We turned this forum over to the Gaming Desk one day last week and gave it full reign to rant and rave for as long as it took to get it all out of its system, and then thought that we had heard the last from them for a while. Imagine our surprise when they turned back up today wanting to talk about their latest accomplishment.
Apparently, I finally completed the game Far Cry 4 last night. Why is thar a big deal?, you might ask. It's because I started the game in 2017.
Back then, I was still something of a novice at video games. Sure, I had spent a lot of hours playing Minecraft, and had completed Fallout 4 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, but that was it. I had found Far Cry 4 much more challenging than those other games.
The challenge, as I later found out, was not only my own inexperience with First-Person Shooter games, but also my laptop computer. I had bought the laptop the year before as a powerful home computer, but not necessarily as a gaming computer. But I later learned that it was robust enough to play some video games, although not, as it turned out, very well. I couldn't play some modern games due to low frame rates or frequent crashes, but I also had performance issues with some other games that otherwise appeared to play well.
My underpowered laptop tried valiantly to keep up with those games and made up for the low frame rate by having my protagonist move at a slightly slower rate. It wasn't always noticeable, but I found that when I needed to move quickly to avoid some danger, my sluggish movement would result in my character's untimely death. On most occasions, however, I could compensate for this on the second or third try by anticipating the danger and moving out of the way much earlier.
In Far Cry 4, vehicles (cars, trucks, ATVs, jet skis, choppers, etc.) wouldn't respond to the controls properly, and would run off the road or spin out of control. I would lose control of their speed and steering and be unable to get them back under control again.
Two particular missions frustrated me in Far Cry 4. In the Willis mission at the Kyrat Airport, I couldn't catch up to a departing airplane in time to advance to the next scene. The ATV I was supposed to ride down the runway would veer wildly off course, or if I managed to control that vehicle, once midair I couldn't use the wingsuit to reach the departing plane. It was so frustrating, and I'd play the mission over and over again without success. I looked for hints and clues on line and watched YouTube videos of people successfully completing the mission, but no one even hinted at that task being a particularly difficult one. By sheer dumb luck, I somehow succeeded to finally catch the plane, but not before first almost rage quitting the game in frustration.
I did wind up rage quitting the game, though, during the Yuma boss fight, relatively near the end of the game (Yuma is the third of four bosses the game requires you to beat). The fight is in some sort of supernatural arena, and equipped with only a bow and arrow, you're supposed to fight off spectral archers who can disappear as you aim at them and tigers that can similarly vanish in a puff of smoke. Your target, though, is Kalinag, a mythological hero who's also shooting arrows back at you and whom you not only have to hit with an arrow, despite the archers and tigers and all, but then finish off with a knife. Because my atavar moved just a little slower due to my underpowered laptop, this was all very difficult but after countless attempts I finally succeeded, only to find I was still in the arena fighting the same foes.
It turns out you have to finish off Kalinag with the knife three times to complete the mission, and if you die during the second or third attempt, you have to start all over again. So I did, but the task didn't get any easier and I'd usually die before even the first of the three victories. I was screaming at the computer screen ("Oh for Christ's sakes!" and "Goddamnit!") before finally abandoning the mission. But since you can't advance the game without beating that boss, abandoning the mission meant quitting the game and after several days and nights stuck in that godforsaken arena, I finally rage quit the mission and moved on to the next game without completing Far Cry 4.
Hey, games are supposed to be fun and if you're not having fun, I reasoned, move on to another.
Since then, I've completed numerous other video games, including Far Cry 3, 5, and 6, Far Cry: New Dawn, and Far Cry: Primal. Not incidentally, I also finally got a proper gaming PC.
Last month, with no new games sitting in my queue, I started a replay of the Far Cry series, starting with 3 and moving my way up in numerical order. I admit, though, to being intimidated by 4 because of my prior experience, despite my success with the other Far Cry titles. But with my new gaming PC, the game was much more manageable than on my old laptop and vehicles performed properly without wildly spinning out of control. I even got through the Kyrat Airport mission just fine,catching the plane on my very first try.
The Yuma boss fight was still a challenge, but it's supposed to be - boss fights by definition are challenging. I died a couple of times trying to take down the hero the first time, not to mention the second or third tries. But I was able to complete the mission within about 15 minutes, not hours and hours over several days and nights like before.
After the Yuma fight, the rest of the game seemed like a breeze, even the ultimate boss fight against the game's main antagonist. I would say that maybe 5% of my improvement of the second playthrough of Far Cry 4 was due to my familiarity with the game from my first attempt (fewer surprises), and 25% was due to practice and experience with other FPS games, including the other Far Cry titles. But the remaining 70% of my improvement was due to finally having the proper hardware on which to run the game, and not being stuck in some slowed-down timeframe in which I physically couldn't react in time.
So with 4 finally under my belt, it's time to move on to Far Cry 5 again, possibly my favorite game of the series.
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