Reflections From the Video Games Desk

I don't recall the last time the Video Games Desk had a chance to post anything, but in order to catch up, it's been a trying year.  

I started the year playing the dreadful Fallout 76 - a boring, repetitious taskmaster of a game that made up for its lack of charm with glitches, bugs, and crashes.  Fortunately, though, that was followed by the immensely satisfying and fun Assassin's Creed Odyssey - a long romp through ancient Greece, both historical and mythological.  

Odyssey took forever to complete and yet at the same time, I never wanted it to be over.  But all things do eventually come to an end and I eventfully completed all of the many main and side quests. By April, I was playing the quiet little indie game, The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit, and an early Assassin's Creed game, Unity, which was so glitchy that I simply and uncharacteristically quit playing mid-game.  It wasn't worth the headache, and all the NPC's kept calling me "pisspot."

In May, I started another epic-scale game, Metal Gear Solid 5 - The Phantom Pain, about which I still have mixed feelings.  On the one hand, it was excellently produced - very detailed and authentic - but on the other hand, it was grim and militaristic, and the missions were all very similar and redundant. By late July, I was only 23% of the way through the game, and once again quit mid-game and started on the very enjoyable Far Cry 5.  I had no desire to play MGS any further and yet keep looking back fondly on some aspects of the game - despite it's many problems, the game somehow managed to get under my skin.

I was finally retired by this time and had all the time in the world to play games, but wasn't sure where to go after Far Cry.  I played my way through the Far Cry and Odyssey DLCs, and also experienced some computer problems that my mind inflated into a near-existential crisis of confidence.  The DLCs weren't nearly as pleasurable as their source games, and even after getting my computer professionally repaired, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the next game I downloaded, wouldn't play on my laptop.  Each year, games get more sophisticated and require more resources, and with Tomb Raider, game requirements finally surpassed my hardware's capabilities.  I consoled myself by joylessly replaying some previous, older games that I knew still worked on my laptop.

Which is all to say that through September and much of October, I wasn't playing games very often, and when I did, it wasn't particularly pleasurable.  

Well, I'm happy to say that all of that changed starting this week.  On Monday, I downloaded the brand-new Outer Worlds game, and it's a blast.  I did some careful research before purchasing to make sure the game was compatible with my system (it was), but was still cautious when I tentatively booted it up Monday evening to see if it would actually work (it did).  My first full-on play session, other than dipping a toe in on Monday night, was yesterday, when I played for some six hours and completed Edgewater, the first major mission.

It was great - good story-telling and not without some self-effacing humor - and reminded me of why I like these games so much.  It looks great on my little, under-powered laptop and plays without glitches or issues.  My only concern is that it's not a long game - some have completed it in as few as 40 hours - and I'm not sure where to go after this.

Anyhow, after the Edgewater mission, I now have my spaceship, The Unreliable, up and running. It's somewhere in outer space right now, so excuse me as I wrap up this post and join my crew on the next mission..