From the Gaming Desk

At the worst possible moment, right in the middle of my self-isolating lock-down during this global covid pandemic, I seem to have lost my enthusiasm for video games.

Back at the end of April, I shared that I was splitting my playing time between Hitman 2 and Far Cry Primal.  I haven't finished either yet.  I'm still dabbling in both, although I'm enjoying Hitman, with its almost limitless number of ways to complete missions, a lot more than Primal, which has come to feel like drudgery, the endless repetition of the same pointless quests over and over again with no real plot or meaning.  I won't quit on it, though, because I just don't want to admit that I gave up on it.  

Then in May, Epic Games released Grand Theft Auto 5 for free and I downloaded a copy.  It was a refreshing change of pace at first and a much-needed alternative to the prehistoric world of Primal and the tactical challenges of Hitman.  But one thing I'm not good at in video games - actually there's a lot of things I'm not good at (I kind of suck at games) but play along with me for the sake of the point I'm making here - one thing I'm not good at is driving cars with PC keyboard controls. 

The letter W drives the car forward just like it does for walking, and the letter A turns the car to the left and D towards the right, but I don't seem to be able to get the right touch.  I tap the A key and nothing happens, and then I tap it a few times more and nothing still.   So I hold the key down and for a second the car starts to turn but before my reflexes can release the key, the car spins a full 180 degrees and crashes into whatever's around it.  Nothing happens and then nothing still happens, and then suddenly way too much happens.  Crashing is kind of the point of GTA anyway - you don't take much real damage and it's fun watching everyone scramble out of your way as you're out of control - but it's frustrating if you're trying to actually get anywhere, which is the whole reason that you got in the car in the first place, isn't it?  You jumped onto the freeway to rendezvous with whoever the game has you meeting, not to spin around in circles for a half hour at the end of the entrance ramp.

I've had this problem with several other games before - they all seem to work off about the same mechanism - and in other games I got around it by just walking everywhere I needed to go.  You can walk in GTA, too, but virtually very story line seems to require you to drive somewhere for some reason - to outrun and escape the cops, or to repo some car, or to outrace some loudmouth boor.  After all, the game 's called Grand Theft Auto, not Grand Theft Pedestrian.  

The game's still on my desktop, though, and "officially" I'm still playing it between Hitman missions and Primal grinds, but to be honest I haven't opened it in  weeks.  Once I either finish or just give up on Primal, I'll turn my attention back to GTA.

But as you may have gathered, this dabbling in different games isn't very satisfying.  In the past, when I had a new game, I couldn't wait to play it, and once immersed in a game's virtual world, would find myself playing for hours and hours on end, way into the late night/early morning hours.  I'll admit to seeing the sun come up on more than one occasion.

But splitting my time between Primal, Hitman, and occasionally GTA, my playing time fell in half.  And then half of that.

That's when I downloaded Borderlands 2, The Pre-Sequel, a game every bit as fun and silly as its name implies.  I played - and enjoyed - Borderlands 2 and the Pre-Sequel has the exact same level of irreverence and goofiness as the original.  I found my enthusiasm for game playing reawakened and suddenly it was up until dawn once again

At least for a while.  The problem - my problem - is that the game's almost non-stop action (you're almost constantly fighting wave after wave of psychotic goons) doesn't have many obvious quit-for-now points, no lulls in the action, and the game play gets your adrenaline pumping which is not really what you want when you're planning to finally get some sleep at 3 a.m.  So I've found myself not playing the game not because it's boring like Primal or not because I'm frustrated like with GTA, but because I know that once I get on the roller coaster ride, I'm going to be manic for the next untold number of hours, and who's got time for that?

Actually, I do, even though I don't want to admit it.

I still haven't given up on gaming, though.  I've downloaded a copy of the game, Ark: Survival Evolved, from a free Epic giveaway, and I purchased the games Detroit: Becoming Human and Disco Elysium during a Steam sale. There's also updates to No Man's Sky and Fallout 76 I mean to try out. Not to mention the upcoming DLC for The Outer Worlds called Peril on Gorgon.  

There's a lot of gaming ahead for me.  I just need to figure out a way to clear Primal and GTA off my desktop so I can get my groove back and return to game-play.