OK, but Sometimes Bad Framerate Is Goooooood, Y’know?

I am very sorry if this makes you feel desperately old, but the PS3 was the first console where I started buying my own games. Up until that point, when our family got the PS2 or Wii as shared Christmas presents, games were mainly bought by parents/grandparents at someone’s birthday or came from an ill-advised venture deep within the bargain bin of GAME to find Dog’s Life or Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. This, paired with the fact that we didn’t have access to game magazines in Ireland and five-year-old me didn’t really realise I could find out about good video games “on the computer”, meant I played plenty of trash when I was young.

Things improved when my brother used his savings to buy a PS3 around 2011*. It was mainly down to a combination of the facts that we were at the age where our parents wanted us to manage our own pocket money, and that our teenage brains started to understand THE INTERNET. The result was, we were spending what little of our own money we had on games now, so if we were going to buy something, it had better be damn good for the most part, this worked out pretty well. Much of this is down to my brother, who would have been 16-ish and developing some level of standards and taste, resulting in me getting to play games like Fallout, Dark Souls, and the Batman Arkham games.

*do not ask me why he bought a PS3 and not the much more popular 360. I have no idea, especially since most of his friends owned an Xbox.

But I was still an 11 (going on 12) year old idiot, and it's really easy to trick teenagers into buying shit that isn't good. 2012 to 2014 is probably the most I have ever been bought into the video game hype machine. A good trailer could really dupe young Lex into buying something, blissfully unaware that the trailer she watched was likely either pre-rendered or running a powerful PC and not the godforsaken Cell Processor. And buy things I did.

Payday 2. Borderlands 2. Need For Speed: The Run. All purchased with my hard-earned money based solely on E3 trailers I would watch over and over in the run-up to release on GameSpot’s YouTube channel. None of these games have what I would describe as complementary PS3 ports. Like most of the industry in that era, I don’t think you could accuse Starbreeze, Gearbox or EA Black Box of mastering Ken Kutaragi’s chip. These games do not run great on a PS3. Sometimes they run quite badly.

With Payday 2 and Borderlands 2, this is especially true. As waves of cop corpses litter the streets in a bank shootout in Payday, your framerate will tank. If you were obsessed enough with Borderlands 2 to get multiple characters to Level 72 and OP 8, and farm for perfect loot drops resulting in a Salvador with two Double Penetrating Unkempt Heralds, a Norfleet and Grog Nozzle, you’ll know that if there are enough particle effects on screen you can, in fact, turn your PS3 into an overpriced slideshow projector.

But here’s the thing. In those moments, when the framerate goes to single digits. When it feels like the game you are playing is falling apart at the seams. When everything slows down to a craaaaaawl. That is when you know you are doing something right. You're literally breaking the game, and it feels like you are getting one over on someone.

Usually, a bad framerate feels bad. Simple as. What feels worse is a game hitches and kicks for a millisecond, and for apparently no reason. When it feels like a game is struggling of its own accord and for no apparent reason. But what feels good? When you are breaking the game. When you are causing so much shit to happen on screen, that game is losing in the fight with you, the player. You are forcing €500+ of premium hardware to give way to you lounging on your couch, hitting buttons. That right there! That feels incredible.

Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom never ran great on the original Switch, and it never feels quite right as a result. These were the flagship products for an expensive piece of hardware, and they would just barely hit an uneven 30fps, and they would frequently stutter, dropping below that. For as wonderful as those games are, it feels like a problem, something rooted at the games' core that might be fixed one day with new hardware. Having these games now run at a locked 60fps on Switch 2 feels right. It feels like a weight that dragged them down has been lifted.

But do you want to know what is more awesome?

Donkey Kong Bananza runs really well on Switch 2. Be it because of the horsepower provided by a graphics chip that wasn’t ripped out of a 2015 mobile phone, or because of the supposed magic of DLSS and all that comes with it, the game runs staggeringly well. Despite physics simulations, particular effects and destructible terrain, the game runs great. But occasionally, switch into the right Bananza (the elephant), find the right plot of bananadium-littered earth and just go to town. At that moment, and just for a moment, seven years of work from the most talented developers in the prestigious game studio working with years of proprietary R&D support on a hardware level can’t stand up to you holding the right trigger and moving the camera quickly. The framerate buckles. You’ve won, and it feels amazing.

Maybe some of this is down to feeling like technology runs my life these days. Not just, “Oh, I am dependent on my phone and computer for my work life and socialising,” way either. But in that technology is winning some sort of existential war to push me out of existing. Every day, I log on and see people asking a racist predictive text, “Is this real?” while burning down rainforests to do so. Or I see media websites lay off more actual human employees and shut down because of the whims of a reckless algorithm that will never be satisfied. And as a result, sometimes I need to just take on technology and just win.

This probably isn't healthy, and it likely says a lot about my relationship with technological tools and my work [derogatory]. But if a world where it feels like I am constantly fighting back against racist AIs in comment sections. Where it feels like I am standing aboard a sinking ship, failing to bail out disinformation faster than it comes in. Where it feels like I am constantly pushing my own work and art up a digital hill, only to have it pushed back down and suppressed by SEO. In a world like that, I do need to take out a little stress, and so sorry, Donkey Kong Bananza. You're my digital punching bag.

I'm going to keep trying to break games and make the framerate crash. Because I need to know that in a world of rampant dehumanisation of work and art and life, I can still kick the fucking computer's ass.