weebdeluxe

Recently, I have written a toot that garnered a lot of attention. It merely concerned my views on human creativity and it’s power to resits the increasing threat of artificial intelligence to our creative and human well-being. It made numbers I deemed impossible on Mastodon up until then and garnered a couple of reactions.

Let me get a thing straight right away. My dislike for AI is not some kind of unreasonable stance that is purely based on emotion alone. It could easily be, but I fear that my concerns are valid beyond a mere facade of grifting on a pre-existing anti-AI-mood that is clearly present in certain online space like Mastodon. Yes, Mastodon ain’t exactly the most AI and tech positive space – unless it’s FOSS. Please note that the FOSS community has a lot of growing pains when it comes to AI as well. But that doesn’t mean that my standpoint only exists in order make numbers on a platform not big on numbers, rejecting them, even. It’s a self-defeating project, to be honest.

I will not tackle AI from a perspective of programming. I am not educated in these matters and even with some classes taken on JavaScript and some self-taught C++ I do not feel comfortable to talk about the worth of AI in programming. With this said, it worries me how easily some in that space embrace AI assistance as if there’s nothing or very little to worry about. This touches plenty of FOSS projects and most notably the work on the Linux-Kernel. I find it also very telling that “it’s just a tool” was exactly the kind of comment I got from programmers when my toot was specifically aimed at creative work.

Yes, programming is a creative work, but it is in a different league than capital A – art. I concede that programming can be an expression of your humanity, but I underline that the word “can” does heavy lifting here. Feel free to disagree with me on that, but please don’t replyguy me.

Art is an expression of your own limitations. While you read this text, you may notice that my English is unusual. I learned English when I was a teen and while I read and write quite a bit in it, I can’t claim that I ever mastered the language to a degree I feel happy with. To be honest, each text I produce in English is a monument to my frustrations with my skills or lack thereof in said language and it will remain as such, since it will never reach the level of other languages I use in my daily life.

However, this makes this text uniquely mine, a time capsule of my current skill to use it as a vehicle for my thoughts on matters I deem to important enough to write on.

There has been a long stretch of time where I didn’t write, mostly because the AI slopmachines are just going to gobble it up for their huge databases. Another cog in the machine is not something I wanted to be. But silence in this matter resembles consent, manufactured or not, so I have to write, hoping someone hears. Even listens.

Art is eternal, it resists as such the flow of time, an endless machinery wanting nothing but to devour our humanity. To produce art is to resist. Resistance can not be futile if it helps you express yourself.

Why would you use an AI to “assist” you in that? Does it not take away the “you” from the process of self-expression? I could use AI to strengthen my language. It would smooth away the edges, make it more natural sounding, maybe even help make the text flow better. But couldn’t the same be achieved by your comments, your feedback? By friends who read it before I posted it. Their feedback would help me to understand them better. They would better understand me. The improvement of the text is almost nothing but a side-effect.

You gain nothing in that regard when you feed your text to the AI. Not only that, but you’re making sure that a considerable amount of people take your art less seriously because it just is less “you”. All the criticism that get leveled at so called commercial art will be leveled at you at the very same moment. Funnily enough, the slopwaves upgrade commercial or corporate art just by the fact that meat and blood humans were involved in the process, no matter how little passion was present in the room when it was created.

Sometimes I feel that my point of view is inevitably the correct one and everyone with two working braincells will arrive there sooner or later. But just thinking that makes me an asshole, so this is the best way for me to handle this: write about it and resist. Maybe someone who held a different belief has read this and thought:

huh.

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You may have noticed some pretty awful gaming headlines over the past year. The death of physical games, the plague of AI slop and vibecoded indiegame flipping, studios being closed, developers loosing their jobs and livelihoods… it’s all pretty bad. Enough to make you want to turn away from modern gaming all together.

In May I did exactly that. I chose to only play games that were 20 years old for a whole month. Not only was it a fun challenge during which I played and finished some games that I haven’t played since I was a teen. It also helped me gain a new perspective on my hobby and what I really value.

The first and most important thing upfront: I want to own my games. Like, really own them. If they are digital, I want a DRM-free version of them, if possible. GoG has been great in that regard and I have started using it more often ever since. If a game is available there, chances are I’ll get it there. Unless there’s a physical version of course.

The thing about physical versions is, that I don’t want to support Sony anymore. I have a big enough backlog on my PS4 and PS5, so I’ll be using those devices for a long time to come. But giving money to Sony? Absolutely not. Their decision to screw gamers and movie watchers alike has been a huge turn off.

Which leaves Nintendo. Not the greatest company, granted, but at least some Switch 2 games are completely on the cartridge. That’s at least something worth supporting. Even though I’m pretty sure that they will do the same move as Sony does at some point. This might just be another generation away though, so I want to enjoy this nice thing as long as possible.

Then what does the post modern gaming world look like for me? For the most part, it means supporting indies who do DRM free versions of their games. But the other thing I truly value now is my collection. Playing the immense backlogs I have and going back to older games and consoles is a true joy. It’s pretty stress free, you don’t have to worry about all the discourse and noise happening and it’s almost like a time out for the modern world.

It won’t make its problems go away, but at least it makes me feel whole for a bit.

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When you’re a teen and video games are your biggest hobby, money is an issue. You have very little of it, but a lot of time. Which back in the 90s meant that you played a lot of the same games over and over again. If you were lucky enough to be into PC gaming as well, you could at least check out many titles easily by trying their demos. You found them on CDs that came with the videogame magazines you bought because they also came with at least one full version of a game you never heard of. Those were the ways of the pre-internet days.

One game I tried this way was Diablo. It had the distinction of running really well on my Pentium PC with 166mhz, which was the bane and base of my early PC gaming experience. I played the game a lot. I understood it very little. I had to be a young teen back then and RPGs were still a very foreign concept to me. I grew up with an NES and only dabbled a bit in Amiga games. But the mood of the Action RPG title was great. It felt like playing something forbidden. So I played, never getting any good at the demo. Basically cheesed my way forward by using the health fill up of level ups. That’s how little I understood about the game. What are those red potions for anyway?

Back then, if I wanted a new game that had zero chances of landing on one of those magazine disks, I had to get a used copy. In Luxembourg, getting games in the 90’s wasn’t always an easy task. But in a bordertown to Belgium (borders are never far away in Luxembourg, but this one sat almost right on top of it) there was a flea market. It was organized once per month and it was focused on PCs. Hardware and software was sold back there. I remember it vividly. Huge stacks of old computers, disk drives and the like. Bigbox PC games shown off proudly. A lot of it was FPS-fare of the day: Doom, Quake and Duke Nukem. Since most of these games were forbidden, censored or hard to get in Germany, Belgian and French sellers took the opportunity of selling these games in Luxembourg to potential German customers.

That’s where I got my copy of Diablo. It cost 800LUF, which roughly translates to 20€. It came in a simple jewelcase, just the back having the original inlay with some text and a couple of screenshots. No box or manual, but it had an ugly sticker with the name of the original owner on the disk. So you could say my copy is unique. Looking back, that was probably the reason why the asking price was so low. Diablo 2 hadn’t been out yet, so the game wasn’t that old yet. I got it right away, without thinking twice.

I never managed to get past the first five levels of the main dungeon. I learned a bit more about it’s mechanics, but I guess it was too complex for me and by the time my brain had developed enough to grasp what an RPG even is, I had already moved on to Diablo 2.

No, it took me until the GOG version launched to actually play through the original. I was impressed, the mood is very 90s PC gaming and the game holds up. For the most part. Not too happy with the controls and the way combat is even handled, but it was a worthwhile experience none the less.

This year I had decided to do a retrogaming month. I baptized it “Retromay”, because I’m that kind of creative person. Since the GOG version initially launched, the Hellfire expansion was added to it. I have a weird fascination for that expansion. Back when it released, I didn’t have enough money to get it, instead buying some weird 3rd party addon disk for 10DM over in Germany that I could not get to run at all. And that was that for me and Diablo back then. But now? Now I could finally go and play it. Even try out that new class I always wanted to try.

I found out very quickly that the game does not play nice with Linux Mint. All I got was a black screen with soundeffects. It reminded me of the old DOS games, where you had to fiddle so much to get stuff up and running. Thankfully, fans had already taken care of things and with the aid of GOG and the DevilutionX mod, I was able to get the game to run via the Heroic Game Launcher.

The Monk class is very interesting. I went barefisted and looked up how to spend my points. It was tough at times. Diablo can be very unforgiving if you don’t want to cheese your way through it. Doors are your friends, funneling the enemies one by one through them sometimes your only way of surviving. But the game grabbed me completely for fours days until I had finished the main dungeon and the side dungeon.

Would I have enjoyed the addon back as a teen? Maybe. I was too young and stupid to really understand Diablo. Even my time with Diablo 2 was defined by me not playing through it for years, restarting it over and over again. And this would have been no different. But there’s a benefit to growing older. You learn to appreciate old things.

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Each year, I set up a couple of new years resolutions. It’s kind of rare for me to follow through on them. But somehow, I stuck with one of them this year, at least so far: I wanted to read more manga.

The initial trigger for this was the fact that I own all volumes of Golden Kamuy but never had managed to read the full series. So I set out to read all 31 volumes in as many weeks. One volume per week was surely easy enough to do.

To my surprise, I started enjoying the manga way more over time. I initially had stopped reading it around volume 13, since I was only getting new volumes occasionally and the series features a huge cast with changing alliances. It’s hard to keep track of everything if you only read a volume every three months and keep forgetting things.

Reading one volume per week initially took me three to four day. After the first few weeks it took me two day and soon enough I manage to read my weekly volume on monday. The best thing? Since February I have been reading at least one manga volume from my collection per day.

This has done wonders for my passion for the medium. I’ve read through series sitting on my shelves for years in a very short time. My best example for this is probably Blood on the Tracks by Shuzo Oshimi, which I read in only two weeks. Yes, I had read many volumes before, but I feel reading this through in a shorter time really intensifies the experience.

Besides my backlog, I’m also reading a couple of ongoing series. Eden by Hiroki Endo is being republished in a huge new edition and I remember reading a couple of volumes back in the early 2000s during the first German manga boom. Reading it now has been a very impressive experience I might write more about soon. I’m re-reading the Chainsaw Man volumes I own to get the follow up volumes and I’m making my way through Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure Part 4, which I enjoy a lot. Besides that I am also making slow progress through Blade of the Immortal, a very impressive series that asks a lot from me as a ready. But I think this time, I’m up for the challenge.

I very much feel like a teenager again. When I was younger, I lived through the first German manga boom. Germany had just discovered manga and the scene was exploding. So many different things got published, so many series got canceled and the only limiting factor to me was the fact I couldn’t buy all the manga with my limited allowance. Over time, videogames took over my free time and I read less and less. My first job led to me having even less time for manga and I retreated completely from it. Until the pandemic hit and I got myself the entire Naruto series and read through it during that time.

The passion retreated a bit after that surge, but it was always there. But focusing on it a bit more, organizing myself, has improved my enjoyment of this hobby way more. I feel like writing more about it is a good way to be creative with that hobby as well. Maybe I’ll even finish writing some of my fanfictions I started back in the day. Let’s see where this leads, but I don’t want to put pressure on myself here.

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Moviethoughts, volume 3

Two weeks have gone since my last entry, so here's two weeks worth of movies I've watched.

Airplane I had seen Airplane twice before but it’s just one of those movies you can put on at any time. Since some jokes have flown under the radar (ha!) before, it has been a good rewatch. The UHD has a very good image quality though there’s no HDR here. I might rewatch this with a commentary at some point. The movie also reminds me that I really miss Leslie Nielson. It’s remarkable how good he is in this and the first two Naked Gun movies before he constantly had directors that were just really bad at utilizing him properly.

Gigante This one caught me by surprise. It’s a well-acted and filmed romantic comedy that might seem a bit creepy if it weren’t for the very likeable characters. Very grabbing story of a security guy falling in love with a cleaning lady. It has some funny moments in here and you sure are rooting for the main character. If you ever get the chance to watch this, give it a try. The direction is flawless and the slow pacing is kept interesting with a variety of techniques and small character moments.

Elvira: Mistress of the Dark Elvira: Mistress of the Dark is so trashy and fun that it might be my favourite B-movie I’ve watched this entire year. Some of the line deliveries have the punch of a heavyweight Boxer on cocaine – Elvira entering the reading of a testament with the words “I’m late, but so is my aunt” comes to mind – and the movie is well paced. Add to this that Elvira: Mistress of the Dark also has the best ending of any movie I’ve ever seen, that I’ll compare every ending of every movie to this one, and you get a movie I’ll probably rewatch every year.

Elio A well made and animated kids movie that lacks any staying power. After a week, I have forgotten most about it and my kid isn’t talking much about it either. Still, enjoyable enough.

Pastewkas Weihnachtsgeschichte An absolute piece of shit trash movie made for German TV with a German comedian I didn’t like back in his heyday. And this is well past his heyday in my opinion. Anke Engelke has some decent moments here but it’s utterly predictable, boring and dumb. Thankfully, the torture session was short.

Psycho 2 I had expectations going into this. A legacy sequel to a cult classic by Hitchcock? That’s bound to be trash, right? Wrong! This is a cleverly written, mostly well-acted horror flick that’s heavy on the psychology of the characters and features some surprisingly gory moments. I guess back in the day the reception wasn’t all glowing, but I think this is pretty good.

Last Night in Soho Instant favourite. Psychological horror by Edgar Wright, interesting music pics, impressive camera trickery and overall superbly paced, this one immediately took seat in my top 50. Where exactly, I have no idea.

To catch a Thief Classic Hitchcock. Haven’t seen too many of those yet, but I am gaining a certain appreciation for these older movies. I guess that’s a side effect of slowly becoming old myself. It also made me realize that Grace Kelly looked absolutely astonishing back in the day.

Suspiria The plot is thin; the characters barely exist and the pacing is fucked. But the colours, lighting, score, set design, effects (except for the bat) are just so good and everything pops on the recent UHD release that I’ll forgive the movies flaws almost completely. It’s just fun to watch and find all the movies I’ve liked this far who have trace elements of this movie in it.

Millenium Actress I have missed most of Satoshi Kon’s output but I will gladly get the 4K restorations of his movies, since that helps me to catch up. Millenium Actress is a great movie that stays with me, thanks to the emotional core and complex narration. One of the very few movies I’d call flawless in terms of direction or animation quality.

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Moviethoughts, volume 2

I originally planned on making this a weekly blog, but due to workloads, I have decided to collapse the past two weeks in terms of movies into one blogpost. I will try to keep it short for the individual movies though, so I hope this will be a swift and entertaining read.

The Thursday Murder Club is a recent Netflix production. It has a lot of good names attached to it, ranging from Chris Columbus as its director to Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley and David Tennant as some actors I usually enjoy. On paper, this should be a winner: Get a bunch of older actors together and make them solve murder mysteries in a retirement home. The result however is one of the flattest, most meh experiences I have ever seen. The script needed at least another pass to be funny or suspenseful, the timing on the jokes is off many times and the cinematography is uninspired. The last point really surprises me because the movie does look expensive. Overall, it feels like this project lacked energy. David Tennant does his very best to play the villain but manages to overdo it. Considering the material he was given – a villain without any kind of depth, past or interesting motives – leaning into his past performances of bad guys was pretty much all he could do. The other actors do not fare much better: while all their characters seem to have unique pasts and skillsets, they all come off rather underutilized. Add to that a beginning that takes way too long to really establish the setting, and you have a proper borefest. It’s not bad per se, mind you, so it can be a decent enough watch and some jokes do land. I appreciated the fact that while this plot happens, most residents just try to live their normal lives and have a birthday party in the background, while the main characters do their own thing. This should have been better.

After that I did my first watch of The Exorcist (1973) on UHD. This movie has been on my watchlist for a very long time, since horror is a genre near and dear to me. While I already knew a lot of key moments of this movie thanks to Slavoj Zizecs The Pervert Guy to Cinema, some moments hit me hard. The pacing is classic but meticulous, the effects are old-school but convincing and charming while the acting is very much of the era. The fun bit is of course to watch this movie and just ignore the horror bits to discover what it’s all about. What I see here is a single mother struggling with the fact that her little girl is hitting puberty and is turning into a different person. A person that clearly notices that her mother is looking for a new romantic entanglement. In that respect it is remarkable how much the girl is turned into a mere body, a body on which all kinds of violence is inflicted, not just by the demon but also by those who seemingly want to help her. The true horror – at least to me – lied in the medical procedures the girl had to suffer through. Very hard to watch for me. All in all a remarkable movie that still looks and feels so much more interesting than many newer movies.

In preparation for the soon to be upon us remake of The Running Man, directed by Edgar Wright, I finally watched the original. I love me some good old Arnie and this movie delivers the staples: Him yelling and screaming in his signature way, the one liners, the ridiculous action and fun set designs. For a Stephen King adaptation, this one seemed to be produced after skimming the cliff notes of the novel and ramping up the media criticism a fair bit, which is very superficial, but serves the movie well enough. It does not reach the highs of other Arnie movies from that era, but it’s decent enough. Edgar Wright can probably make a more interesting movie out of this.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More by Wes Anderson is another Netflix production. I normally enjoy Wes Anderson productions and Benedikt Cumberbatch is an actor I enjoy, but this movie which consists of adaptations of stories by Roald Dahl did not grad me for long. Having the characters in the stories narrate themselves is fun for about 5 minutes before it crosses over into being annoying. The way how colours are handled is charming enough for about half an hour. Static shots can become stale, even if the movie adds a lot of variety throughout. I never really got into the stories and there was a general lack of tension for me. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I had been less tired while watching it.

Midsommar is another movie that has been on my watchlist for a very long time. I am not going to say anything spoilery and keep things very short: It is a beautifully shot and haunting experience that shows true mastery of the craft, both in terms of movie making and horrorstory crafting. I enjoyed almost everything about this movie and even though it is almost three hours long in the Directors Cut, I would not shorten it in any way, as the pacing holds up. It’s quite the ride and maybe one of my favourite movies ever.

Psycho (1960) is my second Hitchcock movie after having watched Vertigo nearly a decade ago. I watched it immediately after Midsommar, which made for a fun combination, as this movie is very different. Don’t get me wrong, it has a lot of good tension going on, even though I already knew the twist, and the camerawork, while very much of its era, reinforces the more shocking moments. This is a movie that has been referenced to death. Everyone has basically seen this without ever having seen it, but it’s a worthwhile experience. The only thing I regret is getting the DVD version, because that looked bad on my TV.

All things considered these past two weeks were fun in terms of movies. I discovered at least one new favourite movie, which balances out the movies I did not enjoy that much.

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Movietime: The World's End and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

It’s surprising I hadn’t seen the complete Cornetto-Trilogy up until this week. Edgar Wright made some of my favorite movies, namely Hot Fuzz, Baby Driver and Scott Pilgrim. I never got into Shaun of the Dead – don’t get me wrong, it’s a fine enough movie, but it didn’t stick with me. This is why I was a bit reserved about watching The World’s End. Luckily, that was unfounded, as the movie is very enjoyable, even if it isn’t my favorite of the bunch.

I found parts of it to resonate quite heavily with me. Getting older brought this remorseful view of my youth with it, that this movie expertly taps into. It deals with emotional and drug abuse quite well without making it the fingerwaving focus of the entire story. A lot of things are left unsaid and only subtly hinted at. Other things are powerfully conveyed in well written dialogue. It goes to show that a silly movie can be poignant, can have something to say. So many comedies fall flat because the writers completely forgot about that.

Since I’m thinking about the topic of drug abuse, I have also watched Fear and loathing in Las Vegas for the first time. Movies that put drugs so front and center never gel well with me on a narrative level and I felt disgusted all the way through. But there were silver linings: the dialogue can be surprisingly witty and the movie does a lot in terms of visuals. This one did not resonate with me, but I am still glad to have watched it.

While both movies are flawed in their own right, they were at least interesting experiences. Lately, I’ve been getting into movies more again, also thanks to letterboxd. My reviews there a way shorter than this one, since I normally write them right away, but you can still follow me on there, if that’s a thing you enjoy doing.

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On why the Borderlands movie is trash

Yesterday I went and watched the Borderlands movie. I tooted about it, writing that it was a bad movie. That toot got a couple of likes, but only one brave soul asked what was wrong with the movie.

I have written up an answer. I feel like I should apologize.

It turns out that there is quite a lot of things wrong with this movie. In my opinion it all comes down to writing. Meaning the script is not good and the characters are wholly undercooked. The movie is laserfocused on being as funny as possible. In its runtime of a mere 102 minutes, the movie probably fires off about 200 of what it thinks are jokes. Not a single one landed completely for me and the four other people with me at the cinema barely gave it a chuckle or two, if that.

That's mostly due to the fact that the jokes are just bad banter, the timing is completely off and none of the actors seem to be fully invested in this. Add to this that many characters like Tiny Tina and Claptrap are as annoying as their videogame counterparts and you have one unfunny movie.

But wait, there's more: The script is badly written too! The characters are flat and have no arcs, besides Lilith and Tiny Tina who progress a little bit. Since the characters have no depth or motivations to speak of, there is little interaction. Without interaction, you have no chemistry and without that the entirety of the movie, which is mostly a series of moments where the cast runs away from things because why would they need agency if they can just react to everything that is happening to them, falls flat on its face.

I am not going into spoilerterritory here, so I'm just going to take one very early example. We have an opening scene where Roland, played by Kevin Hart, saves Tiny Tina on a space station. The door to her cell is opened, Star Wars gets a bad parodic nod, some banter ensues, they fight a character you don't realize is actually the antagonist and pick up another party member that has four lines of dialogue in the entire movie. However, the movie is nice enough to tell us that Tiny Tina is the daughter of Atlas and it makes sure to tell us that yes, Roland is the good guy here and Atlas isn't exactly the good guy here. Then the movie switches over to Lilith as the protagonist. She is hired by Atlas to find his daughter. But we already know that Roland is the good guy here. Hence a lot of possible dramatic tension is lost. The trade-off the writers went for here probably was the benefit of introducing a couple of characters. However, we get so little time with them, so little interaction – even here the movie interrupts itself with an action scene, as it so often does – that nothing is gained in the process.

In my opinion, the movie would have worked at least a bit better without this opening scene. Without us knowing who kidnapped/freed Tiny Tina. Without us knowing who the good guys are already. Yes, there is the marketing material, which already tells us that this is going to be a “ragtag team of misfits”-kind of movie, but it would still make for better drama and dare I say it better character interactions.

The thing is that I am almost sure that this is how the movie was originally supposed to go but someone had the brilliant idea that we really needed that scene to not be confused. Probably the same person who thought it was a good idea to integrate two powerpoint level exposition dumps in the first 20 minutes.

But why doesn't the movie have enough time to really set up these characters, I hear you ask. That comes mostly down to the pacing. The movie confuses good pacing with “action all the time”. We can't have characters talking to each other in a meaningful way for two minutes if they immediately get shot at. What little there is doesn't do enough to give these characters any real motivation. And the script leaves the actors hanging in so many moments. Cate Blanchett tries so hard to snark it up, but there's nothing to work with here.

There are positive aspects to this movie. The colourgrading is well done and the movie is pleasant enough to look at, with some neat camerawork. This is undercut by the editing, which makes the otherwise decent action scenes harder to watch than they needed to be.

Another plus – and this is the biggest, I'd argue – is that after 102 minutes, you're done with the movie and you can forget about it.

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A look back on my month of 3DS

Back in April I decided to do a little experiment. I would play only my 3DS for an entire month. While I wrote up my initial experiences and impressions in a first blog post, I want to use this occasion to look back on this experiment and to evaluate my time I had with the handheld.

I started with a lot of enthusiasm. As a big JRPG fan, I always loved my 3DS since it has a lot to offer in that regard. So, I thought that going back to it for a month and really focus on it would be a lot of fun. And to be sure, I had a lot of fun. There are many games for the system I never spent any time with, and I was itching to get back to. Back when the 3DS eShop closed I made sure to buy as many “essential” games as possible. And when the used market was still affordable, I put a lot of money into creating a neat little collection. So there were plenty games to go around. But it turns out that focusing on a single system can lead to a burnout. At least for me.

I tried to chronicle some of my experiences on my Mastodon account. And at a certain point you could see my enthusiasm vaporize. Yes, it was great that I finally got to play Mario and Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story. It’s a great, fun game with an amazing soundtrack that I want to get back to. But after playing it for 8 hours I had to take a break from it, as I so often do. I tire of a single game quite quickly and need to switch it up, very often by using a different device too.

This was unfortunately when I found out that your old 3DS games can corrupt and become unusable. My copy of Paper Jam Bros. and of one of my Pokémon games are completely corrupted and unusable. Turns out you need to play them occasionally, to stave off that corruption. With a hacked system it could be possible to restore it, but I have yet to try this.

I got some decent time in with Zelda: Link between worlds and the second Phoenix Wright game. While I always have issues with Zelda games, I enjoyed the short amount of time I spent with it. It didn’t hook me, but maybe I’ll return to it to complete it one day. And I love the Phoenix Wright games and Visual Novels in general, but I must be in the mood for them. And quite often I wasn’t. Also, I played the original so long ago that I feel that a refresher is in order. So, I might play all the games in the collection I have for the Switch. I even managed to play and finish a game: Kirby Triple Deluxe. It is a fun, but short romp and I enjoyed every single second of it. It’s not as good as Planet Robobot (very few things are), but it was a very neat change of pace from the JRPGs and Visual Novels I was playing. Because as it turns out, I burned out on those two genres quickly, which lead the weird situation of me not playing any games in the final week of the challenge. Really, I got disgusted even by just looking at the device!

This might be because I always had the 3DS with me. Took it with me on my commute, it was always close by in the house and I tried to get in as much time on the device as possible. In those thirty days I managed to get in about 41 hours of gametime. For comparison, that’s more in one month than I played the system in 2023, 2022, 2021 and 2020 combined. If I had played it a bit more in those days I chose abstinence, I could easily add another handful of years. But I honestly think I overdid it and I should have paced myself better. Maybe I should have set a time limit to really enjoy myself.

This experiment also led to me to buy a couple of new games to add to my collection. Kirby Triple Deluxe was one of those games, but I also got Rhythm Paradise, which was very fun in short bursts, Professor Layton Vs. Phoenix Wright, just to complete the collection, and Lifesigns, a Visual Novel nobody talks about.

One other aspect I got to reexperience is the great local multiplayer the handheld provides. Tetris DS is amazing and just so much fun when playing against others locally. And it made me appreciate the fact that for many games you only need one cartridge and can share the game with others locally. A feature that is nowhere to be found these days, which is sad.

Do I return to my 3DS more often now? Yes, I have started a new playthrough of Samus Returns recently and that is going quite well. I will try to finish a couple of games on it every now and then, but considering my huge backlogs I got everywhere, it will take a lot of time. Will I do another 30 days challenge like this anytime soon? Maybe next year or the year after. Right now I am enjoying my time with my other consoles a lot and as I said, those backlogs are not going to complete themselves.

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On Thursday, the 18th of April, I decided to challenge myself: After having seen a youtube video about somebody only playing the Nintendo 3DS for 30 days, I decided that I want to do the very same thing.

The reasoning was fairly simple: I haven’t really played my 3DS in a long time and it would be fun to revisit the system that I have many fond memories off. 30 days doesn’t seem like that long a timeframe either, so I was sure I’d have no problems making it through that challenge.

It’s way harder then expected. So much is already clear after about half of the challenge is done. But I already enjoyed my time so far and I’m happy to share my insights into what I have learned this far.

Lesson 1: Less is more

This one is basic and unsurprising: Having less choices improves your choice making. I don’t have all that much time to play videogames. Very often, I lose a considerable amount of time just trying to figure out what to play. Focusing on a single console and its library reduces the number of choices I could make. Which leads to me making far better choices.

Lesson 2: The DS/3DS libraries are huge and very diverse

It’s kind of an understatement, but the libraries for the dual screen handhelds are huge. I collected a lot of JRPGs, but I also have a decent amount of Jump and Run games, Visual Novels and many more. I like story heavy games, so collecting those has always made sense to me. However, I made sure to get a lot of Nintendo’s own games as well.

Lesson 3: Switching it up is key

With a challenge like this, I feel like it’s important to switch games as soon as you feel like you need a break. Yes, the Mario & Luigi games are great. Yes, Link Between Worlds might be the first Zelda in a long time to really pique my interest. Yes, Phoenix Wright has amazingly fun writing. But playing those games for days without taking a break is a bad idea, since it will most definitely burn me out.

Lesson 4: Leave your comfort zone

I don’t like Zelda but gave Link Between Worlds a try. That was a good idea. I heard many good things about Crimson Shroud but felt daunted by its mechanics. Now I want to play it more. Resident Evil Mercenaries always seemed odd and… it is odd, but I don’t regret giving it a try.

Lesson 5: True portability

You think the Switch or even the Steamdeck is portable? Compared to the 3DS, those consoles are unwieldy and complicated. The 3DS is small, easy to carry and always ready for a quick burst of gaming. This is not meant as a knock against the other devices, but true portable only devices have the luxury of an even smaller form factor and the 3DS with its clamshell design has been easier for me to always carry with me than other devices.

Lesson 6: Play more, play more focused

In a week I had played more on my 3DS than in 2022 and 2023 combined. I always felt kind of bad for leaving the device behind because I have a huge backlog on that thing. Now I feel like it’s almost manageable to complete all the games on there if only I spend more time with it regularly.

Lesson 7: Retro gold is precious

This is an extension to lesson 3: Revisiting Virtual Console games or even some 3D-remakes of older titles are a great way to break things up and to explore libraries of systems I never owned. This is especially true for the Gameboy, GBA and the Sega Game Gear.

As always, thanks for reading. If you want to follow me on mastodon, you can do so over at @[email protected]

If you enjoyed this blog, consider following me on Mastodon or follow my blog via mail or on paper.wf.