Blog ; ;4 min read
Games that end #
GTA 6? I'll take a retro game from the 90s thanks. On games with stopping points.
I’m not a serious gamer. I’ve never pretended to be one, and when something like GTA takes over the internet and every feed, even the Netflix home screen, fills up with trailer breakdowns and launch countdowns, I feel nothing. I don’t even want to buy it.
It wasn’t always like this. I used to play a lot of Destiny. If you’ve played a live-service game you know the shape of it: you finish a strike, but your bounty is sitting at 80%, the Weekly resets tomorrow, and matchmaking has already queued you for the next run. There is no point where the game says “you’re done for today.” I never stopped because I was finished. I stopped because I was tired, and I’d walk away feeling like I’d closed a laptop with twenty tabs still open.
Playing it well was homework, too. Destiny has a meta, and the meta moves: every time I logged back in there was a new best weapon, a new godroll, a new build that made last month’s grind obsolete. I’d spend my first evening back watching videos just to find out what I was supposed to want. At some point half the hobby is watching content about the hobby.
Lately I’ve been playing retro games like Kid Dracula, DonPachi, and Castlevania instead.
DonPachi wants everything from me for twenty minutes. There is no room inside a Cave bullet pattern to think about work, or life, or which bounties need finishing. You read the screen or you blow up. It’s the closest thing to meditation I’ve found that involves a fire button. And when the run ends, it ends. My head is quiet.
Castlevania is hard in a way that never lies to me. Nothing that kills you is random, the jump arc is always the same arc, the Medusa heads come in the same waves, the axe knight is standing exactly where he was the last time I died to him. Nobody has ever needed a build guide to whip a Medusa head. So when I finally clear that hallway, there’s no build to thank and no lucky drop to credit. It was me. That’s the entire progression system, I got better. And there was closure.
Kid Dracula is Castlevania with the gloom drained out. You walk on ceilings, you turn into a bat, you fight goofy bosses, and there’s no loot, no stats, no build to maintain. Turn it on, play, smile, done.
The strange part is what happens when I put the controller down: I actually put it down. After a short session I stop, and I feel good. That almost never happened with Destiny. I stopped because I was tired, and half the time I’d pause mid-run to watch a video on how to clear the dungeon.
I think it comes down to stopping points. Old games are full of them. A stage ends, a boss dies, the lives run out, and my brain files the session as complete. Destiny is built without them; every goal overlaps the next so something is always at 80%. Even the fights are stretched out with bullet-sponge enemies and wave after wave of spawns, because an encounter’s real job is to pace out the reward drops. And the rewards themselves are different. In Castlevania the payoff is landing the jump, finally reading the boss. In Destiny the payoff was the drop: the god-roll that might come next run, or the run after that. That’s a slot machine, and slot machines don’t have endings.
The old games also just sit there. They don’t care that I disappeared for three weeks. Nothing expired, nothing got sunset. I turn the emulator on and I’m playing in ten seconds, not spending fifteen minutes dismantling gear in a vault first.
So no, I won’t be getting GTA. Not because it’s bad. Because I know what’s waiting after the story, and I’ve finally found games that let me leave.