What else is there to then do but perish the thought and fast-travel across the map? Space is, after all, merely an inconvenience to be overcome in these games. The vistas may be stunning, but the game cannot truly bear your slowness. In truth, you can do about five things (variations on shooting and driving and shopping don’t count as separate things). How many other games can really claim this, especially in the mainstream AAA space? If you, say, stop to smell the flora in Far Cry 3’s tropical paradise, you risk exposing the still-repeated lie of all open-world games #8212 that you can do anything. But each invites deliberate slow play and is prepared to bear the attendant scrutiny. This is an unlikely group of games, each slow in its own way, and some more purposeful about their engagement with time than others. And the newly released Animal Crossing: New Leaf relishes its gentle pastoral consumerism the whole year round, encouraging players to check in every day and experience the real-time micro-changes of small-town life across the virtual seasons. One of the very best games of 2013, Cardboard Computer’s Kentucky Route Zero, uses hypnotic sound design, evocative writing, and casually stunning visual transitions to draw out its haunted, contemplative mood. Indie games like Proteus and Dear Esther have defined the measured pace of the first-person-walker genre, while Japanese action-RPGs Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls employ suffocating atmosphere and the fear of death to terrorize players into slowness. The most important game of this generation, Minecraft, clearly knows that it takes time to inhabit a world of blocks and make it your own. Games that emphasize texture, tone, and the very experience of time itself, both in and outside the game.Īctually, there are a surprising number of video games that would already qualify as “slow,” though they appear to have little else in common. Why not slow games? Games that aren’t merely nonviolent or cerebral but that purposely take their time, that resist players and delay gratification, that reveal themselves only gradually and require more deliberate engagement. There are already movements for slow food, slow travel, even slow parenting. One that doesn’t encourage binging, but rather asks the player to inhabit time and feel its passing more intensely. Imagine a video game that doesn’t aim to pass the time but instead to slow it down. Time, after all, should be killed in moderation. We didn’t intend to get caught in the feedback loop and lose control like that. We feel embarrassed, perhaps nauseated, as if we just accidentally ate a whole box of Cheez-Its. We miss our stop the cart behind nudges us ahead our legs fall asleep. We play them to avoid waiting.īut then sometimes mobile games hold us in thrall longer than we intend. Perhaps that’s why waiting for more lives in games like Candy Crush Saga is so infuriating. These games let us get in, get out, get our fix, a temporary MacGuffin to focus our restless minds. The times between, when we’re not sure what to do with ourselves. The commute, the checkout line, the bathroom. However I am not against MQA as it gives an efficient streaming capability with good sound while from the same library you can use it on almost any mobile gear.So many mobile games seem designed around dead time. I tested it myself with a more expensive DAC. So the advantage that MQA gives: mainly absence of jitter is then partly or totally gone. MQA: A Review of controversies, concerns, and cautions - Reviews - Audiophile Style I read a technical test that showed some downsides of MQA and I can imagine the lossy format downsides can degrade the sound quality level to some extend. But I agree with some people that a basic Tidal stream 24-bit with a good “not unfolding” DAC can sound just as well or better (also depending on taste). I use Roon now for over a year and I compared sound and it does sound well. It is therefore not usable on the road in a mobile situation. But Roon is even more expensive and I dislike their approach of licensing to a single core.
Roon software has the core first unfold decoder included, and it works with “render only” devices to full unfold.