Insomniac Nightmares

Well, two Platinums were added to the cabinet this week, though I’m not particularly happy about either of ’em…

First was Ghostbusters: Remastered (or, as the trophy card says, “Ghostbusters: Remasterd…”) Now, I’m not unhappy about having the Platinum because there’s something wrong with the game. On the contrary, it’s splendid. I love Ghostbusters. I always have. The original movie was the first non-Disney thing I was allowed to watch, and I watched it literally hundreds of times when I was young. When the game originally came out in the dim dark days of 2009, I was over the moon. I adored it, played the hell out of it, laughed my ass off at it.

The main flaw in the original was the janky online setup and the glitched trophies associated with it… but we can’t all be perfect.

The new version is exactly the same, just shinier and prettier, and with a little nod to the deceased Mr. Ramis at the beginning. They jettisoned the online play. It’s a trifle clunky – of course, it always was – but it still deserves my love in every way and was well worth every penny, both when it came out for $60 back in the day and when it landed last week for $30.

What’s the problem?

It’s over. That’s all. I ripped the game apart and claimed the Platinum in a single day, and while I adored every minute I spent with the game and am very happy to have played it again, it just makes me sad. It’s the sense of “I loved it, and I ate it too fast, and now that it’s gone, it’ll never come back.” There’s not going to be a game like it ever again, I fear, and I rushed it.

Aside from the length, though, if you have ever even slightly enjoyed anything Ghostbusters related, go play the game, already. It’s great stuff.

The other was disappointing for a more mundane reason. Virginia, a walking simulator. I have no beef with walking simulators. Some of them I quite enjoy (Slender and Edith Finch come to mind, though some argue Slender straddles a weird line between survival horror and walking sim.) Some of them I can’t stand, considering them pretentious. Gone Home and Here They Lie fit into that camp.

Virginia manages to be the queen of the garbage heap. It’s more pretentious than Life is Strange or Gone Home, piles on garbage graphics (of course, calling it “artistic choice,” thus ensuring that anyone who points out that the characters are just friggin’ Nintendo Miis or XB360 Avatars are some kind of bigot), takes any semblance of story and flushes it straight down the toilet alongside any concept of coherence (while claiming it is “inspired” by things like Twin Peaks; sorry, chief, go play Deadly Premonition. David Lynch-ean nonsense has its own sense, and flitting randomly around without any explanation isn’t how to do it) and then decides to have a literal goddamn acid drop, as if in some last-ditch effort to explain or excuse the whole mess.

Yeah. Plus, I dunno about you, but given that my not-quite-launch-but-close PS4 Pro can handle marathons of Yakuza or Devil May Cry 5 before it goes into “jet engine” mode or skipping frames, I am concerned that this bland piece of shit frequently chugs along at a framerate that makes me more motion sick than the first time I tried Resident Evil 7 in VR mode and makes the fans sound like they’re trying to start a launch sequence the whole time.

The trophy list is just as idiotic and senseless as the game itself; no real descriptions, just vague, pretentious bullshit. My favorite is “Benway: The true ship is the ship-builder,” though “Flea: Victories in time and space” pulls a second. The first one you get for mucking with a guy building a model of a ship. The other you get for annoying your investigation partner by fiddling with her radio.

The most annoying of all is “Doam: Bis!” You get this by beating the game a second time. I don’t know why; according to Google Translate, “Bis” means “encore” in Albanian, but I have no idea if that’s related. The reason this is stupid is because there is no bloody reason to do it more than once. There are collectibles, but there are no actual choices, no branching paths, nothing that changes what happens. So it’s just a pretentious “hey, play our game again! You can waste a second two hours, right?”

Of course, I did. Because leaving the game at 92% would have been more infuriating than playing it already was. But that’s some bullshit.

So Virginia will now sit at the top of the pile of “worst game I’ve ever played,” and hopefully it may save some of you from being subjected to it.

Beyond that, finished the Consequences DLC for The Evil Within… will probably go do Kurayama mode for that and The Assignment soon; finished Yakuza 3, so just need to do all the grindy crap and finish it on Legend; and started playing Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise, which might as well be advertised as “Yakuza, with an anime paintjob.” Then of course Yakuza 4 hits late this month, so… yeah.

What’ve you been playing? What did you think of Ghostbusters or Virginia? Is there something you think I should give a try? Let us know down below!