. Houses and walls keep you from the danger of monsters, allowing you to venture out further in search of more adventure.
Hi-Fi Rush: As Vandelay’s servers are only accessible by the company bosses, Chai and his partners Peppermint, Macaron, CNMN, and 808 sneak into the office to rob Korsica, the head of security. After a fight, a firing, and a discovery about the company’s mind-controlling intentions, Korsica joins up with the good guys and helps take down the public relations propagandist Mimosa.
Avowed: In the sulphuric, acidic wasteland of Galawain’s Tusks, the Envoy discovers that her patron god Sapadal is responsible for the Dreamscourge, summoning it subconsciously to stop the incursion of Lödwyn’s patron god. The Envoy frees Sapadal to end the plague, bears witness to the Living Lands becoming a semi-independent vassal state, and stops the Steel Garrote from burning down the city of Paradis.
PowerWash Simulator: We’re the founder of PowerWash Service, a new one-person business eager to get new clients. And while there’s plenty of zaniness to be found in the exceptionally dirty burg of Muckingham, one power reigns over all: the water, the hose, and the nozzle.
Age of Mythology: Retold: The classic(al) follow-up to Age of Empires II sends the real time mechanics to an antiquity of patron gods and mythological beasts. Unlike that game’s shorter individual campaigns, there’s one main story mode here, in which Atlantean admiral Arkantos goes through Ancient Greece, Egypt, and the Norselands to stop a Machievellian cyclops.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024: In the newest entry in one of gaming’s oldest simulation series, you can fly planes and helicopters to replicate real life aviation jobs. And these can be done in any part of the world, which has been recreated as a single map.
Farming Simulator 22: In this comprehensive recreation of farm and agriculture labor, you can work on or run a farm from the perspective of growing crop, livestock, or forestry. Tragedy strikes, however, as I attempt what should be a very basic tutorial.

Sunday, March 9: started and completed the William Wallace campaign in Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition, entered the Ziggurat of Ur, defeated Voss, and completed Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, won the human contest and entered the future laboratory in Day of the Tentacle Remastered, and defeated the Concierge and got the Challenger’s Rune in Dead Cells.

For self-explanatory reasons, the point of “Passing the Buck” is to get me to experience games that are new to me. Games I don’t own, games I don’t know, and games I’d never play otherwise. It’d be silly to use my increasingly fleeting time to, say, luxuriate in a version of Psychonauts 2 that has good load times. But I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to revisit a childhood favorite or two. I loved Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings as a kid. It was my first experience with real time strategy. Its add-on The Conquerors was my first game expansion, predating DLC in Mass Effect, Fallout, and Super Smash Bros. by upwards of a decade. More importantly, though, this isn’t just me playing an old game. Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition is a stacked re-release filled with oodles of new content. For one thing, it’s playable on console, something that was considered a white whale for RTS back in my day. The additions of new civilizations and campaigns in the years since The Conquerors have also been numerous and seem to never stop coming out, so even though I’m not playing the new paid expansions, there’s still a ton of content that simply didn’t exist back in the early 2000s. Graphics have been remade as well and look quite pretty. Plus, you add in my half-remembered experiences of fighting for El Cid and strip-mining entire continents, and this becomes a great opportunity. In more ways than one, since I can see whether it’s worth buying in the future.

Image: Source Gaming. The fire animation was always quite nice, and I like how it’s been reinterpreted.

What you get is a game with a different sort of learning curve. There are pretty clear compromises taken to make Age of Empires work on Xbox, less in power or movement and more in a deeply cluttered UI. You really can’t play with the sheer amount of facility I had on my parents’ old PC. I’m playing on the easiest difficulty to compensate—but then again, that’s how I always played it. I imagine I’ll be struggling a bit with the interface for as long as I’m playing it, though the odd flipside is that I’ll probably be struggling for quite a while. God, it was fun. The William Wallace intro campaign was never the RTS genre’s most exciting story, but damned if it didn’t feel great to summon units, build an inordinate number of houses, clear forests, and crush every English installation I could find. That pace is perfectly captured, the one of starting off with nothing and ending as a giant, amorphous mass. For whatever it’s worth, I found replaying this far easier than the tutorial in Civilization VI, which I tried last year to no success. You have more opportunities to try things and aren’t railroaded so thoroughly. I don’t think that’s nostalgia. It’s just a better tutorial. Heck, I played a “short” fifty-four minute map later in the day and felt reasonably comfortable.

Image: Source Gaming. Indiana Jones and the Weather Effects.

You know, I sometimes get a bit neurotic about when I hit any milestone. “I have to beat this at the end of the week! It’s more dramatic that way! Sundays are for starting things!” But no, that’s obviously silly. And I’m certainly not upset that after two months of staggered play, we can finally take Indiana Jones and the Great Circle off the docket. It ends, not unsurprisingly, with a weaker stealth section, a terrible final boss fight against someone whose expertise in kara-te leads him to do the Crane Kick (dodge to the side when he does, by the way), and a Nazi being turbo-screwed by a Biblical laser. Great Circle is a good game, and a great one in the first half. It’s witty, brilliant, fun, and the sprawling Vatican and Gizeh levels are awash in excellent game design. But it fumbles when it moves in a linear direction, and having all the shorter, more strict areas together makes the back half distinctly weaker. I think maybe my negativity comes from that shift. I have little patience for these more scripted games, and before Great Circle came out I wrote it off as just another one. I was happy to be proven wrong by those earlier, sprawling levels, so the shift away from that wasn’t the best. I’m still happy for the chance to go through it, though, warts and all. This is a pretty tremendous accomplishment for MachineGames, and I hope they can reap the rewards for years.

Monday, March 10: started Terraria, completed Tracks 5 and 6 in Hi-Fi Rush, entered Galawain’s Tusks and Solace Keep and completed the Companion Quest “Chorus of the Lost” in Avowed, and continued in Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition.

That… really didn’t work for me. Terraria, I mean. I turn it on, walk a bit, struggle to understand what to do and what I can do, and within about a minute enter a completely lightless cave I can’t jump out of. I did come back a few hours later with a guide on my phone and a newly made world, but that wasn’t much better. Terraria is kind of a 2D version of Minecraft, complete with an absolutely massive degree of freedom to create objects and a procedurally made world. And like Minecraft, it’s rather hard and does little to divulge its secrets. At the walkthrough’s instruction, I chopped wood and made a workbench. But it felt far too inscrutable, and perhaps it’s the 2D perspective, but building felt less organic and fun by a lot. When I started this project, I had an unwritten rule to give each game at least an hour of my time. But I don’t think I can keep that promise. This was about the fastest I’ve been put off a game in a long time, even though it’s not actively bad and is, I’m sure, wildly clever in its design. Maybe I’d try again earlier in the project, but—and I recognize the hypocrisy of writing this after spending multiple hours today playing Age of Empires—my time is not infinite. Feel kinda bad about how this played out; I’m pretty sure I installed it all the way back in January and have just been waiting to try it. That being said, I’ll give it another go on Friday.

Image: Source Gaming. One of the many issues I had was in the scope; this is a huge world and a huge window. It’s honestly really hard to do more than swing your axe.

I’m in the fourth and final main biome of Avowed. It’s pretty much Mordor, all dead marshes, green acid seas, and seeping lava. I quickly got there, explored a large swath of the map, got to see its capital, and did the Companion Quest for Marius. That one was pretty good, honestly. Before this is all over, I should do Kai’s and try to unlock the ones for Giatta and Yatzli. I’ve said this a few times, but this truly is comfort food for Western RPGs. There’s some choices, a lot of things to explore, tons of magic and attacks, wacky sidekicks, politics you can solve through fighting, tons of bloom lighting, cursing, sex jokes, magic spells, and many, many proper nouns. It gives you what you want if what you want is a game that harkens back to Ultimate Underworld and Morrowind. It’s also undeniably safe. This is why I compared it to Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of An Illusive Age a few weeks ago. Both of these games, games I like, fit the mold of “role-playing product.” They are gorgeous, polished, precision designed, full of adventure, and don’t break the mold in any real way. They may have very high difficulty, but they won’t challenge you. This has the kind of worldbuilding and big moral choices you’d expect from a Western RPG; that has the timeless Akira Toriyama designs and the mini-games and the incredibly dull protagonist. And in an era where the adoption of role-playing mechanics are damn near universal whether it’s a good idea or not (usually not), games like this have an interesting role. Blatantly nostalgic, but nostalgic for a time where the genre had a fundamentally different role in the culture. I had a lovely time with both games and think they make the industry a little better. I hope Obsidian can dine off it, just like Machinegames with Indiana Jones. But after this, I’m definitely more interested in their next off-kilter project than The Outer Worlds and its upcoming sequel.

Image: Source Gaming. Galawain’s Tusks: the fire’s on the other side!

I was surprised to have gotten so far in Hi-Fi Rush. My quota for the game would be four chapters a week for three weeks, but I’ve already hit half that in less than two hours. That’s why the day felt relatively quieter; I hit my numbers so quickly early on. Look, I do get that viewing games like this, as things to rush through, isn’t ideal. I’m gonna miss a lot of content that’s worth seeing, including major quest lines in RPGs and alternate modes in action games. And it does lead to a crunch mentality, which I shouldn’t be promoting even as an unpaid blogger whose work gets absolutely no attention. Thing is that this mentality doesn’t really feel real here. Last week I talked about feeling a sense of serenity, and that hasn’t subsided. I’m making a lot of progress, and it feels good, but also somewhat relaxed and ethereal.

Tuesday, March 11: started and completed three jobs in PowerWash Simulator, continued in Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition, completed Track 7 in hi-Fi Rush, and defeated Inquisitor Lödwyn and Kostya in Avowed.

PowerWash Simulator is a quiet experience. There’s no music, no characters (even you only show up on screen in the recaps of each job). The game keeps a record of how long it took on each level, but it never shows up in the in-game menu. You don’t have to worry about the rising cost of water, and while additional soaps are available, I’ll need to clean a few more vehicles and backyards to unlock any of them. The most complicated addition are the nozzles that alter your spray’s width and power, but no matter what the grunge will always, eventually be removed. All of these factors combine into something deeply meditative. It’s just you, the hose, and a percentage at the top left for how much you’ve cleaned. And since all you do is slowly, methodically wash away grime, there’s this nice sense of real accomplishment as you slowly uncover the beautiful, sparkling… whatever’s underneath. Metal, stone, wood, all bursting from the grime. It can take awhile, but the shine will always come out. This is a near-perfect kind of cozy experience, and I can see why its co-op mode is so popular. I’d like to try it sometime.

Image: Source Gaming. Some of my very first powerwashing.

If I do have complaints, it’s on the apparent sizes of the levels. My first and third were vehicles, a van and a bike respectively, but the second one… woah. It was an entire backyard, filled with pavement, chairs, a grill, and a shed. It took over an hour, which is a long time to hold down a trigger. Other levels in the campaign appear to be this long, and I’m not looking forward to them. Cleaning up smaller objects seems a lot more fun. These are presumably there to accommodate the co-op, and that’s entirely fine. But it’s pretty intense for a single player, so I’ll most likely either gravitate to smaller levels or go out of my way to make time for the larger ones.

Image: Source Gaming. Part of the phenomenally weird quicktime event boss fight.

I’ve run into a different sort of issue with Hi-Fi Rush over the past two days. Generally, I like to approach a game on its terms, so even though I seem to only hit about 62% of the timing windows in the game, I still feel accomplished and like trying to hit the beat. But the introduction of parries threw me for a loop. They’re hard to do, and they’re often stacked in groups that are physically hard to pull off. The game loves to throw robots out that will only let you pass if you deflect their attacks. They’re bad quicktime events in practice, like the more formal quicktime events are simply hard for me to physically react to. Hi-Fi Rush demanding a level of precision that isn’t possible for some players was a sticking point in the game’s launch, and to their credit, Tango did release several accessibility options for players. For parries, there’s an option that only requires you to press and hold B, meaning you just have to get the timing right once. I turned it on, and another one that makes the QTEs easier. And my experience dramatically improved!… Except for the Chapter 7 boss, whose QTE boss fight seems to have missed the memo. She unleashes chains you have to parry, except that she’ll often throw out a move you can’t parry and need to dodge. The accessibility feature doesn’t factor in this new move at all and became almost totally useless in this fight. I did eventually drill the timing into my head and parried manually, but I was a hair’s breadth from just giving up entirely. Really bad way to spend an hour.

Wednesday, March 12: started and completed the first six chapters of “Fall of the Trident” in Age of Mythology: Retold, completed Day of the Tentacle Remastered, continued in Dead Cells, and completed a job in PowerWash Simulator.

And here’s the other game for this project with which I already have experience. I loved Age of Mythology just as much as Age of Empires—perhaps even more, given how important ancient myths were to me. It’s also a very different game despite having the same baseline (and in the case of this remaster, the same console UI, which is mostly good beyond the difficulty in selecting specific units). Empires is a very ordered game. The pace is slower, the loops are steadier, and while every civilization has unique distinct pluses and minuses, the differences are surface level outside the high level meta. Not so in Mythology, which is wildly, gloriously divergent. Almost nothing is shared between the civilizations, and even units that fill the same roles have their own tweaks. The way each works the economy is distinct. And, of course, there’s the fantastical element. Your upgrade trees involve deities, you curry favor through specific kinds of worship, and you gain the power to unleash natural disasters and monsters. These Myth Units are a delight. Man O’ Wars shoot chain lightning, while Hydras and Scyllas grow heads as they fight. Sphinxes, Giants, Colossi of Rhodes, and the laser-blasting crocodiles of Sobek provide incredible spectacle. Even back as a kid who only played on Easy Mode, it was obvious that these were unbalanced. But that made them fun. I probably played the Greek faction most since it’s the most accessible, but all three—and, to a lesser extent, the Atlanteans from the Titans Expansion that represent the primordial Greek deities—were good. I’ve only had a chance to play the Greeks so far, but this has all been lovingly retained. The music and voice lines are as fun as they ever were, the topography is still more diverse than Empires’, and some of the gods have gotten a soft redesign to make them less… of their time. Aphrodite is no longer sporting a Nineties “boobs and butt” pose, while Baldr’s WASPy Leonard Nimoy look has been replaced by something befitting his “proto-Jesus” cultural interpretation.

Image: Source Gaming. Catapults and Cyclopses lay siege to a wall.

It’s important that the gods look like superheroes, to be clear. Empires told its story through scratchy pen art and narration; it tried to capture historical weight through stoicism. The pre-rendered, Donkey Kong Country-esque graphics leaned into that. It was classy. But freed from any interest in realism, Mythology dives into Chthonic levels of kitsch. The characters and world look crazier (though this was more extreme in the original release, which had polygonal graphics. The remaster largely follows the aesthetics of the other Empires remasters). The powers feel about as game-breaking as any of these games’ cheat codes. And its original campaign—hilariously titled “Fall of the Trident,” which I think is an invention of this re-release—is deeply, delightfully stupid. It’s ancient mythology fan-fiction, with stern OC Arkantos bumbling his way through three religions across the globe. He builds the Trojan Horse, gets blessed by Athena and Zeus and Isis and Thor, fights a cyclops who sometimes speaks in rhyme, and eventually becomes a god. Like, Day of the Tentacle ended with the bad guy teaming up with dozens of versions of himself from across time, and this is still the most Kingdom Hearts thing I’ve played for this project. This isn’t a complaint. Is it strange that the Iliad’s Greater Ajax was turned from a powerful, dramatic symbol of Greek violence into a Worf clone? Yes, obviously. But strange isn’t bad, and I’m looking forward to reliving more of this nonsense. Empires is great, but its campaigns often feel much longer or more rigid. This has a much more demented energy. It also makes me more interested in this game’s new content. I’ve already done maps in the older game as the Vietnamese and Khmer, and they’re fun, but they’re also, you know, Age of Empires II civilizations. I know little about this game’s Chinese faction, but I’m cautiously optimistic that their mechanics fit the level of crazy.

Image: Source Gaming. Not included: the part where this guy turns out to have been friends with Agamemnon and Odysseus all along, or the part where he rescues Chiron from jail.

So, uh… it turns out that at least one of my big PowerWash problems could be solved with just a look at the menu. Pressing left on the D-pad has the water spray continuously, without having to pull the trigger. What you lose in the more physical sensation of doing the task is more than made up for by not holding down a single button for an hour while you wash a house. The sensation of holding this powerful sprayer is still there, so while I do turn it off when I’m not actively trying to clean a surface, this manual button is a life saver. Incidentally, before I turned the manual off for the first time, I watched my hose blast a torrent of water for a few seconds and realized that there might be something to a version of this that limits your water use. Not PowerWash Simulator itself, which needs to be calming, but another entry in the emergent powerwash-type genre. Just imagine playing as some NIMBY jerk and trying to use way more water than you should on your ecologically devastating lawn. Perhaps you could add a management element, or make it like a stealth game where people punish you for being too conspicuous?

Thursday, March 13: completed Chapters 7 through 13 of Age of Mythology: Retold, started and completed five training missions in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, and started a job in PowerWash Simulator.

There are plenty of video games that indulge in virtual tourism. Cities you can pretend to live in, countrysides you can explore at your whim, and while they can be entirely fictional, the ones that recreate real world locations can be the most fascinating. It’s a bit stupefying thinking about all of the video games that painstakingly make a fully accurate New York City. But with Microsoft Flight Simulator, it feels like we have reached the n’est plus ultra of the concept. 2024’s most successful sim recreates the entire planet and regularly updates itself with new satellite data. You can explore every continent in seemingly every kind of flying machine imaginable, with unique controls and systems for moving planes, helicopters, and even weather balloons. Hundreds of real world airports are available for takeoff. Clouds are designed with incredible depth and complexity The idea of the Earth being recreated in such a way is absolutely staggering, but no less so are the controls and systems behind each vehicle. I am… not a pilot, my crippling acrophobia is proof enough of that, but you can see the work that went into depicting the function of these devices. You have to juggle all manner of controls and look through multiple gauges to wrangle one of these things.

Image: Source Gaming. One of the training missions. After trying a photography mission near the Great Pyramids, I spent all my time in the tutorial levels.

However, being such an absolutely staggering work of art doesn’t help it be much fun. The controls are frustrating, and the whole process is often exhausting, more like a job than anything. That’s kinda neat, but it makes the appeal of flying above New Jersey less powerful, something that’s only worsened by the shockingly long load times. I fully understand that Flight Simulator is not made for me; it’s for people who want to experience the act of being a pilot and seeing the Earth from six thousand feet in the air. Its attempts at realism are done not to be “fun” in the conventional video game sense but to provide a specific sensation almost none of us will ever personally experience, and in that sense it’s a real accomplishment. It is the truest simulation of any of the games we’ve looked at this week. But I’m gonna be happy to delete this by the end of Saturday.

This was another quiet day. Flight Sim took a lot of time, and it felt like it took even more, if that makes sense. The load times are probably why. But thinking on the day did make me realize that I was wrong when I said that there weren’t natural ways to “finish” any of these simulation games. Because while all of them do have single player campaigns and story modes, and while those campaigns are far too long and extensive to do them in under three weeks, the Age of Mythology one actually does work. It’s a single story that teaches you how to play the original three factions, and I’m already over a third of the way through. Granted, I’ll have to redo Chapter 14, but Mythology moves by with relative speed. It’s more offense-oriented as a war game, and its missions are breezier. Compare that to the third Joan of Arc mission in Empires II, which lasted two hours.

Friday, March 14: completed Chapter 14 of Age of Mythology: Retold, completed the Companion Quest “Battle Scars,” entered the Garden, defeated Inquisitor Lödwyn (again), and completed Avowed, restarted and built a house in Terraria, and completed Tracks 8 and 9 in Hi-Fi Rush.

Boom! Avowed is done—and with it, almost my entire rotation of games from previous weeks. Four chapters were spent on this thing, one a biome. It was a fun ending. Anticlimactic in a few areas, since the game actually draws from your Companion Quests and I didn’t even start half of them, but dramatic all the same. The final dungeon was an enjoyably crazy bit of level design, more reminiscent of Mario than New Vegas. All floating platforms and giant mini-bosses. There’s also plenty of classic RPG choices. Probably the biggest is what to do with a god who’s rogue, trapped, and hated by the other gods, but my favorite is the political one. Right before you storm into the final boss fight, politicians from all four sandboxes are debating the direction the Living Lands should go in, and as the hero, you’re given the choice. I abstained; I’m “the Envoy” because I’m literally an envoy for an encroaching evil empire. It was nice having that option. Instead of telling four very different leaders what to do, I watched them vote on becoming a vassal state for a bloated, imperial nuisance that promotes brutal vice laws, is hated by them and almost everyone else at the meeting, and had empowered an evil skull woman who was burning down the island as we spoke. That was probably one of the casually stranger moments of “Passing the Buck.” Granted, it was still the least asinine vote I saw today, but I’ll save the non-gaming commentary for my off hours. For now, lemme just congratulate Avowed for being excellent as a distinct B-game.

Image: Source Gaming. And for anyone nostalgic for the buggy days of Obsidian, don’t worry. This game’s super polished, but my character’s hair did get caught on the world geometry for a couple minutes of the big climax.

My second time with Terraria was not great. I still found the UI awful and confusing. Even more than the Age of games, this one visibly struggles with the restrictions of a console, and it’s just hard to actually understand anything that goes on. I’m not gonna keep on with it after today. However, I am glad I took the time to go back. I actually got to do the most basic goal in the game: build a house. It didn’t have a roof, it was ugly and ungainly as all get out, and while I did manage to successfully put in two doors the whole process of how they work is beyond me. And yet, it survived the night. Zombies couldn’t get past my walls, and I even made extra walls just to be even safer. It was good to try again and build this, ugly those it may be. Abandoning the game without experiencing that part would’ve made me feel a bit bad. As it is, I can get the appeal of playing with its form of construction, making things in 2D.

Image: Source Gaming. My “house.”

Hi-Fi Rush has become progressively less satisfying. The timed hits and quicktime events feel increasingly harsher, even with the accessibility options still on. And while the story’s fine, and the characters perfectly charming (even if Chai’s shōnen trash shtick is wearing out its welcome), it’s not that great and isn’t something the game can rely on. But I still managed to outdo my quota and get five chapters done this week—Chapter 9 only has two things, a boss fight and a very timely 2023 reference to the “left shark” meme, so saving it for next week seemed silly. This means we can potentially finish Hi-Fi Rush in a single day next week, which is good, because even if the Age of Mythology campaign is more digestible than an average Empires II one, it’s still over thirty missions long. Not to mention we’re gonna have… quite a lot of stuff to try next week.

Saturday, March 15: continued in Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition, completed Chapters 15 and 16 of Age of Mythology: Retold, and started Farming Simulator 22.

When I bounced hard off Terraria, it felt bad because an important, brilliant, and shockingly successful part of gaming history was impenetrable to me. Those more positive moments let me see the sparks of brilliance shining like the whole shebang had gone through PowerWash, but they also made me a bit sad for struggling with it the rest of the time. Farming Simulator 22 has no such clout, or role in the canon, so I don’t really care that I bounced almost as hard off it. In fact, I found the entire experience hilarious and spent much of my forty or so minutes laughing. The game wants to give you an incredibly deep and detailed experience of having a farm, not to mention working and managing it, and it’s so bad at it! Like, wow, it was bad! There is a tutorial to help you get up to speed. It’s somehow both far too controlling and too unclear at the same time, and also I think it broke. You’re told to jump into one vehicle, then attach it to the attachment it’s next to already, then go to the appropriate field with some of the worst game feel I’ve seen in “Passing the Buck,” then lower the attachment to do the farming, then press the B button so an AI character can do your job for you. Who doesn’t love the fantasy of dictating work to someone else? After that, I was tasked with getting a tractor and hooking it up to a dispensary. Now, I don’t actually know if the tractor-like vehicle near me was a tractor, and looking it up in the menu all I got was the brand ID. By that point I had fully given up on trying it out more. I mean, I started the game for the first time without getting the tutorial, and the whole world was unclear and unsatisfying. It was strange and vacuous, like walking into a prototype game without any assets.

Image: Source Gaming. It’s a farming game. Look, I don’t always have the greatest critical eye, but this was pretty boring.

The appeal of this game is crystal clear to me in the abstract. Farming Simulator allows you to try your hand at the honest, hard work of the real America, living the life we’ve seen in hundreds of commercials for John Deere vehicles and art on milk carts. It lets you work a thresher with no threat of getting your head caught in it, or successfully run an estate at a time when farms across the country are feeling the threat of catastrophic financial devastation. This is a fantasy of structure, order, and slow, eventual domination over a process, and it’s put over a tranquil rural setting. And that’s pretty “video gamey,” if you think about it; just swap “hay field” with “troll” and “tractor” with “broadsword shaped like a lightning bolt,” and that’s kinda Diablo. I’d be remiss, of course, to not point out that there are many, many games that incorporate construction and management elements. But there’s absolutely no interest on the part of this game in evangelizing the fantasy. If you, like me, came in as a witness, there is no space for you; even the tutorial feels nonplussed at your existence. This game has an established audience, and you probably ain’t it.

Image: Source Gaming. The Cobra Car, able to speed anywhere on the map and fire invisible machine guns. This thing rules.

Back to Age of Empires II. A couple days ago, I tried the first mission of the Sundjata campaign. It was one of the missions from The African Kingdoms, a 2015 expansion to the previous HD re-release of Age of Empires II, so it felt right to do a new one instead of just the William Wallace, Joan of Arc, and Saladin campaigns I played as a kid. It’s pretty hard, since you start off vulnerable with very little in the way of resources. And, well, I was just itching to try something from my childhood: cheat codes. For me, cheats are a strange and largely niche aspect of gaming, but they’re amazing in a few situations, and the Age of franchise is one of them. AoE2 and AoM both had an absurd selection of cheats, ones that could boost your resources or end the fog of war or summon a royalty-free version of Big Boy. But for whatever reason, only one of these stood out so much that I remembered it twenty years later. Not the one that makes the berry bushes into soldiers, not the one that gives you command of all wild animals, not Furious the Monkey Boy; it was the car. The Cobra. Type “how do you turn this on” in the chat against the AI opponent, and a sports car with insane modern day firepower will spawn in your Town Center. Granted, typing this, “cheese steak jimmy’s,” “rock on,” “lumberjack,” and “robin hood” (to artificially boost my resources) into the Xbox keyboard is not the most fun, but… yes, using cheats in these games is clearly still fun.

Outro: Oh, did I talk a good game. “I’m gonna have a huge, Triple-A blockbuster to anchor every week for the rest of the project!” Yeah, how’d that work out? Well, it was great for Doom Eternal, but then I got bored with Assassin’s Creed Odyssey immediately, and I didn’t even have one planned for this week. The anchor was simply a genre. Though in retrospect, and it wasn’t actually intended for this role, I suppose Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition fits: great, the first game of the week, and also something that should be taken out of rotation. Mythology is literally part of the same series, more overtly fun and wacky, and also just a bit better suited for “Passing the Buck.” Both I’d like to buy in the future, though.

Image: Source Gaming. One of the real benefits of this release—I’d say it was from the remaster, but I think it was from an older version?—is how you can just zoom in really close. The Myth Units are really cool.

If I look at these six games, the thought that first comes to mind is the aesthetics of realism. Some of these games are more or less realistic than others, but they do try to create a world that feels believable and coherent. In the Age of games, war is presented as fundamentally transactional, economic, and mercantilist; everything costs something, so you have to constantly wrangle resources and figure out how best to expand. PowerWash is laser focused on the cleaning, so it doesn’t matter that there aren’t NPCs or music. Flight Sim is the most overt about this—it literally remade the planet—but it also has these frustrating controls to simulate the challenge of flying planes. These games are not trying to pretend they aren’t games, but they do seek a kind of immersion that mimics or captures or interprets reality.

The complexity itself is another thing that unites these. These are (PowerWash excepted) games that expect you to learn controls, mechanics, or states that are often unintuitive. I can explain the basic loop of an average Age of Empires match, but “you build a working society and army” doesn’t explain construction, villagers, varied military units, and the very complicated controls. Controls are at the heart of Flight Sim, too. And then you have Terraria, which is utterly inscrutable. Because the goal is to recreate something, like a job or a universe, emphasis is put on making sure none of the process is cut. For whatever reason, people seem to feel that complexity is inherent to realism, and that a lack of complexity denotes simplicity or less rigor. I’m not sure why this is the case in this industry, but I don’t think it’s always required. PowerWash alone shows that you can have a lot of distinct elements and still be a largely simple, arguably shallow, but very satisfying simulation.

Image: Source Gaming. This was the level I couldn’t finish even after two hours and asking someone else to help play while I set up the SG Choice article from Friday. It’s so, so big. It’s too big. But, the dinosaur is great, and cleaning it does feel great.

Going back to what I said about Farming Sim, they’re also games that take the conventions of games and funnel them in very specific ways. The experience of slowly learning a skill is still there; it’s just so concentrated on one thing like finagling a plane or figuring out how to wrangle that one villager who’s stuck behind a forest for some stupid reason that the “video gamey” aspect is hidden. PowerWash is a first-person shooter, and while it’s twists (what you’re shooting, how you shoot what you’re shooting, what you’re shooting at, what stakes are there) are not minor, they’re still presenting a very satisfying FPS experience.

Finally, I find it fascinating that although these games try to do a lot of similar things, they’re very, very different in terms of tones. The aesthetics of realism apparently don’t extend to the aesthetics of everything else. PowerWash is fully a cozy game, without much in the way of pushback or competitive drive. Flight Sim is hard, but the worst of a fail state it has is being stuck in another long loading screen. And while Age of Empires and Age of Mythology are in the same genre and series, ones that are built around friction and loss, the former is serious and the latter wacky. What this shows to me is that the world of simulation games is massive, diverse, and with enough space for everyone. This is only confirmed by looking through the sim games I didn’t play for this. Animal Crossing, Civilization, The Sims, Stardew Valley, Rollercoaster Tycoon, Cities: Skylines, and more are all out there, giving you different flavors of reality. My feeling is that this genre tends to be somewhat underrepresented in gaming discourse, beyond a few big hits. Perhaps I’m misremembering. That happens a lot. Whatever the case, this deep dive has made me interested in trying more things in the future. More strategy games and city builders. More power washing, which makes it convenient that PowerWash Simulator 2 was announced a few days ago.

Image: Source Gaming. I feel like I keep describing Avowed in ways that are dismissive or come with caveats, and I do feel bad about that. It’s not amazing, but it is fun—and, crucially, not bloated—RPG.

While I’ll be casually playing Age of Mythology and what I guess we have to call PowerWash Simulator 1 for the next couple weeks, beating Avowed after four weeks and Indiana Jones after… well, we’ve probably have to consider the weeks I took off, but anyway, that’s not important. What matters is that if we don’t count Minecraft (itself a simulation game and a notable absence here, not least of which because I need to eventually finish that project), we came into Chapter 11 with three incomplete games, and they’re all done. Two major games and a minor one are off the table. I am in quite the comfortable place. And wouldn’t you know it, but I’ve also got a week off. So let’s add to the pile again with seven new games. In the grand scheme of things it’s not too dramatic; I’m not gonna treat every day as an eight to ten hour marathon, and my don’t have to carve out time for a fairly large 2025 RPG or a very large 2024 stealth game. And I’m excited to show off the ones I’ve picked. It’s a motley crew if ever there was one. A couple of them I’d like to beat, and while there is one major release that fits in that “do it for a week and give up” mold, a few others are in a similar space. Plus their genres and looks are all entirely different. I am confident. I hope you are too.