Hello and welcome to Dominik’s Little Old Purple Column the 22nd of its kind coming to you from the part of Canada that had the worst hurricane in the history of the country pass over it last weekend – if you haven’t heard of it just google Hurricane Fiona and Canada. Yes. I walked home at midnight after a radio show right in the middle of it. Because I am THAT hard. Or because I really don’t care anymore what shit the world throws at me now. After the last couple of months? It appears that apparently, I cannot be killed.
Suffer? Certainly.
But not killed.
(That’s not a challenge to Gods nor men, by the way!)
Roll the theme tune! (Go and click audio version to hear. It’s ace!)
I had a horrible thing happening to one of my favourite ever games this week. I was flicking through what was on offer on Playstation Plus and saw a five-hour trial of Horizon Forbidden West, the sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn. I let my oldest kid play through it instead of me because she loves that game series even more than I do AND I’m such a good parent. And I’m also off games that are remotely stressful, or action filled while my guts recover from the weird stress thing that landed me in hospital the other week. So, I watched her play while I sat there calmly, injecting pure camomile into my veins.
The five-hour sample started off well enough with a tutorial level that introduced big snakes. Big snakes are always welcome bad guys in video games. Remember that snake boss in Resident Evil 6? He was just about the best named boss ever: Yawn. Fantastic. That’s the name of the snake boss in Resident Evil 6. Not me yawning because I’m 140 words into this week’s column podcast colcast and I’m bored already. No, siree. I am at priapic levels of excitement.
(PIC My kid having at it with a fearsome snake in that there Horizon Forbidden West)
I have also had a soft spot for snakes ever since Vic Reeves appeared on GamesMaster Series 2 playing the Comic Relief game Sleepwalker and said he had always feared snakes because anything that breathed through their tongue had to be feared.
So that was an encouraging start, and I also liked how it allowed you to catch up with all your pals again from the first game and let them basically kiss your backside for saving everyone and everything in Horizon Zero Dawn. There’s not enough of that in role playing games. You do all that work: all that grinding, all that level-upping, all that skill branching, all that saving of assorted arses and then after the big bad killing?The endings tend to be quite perfunctory. You don’t get the equivalent of the scene where they hand out medals to everyone at the end of Star Wars. (Except the Wookie!) So, I liked that the sequel started with the arse-kissing because, yes, I DID save all your lives, denizens of Horizon Zero Dawn. You are most welcome.
However, everything was about to topple from this perch of prime pleasing into the depths of pishery when you leave on the actual mission part of Horizon Forbidden West and, over the opening credits, you have the world’s most insipid excuse for a song I have heard since I worked for Real Radio in Scotland.
(Yes. We had some exceedingly soft songs on that playlist. Lovely people to work with though.)
Why? Why do we even have songs in video games?
This happened the day after I watched Top Gun Maverick which got music so perfectly right by using Classic Rock. This song in Horizon Forbidden West was not Classic Rock. It was Classic SoftChillMeh. Like Enya without the intelligence. James Blunt without the irony. The Corrs with just the brother. It was like someone said: “what is the least videogamey song we can ever put in a videogame?”
The song includes the lyric “these words don’t seem like mine, but the iron won’t subside” which I think could be the worst line ever written by a human being, as Stewart Lee might say. I am not going to name the song or the composer for fear that if I say it out loud three times it might be like an aural Candyman.
So, I ripped the controller from my kid’s hands and said that was it. She was not allowed to play the game anymore. Then I deleted it from the hard drive of the Playstation and, just in case it was still lurking there in some part of the darker regions of the machine, I drenched the Playstation in gasoline, set fire to it while performing an ancient incantation I saw in an Indiana Jones movie and threw it into the path of a passing hurricane. What were the chances one of THOSE happened to be coming along, eh?
This was all very embarrassing because it was my oldest kids’ birthday, she is 24 and I really should let her make her own decisions. What can I say? I am a parent who has rules and boundaries.
And on that Bad Dad Bombshell, thanks for experiencing the free version of this week’s Dominik’s Little Old Purple Column. There is a much bigger version of the column/podcast thing lurking as always just over yonder.
Four times the length of this: This week it’s all about how I got on with your assorted so-called relaxing game suggestions AND conversely a run through some of the most stressful game situations ever.
As well as the full-length column you get access to the comments section AND the archive and MOST IMPORTANTLY the smug satisfaction that you are supporting me being able to keep creating this stuff for you. Approx 4 quid a month and you can cancel at the end of any month. Click the button on written version of the substack for that. Otherwise, until next week? Keep it little, keep it old, keep it purple.
Dominik's Little Old Purple Column #22 FREE VERSION