I’m really not good at video games. That’s a shame, because being good at them would look like fun. There is only one big thing holding me back. I am an idiot. a clown. A simple-minded nincompoop who is fundamentally unable and unwilling to engage intellectually with the deepest level of interaction with game mechanics.
I’ve never pressed the block button in my life. I never fought back because I’m not a member of Mensa. I can’t even bring myself to think about grenades in a multiplayer shooter. so thanks, Miracle Snapshotmakes me feel like a genius.
Marvel’s new digital card game has been professionally calibrated to appeal to people like me – the idiots with small attention spans who are easily distracted by pretty shapes and colors. Really, really beautiful color. Marvel Snap may be a fundamentally simple game, but it does so with tons of ridiculously smooth animations and effects, and satisfying sounds — all carefully crafted to light up gamers’ brains with baby-like joy receptors. It’s like playing Bop It. If you play the cards on a mobile device, the cards themselves really pop off the screen, and the high-res screens are capable of rich colors, rendering these little rectangles of Marvel art so crisply that you can play them in Cut to your thumb on top.
Aside from playing the game itself, there’s a big draw to upgrading the look of all those cards and making them look as organized as if they were in one big ring binder. The resources needed to do so aren’t locked in after a victory, so getting started isn’t as daunting as it usually is. It’s always frustrating to bang your head against something and have nothing to show unless you win, but this is a free mobile game designed to make you feel special.
While I was initially drawn only by the aesthetics of this thing, thinking about how exciting a shiny Pokémon card was to me when I was nine, weird things started to happen. I realized I didn’t lose a game. in 50 games. I take it as beginner’s luck, or as a sign of my long-term match with AI or bots. That 50-game winning streak turned into a 100-game winning streak. When I ended up losing a game, it was because I was distracted by hugging my existential hot girlfriend, so I timed out. I set out to figure out what the heck is going on here.
The first — albeit the least plausible — possibility is that I’m just good at Marvel Snap. By playing the game over and over, I somehow internalized information about the rules. I have some intuitive understanding of card synergies and galactic tactics. Maybe I’m just picking cards based on how they look, somehow assembling some sort of mathematically incomparable deck. When I played into the night and started paying more attention to what I was doing, I finally started to lose. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, so I went to bed.
The next morning, with another undisputed decisive victory, I finally realized what had happened. children. I am hitting the child. I just described the game as a “fancy toy”, but I was still taken aback. This is a baby game. I’m a freelance game journalist, which basically means I’m out of a job. I can watch daytime TV and play mobile games as much as I want. At noon, I’ve been playing with the kids at school, staring at the phone under their desk. I ran with this theory and made a note to try again after 6pm.
I was obliterated. Taken apart forensically by fully-brained adults returning home from real work. These are the people who watch the college challenge and talk about books with friends. Someone who blocks in a game and knows what frame cancellation means. I can picture them sitting in their exquisite home with their feet on the plush ottoman, laughing and drinking port as they handily beat me and my pathetic, ridiculous deck.
The dream of being really good at video games is over, but that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped playing. I can still pretend I know what I’m doing between 8am and 4pm when 90% of the player base is a 10 year old slug who just loves clicking pictures of Iron Man (why do you double one You only have room for 3 power supplies – do your homework).
I finally got a glimpse of what it’s like to think right, to feel the thrill of defeating an opponent. I never did that in Splatoon 3 – I bought it on launch day and the skill cap was forever out of reach. Children are very good at aiming guns, but apparently they are not very good at counting.
Well, if you’re not good at gaming and want to feel what it’s like to be good at gaming, then Marvel Snap is the perfect game. You can spend 10 minutes reading the card descriptions and set up a deck that will most of the time get all the numbers up as long as you do anything and easily win with someone a third your age in a week’s bargain period victory.
will you feel good? It’s really up to you. In my opinion, after trying to get into Apex Legends and finding myself unable to even see what was killing me, I was long overdue for a break. Kids can easily get over these things, but I’m a depressed adult going through my second puberty and I’ll do my best.
