The on-demand era has arrived in video games

For decades it was a hope never exhausted, almost a dream: that the video game They could be played in the same way as watching shows and movies on television or listening to music on the radio.

The fantasy of gaming immediately and on demandwhich avoided the hassle (and costs) of physically purchasing games, began to materialize in the 90s, with the massification of the Internet, first on computers, where legal services (and servers) appeared. not the saints) for temporary or permanent downloading of games.

Everything would arrive on consoles much later. In the new millennium, the consoles of Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft took the first steps towards remote purchasing and digital storage video games; the immediacy, efficiency and (sometimes) economic savings of digital consumption ended reducing the purchase of games in physical formatin a similar way to what happened with movies and records.

In the new digital ecosystem, however, cinema and music once again took the lead: platforms such as Netflix and Spotify pointed out the limits of the pay-per-view and established the current model of single payment which allows free and unrestricted access to a large amount of content. With the consolidation in recent years of the cloud gamingwhich enables remote access to game catalogs located in the cloud, the video game is integrated into the offering of content platforms.

In Argentina, after the trial and abandonment of the Gloud location, services such as Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, from the giant Microsoft, and GeForce Now, from the technology company NVidia, were established. Everything changed: in a market where corporations do not so much dispute the loyalty of users but rather their attention, your hours and minutes of enjoymentNetflix ventures into the video game universe.

From 2021 Netflix It dedicates a large amount of resources to generating a video game catalog. After having hired industry veterans and allying with development studios of different scales, the platform finally has an offer of gaming: There are about forty games available for all subscriptions. At the moment, the games can only be played on mobile devices such as cell phones and tablets and must be unloaded, although the company plans an upcoming landing in the cloud gaming.

He game catalog is expanding regularly: three installments of the Grand Theft Auto franchise were recently added, and Storytellerthe game of Argentine Daniel Benmergui acquired last year, it was the most downloaded on the platform in 2023 and reviewed by Ñ magazine.

As expected, the selection of games exhibits the same quality disparity than that of movies and series. A constant is thus drawn: it is advisable to avoid games produced or commissioned by Netflix, almost always summary expansions of its own content, and explore the catalog area developed outside the platform.

Immortality juggles with history and materials of cinema. The game allows you to manipulate film records of three films and their shootings. Starring the same actress, Marissa Marcelthe three films were considered cursed and they had, like her, an uncertain destiny.

The games of developer Sam Barlow (Her Story, Telling Lies) always revolved around the obsessive viewing and investigation of fragments of surveillance cameras or videos of webcam. Immortality forces to manipulate scenes choosing places in the image that connect with new fragments of footage. The investigation, which resembles that of a feverish film buff, must help put together the missing pieces and uncover the mystery of Marcel and the missing films.

And Immortality evokes the history and myths of cinema, Moonlighter works on the memory of a video-ludic genre, the rol playing game (RPG). There is a recurring scene in role-playing games: during their long journeys, the heroes rest in towns and visit merchant shops where they stock up on weapons, potions, and other precious items before setting off again.

Moonlighter change the point of view and count the story of the owner of one of those businessesone more of the poor devils to those who are denied the brilliance of adventure and glory.

The protagonist must visit a complex cave system daily to fight inch by inch with ferocious creatures and obtain swords, armor and other goods that he must then sell at his location. That’s where the studio game Digital Sun incorporates another genre on the rise: that of management of commercial establishments whose duties include, for example, arranging objects in stained glass windows and shop windows and discover the fair price of each object.

For years, procedural generation made it possible for environments, enemies and elements to change with each new game. That technology helped establish a new genre, the survival game long-winded (as Minecraft o No Man’s Sky), and introduced new features in others such as platforms (Super Mario Bros).

In Dead Cells, a decapitated prisoner discovers, not without surprise, that he can evade death. Now he must escape from the dungeon and make his way through the different rooms of an island ravaged by a strange infection.

As everything roguelikeprocedural variant of the platform genre, each game of Dead Cells it is unrepeatable– the landscape of enemies, obstacles and weapons found in each run It’s unique.

Each failed attempt returns the player to the initial dungeon, but some general progress indicators help start the new excursion with some improvements.

Elegance in the design of the levels, the behavior of the enemies and the audiovisual display they play Dead Cells a clockwork mechanism with a precision rarely seen.

Far from the feints and acrobatics of the roguelike, Kentucky Route Zero It represents another type of trip. The game begins when Conway, a gray trucker, you must make a delivery for your company. But contact with the inhabitants and the places that surround Ruta Zero only distances him from his task: a conversation leads to a request, which in turn leads to a detour, which puts the protagonist in contact with a new character. An air of estrangement from restlessness It invades everything: those forgotten lands are populated by ghosts that quickly and unexpectedly cross the spaces.

In its three acts, Kentucky Route Zero moves away from the harshness of the graphic adventure and its logical challenges: in its place, the game of Cardboard Computer proposes a night trip through an ominous region and a experience of loss.

With just two games released in twelve years, Subset Games It is one of the most promising studies of the scene indie. FTL (Faster Than Light2012) e Into the Breach (2019) regurgitate different videoludic and music traditions. Science fiction under the codes of strategy genre.

Into the Breach follows a small squad of human-controlled robots (the mechas of the anime and Japanese manga). The group comes from the future, where a humanity on the verge of extinction sends a handful of soldiers and machines to the past in the hope of modifying the timeline and saving the species.

The three robots and their pilots fight deadly battles against waves of kaijus in the midst of devastated cities or unforgiving nature. If the story evokes series like Ultraman o Mazinger Zthe playful display brings back the ancestral memory of intelligence test and board games: in turns, on a grid of eight by eight squares, each action must contemplate, in addition to the attack, the protection of civilian objectives, the defense of one’s own robots and the anticipation of enemy movements.

Each squad is made up of robots and pilots with different skills and synergies and, as happens in any great game of puzzle, the playful dynamic teaches (forces) to think on one’s own terms. Mysterious pleasure of the genre: reasoning acquires a speed of its own and the player discovers himself taking complex decisions without fully understanding the logic that mobilizes them.

For at least 15 years, the video game has maintained stable and constant relationships with its media past. There is a classic genre, the fighting game or beat’em up (in Spain it is known by a picturesque name: “Me against the neighborhood”), which was definitively eclipsed at the end of the 90s, shortly after its golden stage, and which now enjoys a strange survival under the motto of retro and nostalgic forwarding.

TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge It is the most recent chapter of that return. The story is outrageously simple: Ninja Turtles must once again face Destructor and thwart their evil plans. There are several recoveries mobilized by TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge: he beat’em up balanced and complex of the early 90s, the playful universe of the Ninja Turtles fighting games for the Super Nintendo console (not the arcade version), and the sensory experience, both tactile and audiovisual, of the games of the generation of 16-bit devices.

And jump into the past built on a taste for the pixel, strong colors and narrative lightness; a time capsule from the era that still dreamed of getting video games transmitted over a cable or radio waves.