LOL, there is a literal "gaming desk" now, as in a piece of furniture, a computer desk, dedicated to gaming. I'm sitting there now typing this with my gaming PC.
Last night, again at this desk, I finished the game Shadow of the Tomb Raider. 44½ hours. It's the third and final game in the most recent reboot series, and I understand the 12th Tomb Raider game since the franchise got started back in the 1990s.
I played the original Tomb Raider back then on my very first home PC. I played a few other video games back then, too (Myst comes to mind), but I didn't become a "PC Gamer." The latest game, Shadow, does a nice job of re-creating the original Tomb Raider experience, the challenging puzzles, the exploration, and the impossible climbs, while toning down a lot of the anachronistic problems with the original - less sexism (Lara Croft no longer goes spelunking or alpine climbing in a skin-tight leotard top with a leather holster strapped to bare thigh), less looting of cultural resources, less gratuitous killing of innocent animals. It was a reasonably enjoyable, open-world RPG, but not enough to necessarily get me to purchase the other games in the reboot trilogy.
But memories of Tomb Raider in the 90s got me to thinking about the origins of my current fascination with video games. It's been almost exactly four years now. About this time of year in 2016, right after you-know-who got elected to the you-know-what, I was quite desponded and starved for something with which to distract myself. I had a fairly new laptop with Windows 10, and one of the features that came with it was a free trial version of Minecraft (Microsoft had just bought the game rights for its X-Box, and was promoting Minecraft for PC users as well). I had never played it before and up until that point I had ignored the icon on my desktop, but as I said, despondent, I decided to give it a go.
They say you can become addicted to crystal meth the very first time you take it, and Minecraft had a similar effect on me. It took up a lot of time, was a fairly immersive experience that didn't have me thinking about you-know-who, and that game in particular has no real "end" - the computer keeps generating additional landscape and characters as you travel, so the virtual "world" is essentially infinite. Suddenly, I was avoiding all the ugly, brutal realities of everyday life by immersing myself in the simulated world of Minecraft.
This went on for some six months, which is fairly embarrassing because gameplay is basically plotless and the game itself is kind of a juvenile, children's game. So around March or April on 2017, I decided to purchase some other game to try on and see how it fit, and fell into the wormhole of Fallout 4.
Fallout 4 was to Minecraft me what Minecraft was to pre-game me. The dark humor, the Boston setting, the seemingly innumerable side-quests, etc., had me addicted. I probably played the whole game through four times in a row, siding with different factions each time, and managed to log 639 total hours of gameplay over the years. After Fallout 4, I downloaded Skyrim with similar results (308 hours), and from then on, I was basically a recreational PC gamer.
Today, I started on a new game, Detroit: Become Human, and I have one more unplayed game, Disco Elysium, in the queue. After Elysium, I'm considering buying Red Dead Redemption 2, the latest Assassin's Creed game, Valhalla (Vikings!), possibly Borderlands 3, the next Far Cry game, 6, whenever it comes out, and Cyberpunk 2077, if it ever comes out (it's release has been delayed numerous times).
Basically just for my own records, here's a list of the games I've played over the past four years since my Minecraft experience.
- Ark: Survival Evolved
- Assassin's Creed Origins
- Assassin's Creed Odyssey
- Assassin's Creed Unity
- The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit
- Bioshock Infinite
- Borderlands 2
- Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel
- Civilization VI
- Dishonored
- Dishonored 2
- Dishonored: Death of the Outsider
- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
- Everybody's Gone To The Rapture
- Fallout: New Vegas
- Fallout 4
- Fallout 76
- Far Cry 3
- Far Cry 4
- Far Cry 5
- Far Cry: New Dawn
- Far Cry: Primal
- Grand Theft Auto V
- Hitman
- Hitman 2
- Metal Gear Solid V
- Minecraft
- Nier: Automata
- No Man's Sky
- The Outer Worlds
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider
- Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt
- Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus
As it turned out, all the game playing and the purchase a few months ago of my new gaming PC was actually a wise investment, as the games are the perfect solution for staying at home during this covid pandemic.
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