Gaming: A love/hate relationship

[Blaze163]

Lali ho.

Still trying to keep my mind off the fact that New Zealand based lady friend Sian isn't answering her phone after 60-odd people died in an earthquake, so I'm writing my new blog. Maybe it'll help. I dunno.

I got to thinking while playing the demo for Dragon Age 2 (which is kinda meh, to be honest) today that my relationship with gaming has changed over the years. As I've grown in maturity (shut up, I have) I've stopped looking through the rose tinted glasses of my youth and have begun to see real issues. But it's not all bad. It's acually fairly well balanced. Allow me to demonstrate with the following.

The top 5 aspects of gaming that need to fuck right off.

- Constant huge updates. Seriously, what gives with this shit? There are times when I've downloaded a demo that's only been on the Xbox Live Marketplace for a couple of hours and I still need to download an update for it. PS3 games are nightmares because of the ridiculous ammount of data some of them feel the need to install and download. Whatever happened to the days of the SNES when playing a game was as simple as putting it in the machine and going at it? Seriously, this is meant to be the modern era and we're lumbered with what is essentially a set of loading screens that rivals the Commadore 64 in terms of time wasting pointlessness.

- Extreme Fanboyism. Let me explain, I have no quarrel with people not liking what I like, to each their own. But some people clearly do not share that point of view. This tends to affect fans of games like CoD and Halo, in which they're prepared to accept any ammount of half-baked dross for the sake of what came before. To me Halo 3 was a massively over-hyped rip-off, trying to justify a feeble single player campaign with the multiplayer, which isn't fair as to me every game must be able to impress with the facilities every gamer will have. Not everyone has Xbox Live Gold, or even the internet. Don't they deserve to be entertained for more than 4 hours? See also Star Wars Force Unleashed 2. Fanboys piss me off. I love the FF series but even I admit that it's fallen from grace lately. 13 was dull, 14 was an abomination, even 12 didn't particularly impress me. Love what you love, by all means. But don't let that love blind you, and don't be so damned aggressive about people disagreeing with you.

- CoD Addiction. The kid across the road from me hasn't left the house for about 8 weeks because he's too busy getting his latest Prestige Star. 'Nuff said. Seriously, it's a great game, I love it, you love it, we all love it. But go outside once in a while and be with the 3 dimensional people. This also applies to MMO's such as Warcraft and such. Gaming's great but do try to remember that there's more to life. Pretty girls, for example.

- The oversexualisation of lead female characters. I don't mind a game character being made to be 'hot', but it's not enough to make a great character, OK? Big tits do not a winner make. Case and point, Bayonetta, a game so blatantly oversexualised that no doubt there are people wiping spunk off their pads right now. She has the emotional depth of a teaspoon and is about half as appealing. She has no personality, she's just walking tits and arse. And that's just stupid. She's the gaming equivalent of the ill-conceived lovechild of Paris Hilton and Sarah Palin. A truly horrifying image.

- Dumbing down. My biggest peeve. As I said I was playing the demo for Dragon Age 2 earlier and it exemplifies exactly what I'm talking about. Gone is the emphasis on tactics and team strategy from Dragon Age Origins, replaced by tedious hack and slashery. Games are so obsessed with being 'cinematic' these days they forget to be good. They can get by with 'mash A to win' because they have big flashing lights to distract the very worst of the cultural wastelands and intellectual voids they now have to cater for in the form of casual gamers, who in my experience want everything dumbed down for them because they're too lazy or too stupid to play games properly. Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't being stupid a bad thing? Something to be abhored and punished? When did it become the social norm? Oh right. Paris Hilton. Never mind.

HOLD IT!

Like I said, it's not all bad. So here's the counter top 5 of things that I still love about gaming to balance things out. Kind of.

- Social interaction. Whether it's online with my mic or on the sofa with my friends, games bring us all together. Noticably so now that I'm the only one in my social strata with Marvel VS Capcom 3. I've been off work for 2 days now and so far I've had about 15 minutes to myself because people are flocking from miles around to get pwned by my team of 3. They love it. Even when I'm winning 17 rounds to nil, they still come back for more. Gaming has the potential to unite us all in common interest. In this case, everyone getting the shit kicking out of them by Phoenix, Zero and Felicia The Cat. My little brother hates that cat. I use her just to annoy him. The embarrassment of his super-cool characters like Wesker being beaten senseless by an anime cat girl

- The babes. I know I mentioned that oversexualisation is a bad thing, but sometimes they just get it right. I could list countless examples of girls in the gaming world (both in-game characters and real life people) that are the complete package. Lisa Foiles and Jessica Chobot, for starters. God, I would do everything to those two. Gaming seems to attract some fine ladies at the moment. Honestly, who doesn't like that? Anything that puts a pretty girl on the screen is OK by me. Even better if the screen is replaced by my bed

And yes, I have met girls as a direct result of video games. Faith was our white mage in FFXI, and she's hot enough to melt a tank into goop. But unlike Bayonetta she actually has a personality as well.

- The Escape. We've all been there. Rotten day at work/school, life treating you like shit, you're angry about everything. Problem solved. Fire up your gaming device of choice, put in your favourite shooter and blow some heads off. Just as cathartic as doing it in reality, only without all those bothersome prison sentences. I've lost count of the number of times popping a few caps over Xbox Live has calmed me down after a shite day at work. Or the times I've lost all my troubles by simply losing myself in some land of fantasy, general of the 'final' variety. Even simple games like Tetris or Angry Birds have an almost magical healing power when you're stressed.

- The connection. Anyone who's ever truly gotten in to an RPG will testify to this. You begin to actually connect with the characters, a truly great game can make you forget it's even a game. It somehow becomes more than that to you. You want to beat the evil villain du jour not for your gamerscore but because he's the ass hat that wronged your team. Maybe this doesn't happen to everyone but trust me, it happens. Just like any art form, you can care about video game characters like they were real, and that's truly impressive. Of course it's not often a game reaches such status, I think Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age Origins were the most recent ones for me.

- The Change. Honestly, who here hasn't absorbed at least something from a video game they've loved? It could be a personality trait or a quote you keep repeating, but it happens. For me, I have an irritating habit of tapping my foot when I'm bored a la Sonic The Hedgehog, I learned to play the ocarina which I wasn't even aware existed until Ocarina of Time, and I'm fully versed in the methods of zombie extermination should that knowledge ever become necessary

Think about all the little quirks you've picked up as a result of gaming. A knowledge of assault rifle technology after a Black Ops session, perhaps? Call me crazy all you like, but you know I'm right. You know that when the shit hits the fan, because of gaming you'll all remember to do a barrel roll.

Well, that helped kill ten minutes or so. But I'm out of material and I'm getting kinda hungry so I'm off to Tesco for more jelly beans. Toodles.

Blaze.

'Cheese it!'

 

[Sterling]

Man, I hope your friend in NZ answers her phone soon.

I also have to agree with you on the subject of RPGs. DA has to be one of the greatest RPGs I've played in awhile. It has great in depth characters, very in depth story, and the expansions kick the crap out of a map pack any day.

However, your synopsis of DA2's demo has me worried. One of the things about DA was the strategy involved with flanking and tanking, healing and stealing, etc. I would be crushed if this was all gone. :/

 

[Law]

However, your synopsis of DA2's demo has me worried. One of the things about DA was the strategy involved with flanking and tanking, healing and stealing, etc. I would be crushed if this was all gone. :/

Apparently the PC version will still be the same as it was before, but they've dumbed down the console version.

 

[Blaze163]

Well, Sian finally answered her phone, thank all that is holy. She's fine, and aside from some flood damage to her car survived with little to be concerned about. At least that's my mind at ease about that. She means more to me than she'll ever know, I don't know what I'd do if she'd died. Probably lose my mind in despair and blow my head off or something.

As for DA2, I've seen interviews that claim you can play the game any way you like, strategic or button mashy. But the demo had basically no strategy in it at all. I beat the whole thing by mashing the A button and very occasionally pressing either X to use the rogue's teleporting backstab move (which is stupidly overpowered and overuseful since you're pretty much immortal while using it) or Y to do the backflip move to get out of trouble. I concede that with it being only a demo it didn't have any particularly big battles that would require strategy, but it just felt a bit too button mashy for my tastes.

It just seems like a step down from Dragon Age Origins, to be honest. The graphics aren't exactly drop dead gorgeous, the gameplay's a bit too basic, and the demo was kinda buggy in places, such as one wave of Darkspawn failing to animate properly and simply gliding down the hill towards me because their walking animation fucked up. It needs more testing, more work, and less of a focus on spectacle. Yes, the rogue's teleporting acid flask kicking backflipping antics are reasonably fun, but it feels like there's too much flash and not enough substance, to me. As opposed to Dragon Age Origins which hs so much substance I've still not finished playing it after over a year. Curse you, Ultimate Edition box set with all the DLC. Best £30 I ever spent but damn, I'm never gonna finish it all. But that had more than enough style flair without all these fancy-dan acrobatics and didn't sacrifice a sense of immersion and reality for shiny super moves.

The beauty is that my dad's an even bigger Dragon Age fan than I am. So if I leave it and sink my funds into my 3DS, he'll go out and buy Dragon Age 2 anyway, so I get to see if it's any good without expending a single penny. It's like having a hacked console but slightly more legal. And funny.

 

[Sterling]

Another game I have to recommend is Bulletstorm. Jesus Christ, if you don't want the mutliplayer get it for the campaign. It's kinda like Gears, always gonna have you on the edge of your seat. It also has some gut wrenching and tense moments. Totally makes it worth the 50 I spent. Then ending is as open ended as it gets making a sequel not only possible, but inevitable.

 

[Blaze163]

Well today's going rather well so far. The cable guy from Virgin Media showed up about 7 hours ahead of schedule to install my new broadband package. So now I can finally watch Inside Xbox via my 360 dashboard without having to give it ten minutes to load. My download speed isn't improved all that noticably for PSP games and the like, but probably because I'm using the non-premium services on the mirror sites, ergo the speed's limited anyway. It's worth paying for if only to stop the damn thing cutting out whenever next door neighbour goes out for the day and turns her router off, leaving me up shit creek without a paddle. Download speed on PSN/XBLA is very noticably quicker though, and I'm not risking connection failure when laying the smack down in MVC3 any more. Assuming I get to move this time, that last fight was a fucking embarrassment.

Aside from that the day carries on much the same as always. I've spent most of the day chatting to Sian on MSN, actually. Seems the recent quake made us both think about things that haven't been said. Once my 3DS is paid for, my next major purchase is my replacement passport, followed by a flight out to see her. Not seen her for nearly seven years, I miss her every day. Guess I owe you some background intel, I talk about her a lot so it's only fair you know who she is. You see, we were childhood friends. I'm 3 years older than her. It's obviously not an issue now but when we first met I was 16 and she was only 13, that does present certain issues. We were inseperable for the two years I lived in Belper for. Her older sister was in my class and remains part of my social strata, hence me and Sian were introduced, she had a rather obvious crush on me but I didn't want to say anything to embarrass the poor girl, her sister did that often enough anyway.

But fate intervened and the troubles I suffered with my mother got progressively worse, to the point where she threw a knife at Amelia, a knife I rather foolishly blocked, hence the Triforce shaped colour changing scar on the back of my left hand, it never healed fully and as such it becomes more prominant when my blood pressure is high, almost glowing red when I'm really fucked off about something, ergo it glows pretty much all the time. I was rather idiotically hung up on a girl I had a crush on here in Coventry before I left by name of Kerry, I've mentioned her before so refer to previous blogs as necessary. That combined with my unwillingness to risk anyone's safety around my mother left me unable to pursue any romantic interests for those two years. Something which didn't go down too well with the girls I knew at the time, including Sian and her sister.

Eventually things got so bad that I almost died, and I had no choice but to bail with my now legendary vanishing act. I had to get out quickly and because of the options I had available at the time I didn't even get a chance to say goodbye to my friends. It wasn't until almost two years later when I finally gained internet access that I was able to track them down via MySpace and apologise for disappearing, by which point a broken hearted Sian was convinced I wasn't coming back (she actually thought I was dead) and thus put up no arguement when her parents decided to move to New Zealand for no good reason.

Now she's blossomed into a rare and beautiful young lady and she's about as far away from me as she can get without losing the grace of gravity, and thus I am unable to make up for my past mistakes and tell her how I feel. She's still as sweet as she always was, only now the age concerns are irrelevant. She's still hung up on me, made evident by the fact that of everyone she's ever known only I know certain things about her, which obviously I shan't repeat here. She's currently dating someone who looks suspiciously like me, with a name only one letter different to my own, who has about the same interests as me. But as with all things, no cheap knock-off can beat the real McCoy. She's made a few passing comments about how much she'd love to leave it all behind and come back to the UK, so her relationship with him can't be all that satisfactory. The thing is, as you've probably guessed if it wasn't for the age barrier back then, I probably would have dated her, she's the only girl who's ever managed to take my mind off Kerry for any length of time. Now I'm over the whole Kerry thing (our reunion wasn't exactly what I'd had in mind) and all I can think about most of the time is how many times I've failed to say what I should have said, and the pain I caused Sian by breaking her heart like that. How I feel about her, how I was a total wazzock back then and should have said something. And now she's thousands of miles and therefore thousands of pounds away, and there's next to fuck all I can do about it.

The best I've been able to do thus far is send her something for Valentine's Day. She made a comment about wanting wings to fly away from her controlling and frankly fucking mentally ill parents, and so I bought her a beautiful silver angel wing pendant and chain, sent it all the way across the world to her. I thought it might help. Now she never takes it off. Her current boyfriend fucking hates it but even then she STILL won't remove it. She heard I was ill recently and sent me a very sweet get well soon card, which I've kept on my shelf for sentimental reasons. But even with that going on, it seems we'll most likely never cross paths again.

Bad times.

Anyway....

I've played the demo for Bulletstorm, and while I found it amusing I don't think it holds enough lasting appeal to be worth full price. It's a game I'll leave for a month or two then pick up in the sales or pre-owned. Besides, I have barely enough cash to pay my bills at this point, and I have my 3DS and games to save for. Halfway towards the cost of the console already so not doing too bad. Provided I don't get sacked or made redundant if our store does end up closing down. And if that happend my priority is how I plan to afford food and rent rather than my broadband or 3DS games.

Well, I guess I should try to do something constructive with my day. Top priority is finding a new game download site. The one I use keeps saying I've 'failed the captcha too many times', in other words 'upgrade to our premium service or fuck off', so I need a new one that doesn't suck or send me viruses. No torrents, no premium stuff. Asking a lot I know, but I pay for this broadband now, so in essence I'm kinda paying for my games too. So at least my piracy is slightly less illegal now, in an odd way. I'll be damned if I'm paying for the right to steal stuff when I'm already paying for my net connection. FUCK DAT SHIT.

I'm depressed now. You know how much it costs to get to New Zealand from here? Fucking thousands. Don't get me wrong, if I had the money she'd be worth the expense a million times over, just to see her again. But how is working in a sports shop part time going to be enough? I need a new job. Something serious. Something big. Seems it's time to break out the big guns and go all out at life. I've coasted for too long, drifting from moment to moment, trying in vain to find meaning in my pathetic existance. No more. Time to show the world what Blaze is capable of.

To war!

Toodles.

Blaze.

'Look, I've tried to be tolerant and understanding for as long as I can, I've put up with all your bullshit and the constant insults and insinuations, and I've taken it all in good humour. But if you don't back the fuck up out of my face within the next three seconds I'm going to smash your fucking face in and feed you cock to my dog.' - Explaining to Tony that my patience is not unlimited. Another good reason why I need a more serious job.

 

[Sterling]

Well, what ere you good at? Writing seems to be one of those things. Make an original concept and get published. That should get you a jump start. Hell, I'd import one.

 

[Blaze163]

Well I do write my reviews, I'm hoping one day to become a contributer to a magazine of some sort. Possibly Edge if fate decides to take it easy on me for a change of pace and stops throwing the life event equivalent of a huge pile of triceratops dung into my face on a daily basis. Still, as I always say you won't know until you try, hence why the last 3 days have been spent adding the finishing touches to a rather large pile of reviews I intend to create my official portfolio from, and from there distribute to pretty much every magazine and website on the face of the planet. At least one of them should get back in touch, even if it's just an email note saying 'you suck, please die', so either way I'll have something to work with.

As for my crushing lack of companionship right now, I've been thinking about it on and off for most of the evening so far and have reached the decision that nobody in this city is worth dating. Every girl I know in this city falls into one of the following categories:

- Taken
- Teen Mum
- Failed her primary school entrance exams, IE: the act of opening the door to get in.
- Looks like a haddock
- Fat enough to render any form of physical relationship a serious health hazard.
- Genuinely thinks being bisexual is a fashion statement.
- Lives hundreds of miles away.

To be honest I think I'll give it a miss until someone worth my time comes along, or until Sian finally realises that she's old enough to tell her parents to go fuck themselves and returns to England as she'd always planned. Until then I've hit upon a new plan. Get a dog. You see, there are two cats in my house but neither are very fun. Kochanski just sits and sleeps all day and Lightning is a massive pain in the arse. So I want a new pet. I want a dog because they're more fun to be around. And I want in particular a siberian husky. Reason? Because it's about as close as you can get to owning a wolf, and that's awesome. They're beautiful dogs, especially the ice blue eyes. I've been doing my research online for about an hour and a husky puppy will cost me anywhere between £250 and £600, with about £380 being the average. So if I save up for a while I can get me a wolf. I'm well versed in dog training, I had an alsation until recently. I get plenty of time to walk it, it's got the garden to run around in, the cats can take care of themselves so I seriously doubt anything would happen, and....well, IT'S A FUCKING WOLF. You don't fuck with people who have a pet wolf.

It'd be an interesting work scenario, Tony giving me his usual abuse and I show up with a wolf. I'm pretty sure that'd shut his fucking mouth once and for all. But that's not why I want one, I miss having a dog around now that Shana's returned to the earth. I always used to take her for massive walks around the local park. It takes about 25 minutes to get there and we'd walk for hours around this park. It was an afternoon of fun with my dog and my friends. I miss that.

Besides, owning your own wolf must be a pussy magnet, surely?

loljk.