Not much time for an update, but I wanted to share some recent game experiences.

Online multiplayer is a world from which I’ve generally kept my distance. It involves a time investment that I’m not willing to make due to the low reward in the end and potentially obnoxious players that make the game altogether unpleasant. Every now and then I’ll dabble in something offered for free or for cheap, like some League of Legends-style Lord of the Rings that released on PS3 nearly a decade ago and Fat Princess, a game that I’m surprised did not receive a sequel. I even gave Warframe an hour. Nothing was a must-play.

This past week saw the launch of Mobile Suit Gundam Battle Operation 2 in English-speaking territories and the beta of Project REsistance, the new Resident Evil game. I played and had fun. Gundam was a no-brainer because I’m taken by the mecha designs and the, “Whoa! I’m a pilot!” of it all. Project REsistance was something else. You can look up full reviews of the beta to read about the asymmetric game play in this 4-vs-1 game, so I’ll spare you those details. What I can tell you is that it’s a unique experience to play a clustered action horror game and not be able to expect anything due to the random element of the player on the other end.

And that helped me to realize what games like these do well. The randomness of other players is chaos. And the chaos is a unique story that you experienced and can tell. It’s like Shadow of Mordor but on a larger scale. I can tell the story about how the Tyrant emerged out of nowhere in Project REsistance and I kicked it with Tyrone before running away. I can tell a story about how disabled a bomb in my own base and then blasted an enemy pilot with a bazooka not once but twice in the same session of Battle Operation 2. And those are fun stories because they were not expected, and someone else playing the game may not have a story quite like that.

Maybe it’s not what everyone gets out of those games, but those are my takeaways.