My mood is better today than last night (what a difference a good night's sleep can make) even though that document is still missing, there's no resolution with PayPal in sight, and broken things are still broken.  But it's our own choice how we react to things, how we cope with adversity and how we deal with success, and today I'm apparently choosing to take it all more in stride.

Part of yesterday's frustration was yet another malfunction and this time with my beloved video RPGs, my escape and solace from this mortal world. After completing the less-than-satisfying BioShock Infinite in a mere 15 hours (pretty far from "infinite"), I decided to tackle the other game I purchased along with BioShock, the relatively new (about one year old) game NieR: Automata.

I knew next to nothing about the game, which is kind of how I like it - a total mystery, so everything's a surprise and a revelation.  I didn't know why the letter R at the end of the titular NieR was capitalized, I didn't know how the protagonist could see with the black blindfold covering her eyes, or why she even had a black blindfold in the first place.  I vaguely knew that the game involved some sort of post-apocalyptic humans-vs-robots plot, but that was about it.  I booted up the game with absolutely no expectations on what I would see.

The first thing I saw were words informing the player that the game does not auto-save, and you had to play the game to learn how to save.  Okay, thanks for tip, I thought, I'll be sure to watch for that. 

What I experienced next was more similar to a classic arcade game like Space Invaders or even Pong than a 21st Century RPG. Five spaceships were lined up at the bottom of the screen, and you commanded one, the center one.  You could make it toward the top or the bottom of the screen, or left to right, and shoot ray beams at enemy spaceships scrolling across the top of the screen.  Pa-choo! Pa-choo!  Pa-choo!  Whee!  This is fun! (that's sarcasm, if you can't tell). I'll admit, the graphics were better than a 70s arcade game and the soundtrack was excellent, but other than that, pretty disappointing stuff.  

After a few minutes, the other spaceships were all blown away and you were all alone, and now get this - big change (more sarcasm) - instead of looking down at your spaceship, the "camera" was facing sideways, and you could go up and down to avoid enemy ships and enemy fire.  

I couldn't believe this was actually the game - there would be riots in the streets if the developers were trying to pawn this off as a modern game and had put a blindfolded blonde on the cover just to fool customers into buying it.  But the arcade-style action continued for five or more minutes, and after I had destroyed a sufficient number of enemy ships, the game indicated I had "Leveled Up" and was now at Level 2. Apparently, that was really the game.  

Really?  That was all there was to it?  I wasn't in a good mood to start with, and at that point I realized that my big purchase of a new game was nothing but a rip off.

But wait!  It changed!  After nearly 10 minutes, my little spaceship icon unavoidably crashed into a wall that appeared out of nowhere and the blindfolded blonde, rendered in full, state-of-the-art, 3-D video-game animation, falls from the wreckage.  An off-screen radio operator warns her that a large enemy group has been detected and she goes at them, attacking with a sword larger than she is tall.

It was pure poetry in motion.  There was a gracefulness to the curve of her swings and when you backed her up, instead of merely stepping backwards she'd execute a balletic back-flip, still swinging her sword and taking enemies out in mid-air.  This was more like what I was looking for.  This was the state of the art of the video RPG. I was finally in a real game, and based on what I was now finally seeing, probably in the hands of true masters. 

I guess the opening was some sort of homage to the arcade games of the past and a gentle immersion into the more sophisticated world of modern gaming.  Okay, cute, I get in now, but honestly, I felt like it went on a little too long.

After dispatching the swarm of attacking androids, a huge crane with a rotating cutting wheel at its end breaks through a wall and attacks our heroine, and she then has to take on that boss opponent.  It looked impossible at first, but after a few strikes it was apparent that she had done some damage (good sword!) so, emboldened, I moved her character forward in for the kill.

But I had gotten too bold and instead of the girl killing the crane, the crane killed the girl.  That's okay, you die dozens of times, scores of times, in most games, but I hadn't learned how to game save yet, and with no autosaves, words scrolled across the screen saying something like "And that was the end of the war and the robots lived happily after after.  The End," the final credits scrolled by motion-picture style, and the game's start screen appeared as if you had just finished the full game and were now ready to start over if you so chose.

Sheesh!  I was a full 15 minutes in, but now I had to start all over again and play that 10-minute arcade game over again just to get back to where I had left off.  That was frustrating but it got even worse. When I was finally facing the boss crane again, the screen froze on me and I couldn't do anything at all - couldn't move the character, couldn't pull up a menu, couldn't do anything other than finally open Windows Task Manager, end the game, re-boot, and start all over again with that infernal arcade introduction. 

But every time I got past the intro, the game would freeze up on me again, sometimes while fighting the androids, sometimes while fighting the crane, and one glorious time I even managed to defeat the crane without freezing (or getting killed) and played for another 10 minutes or so before the game finally froze on me again.  With no autosaves and still no clue yet on how to perform my own save, each time the game froze I'd have to start all over at the very beginning again and play that little Asteroids game over and over again (Pa-choo! Pa-choo! Pa-choo!  Whee!).   

This was beyond frustrating, so I went online and saw that many, many people had the exact same problem with the game. There are whole Reddit and Steam forums dedicated to theories on how to fix the game, but most people reported back that despite the advise, the game was still basically unplayable on PC because of all the freezes.

I tried to follow as much of the advice as I could.  I checked the game's minimum requirements against my computer's specs to make sure we were compatible (we were).  I updated the drivers on my video card.  I minimized all the graphics properties on the game to their lowest possible setting, and then lowered the same properties on my graphics card as well.  I downloaded and applied a user-produced mod that was specifically designed to supposedly fix the problem.  I turned off the Steam overlay.  But still, the game kept freezing and by now I was absolutely detesting that arcade-style introduction.

There was some advise I refused to follow, like download an executable file that supposedly removes all drivers from your computer and then manually replace the graphics driver with an older version.  Any advice that included first backing up my entire hard drive before tinkering around with the BIOS settings or whatever was off the table - I wasn't going to bungle my way into destroying my computer in an  attempt to fix a game.

One thing I noticed was that most, if not all, of the forums and posts about fixing the freezes were from the first half of 2017, and the topic seemed to drop off the internet by last summer.  That either means that people, collectively or individually, figured out a way to fix the problem, or that they had just given up and nobody else ever bought the game for PC since then, at least until I came along.

I finally gave up after wasting six to eight hours trying to fix it and playing though that infernal arcade-style intro at least 20 times.  Worse, I bought the game from Steam, who allows you to refund a purchase if you're not happy and have played less than two hours, but with all my tinkering and attempts to fix the problem, I had managed to log four hours of playtime and was now ineligible for a refund.

My advice for PC gamers out there is what I wish someone had told me before my purchase, and don't buy NieR: Automata unless you're running an absolute state-of-the-art gaming computer AND you've given the game a test run.   It really does look like a great game, based on those few minutes of play I got in after the intro and before the inevitable freezes, and it apparently runs fine on Play Station, but until the developers fix their product, the game simply doesn't work on PC.

At least my PC.

Which is why I was in such a bad mood last night.