‘09 Fails To Be A Good Gaming Year For Me
2009 was to be the year my concentration for gaming dwindled to a considerable low. People say that gaming is a hobby you inevitably grow out off, but the fact I returned to it on my 19th birthday after a 4 year hiatus, and have since spent a lot of time doing, proved to be the opposite for myself. However, something odd has happened to me over the past 12 months, and I find myself notably less excited about gaming than I ever have been. Where did it go wrong, and why?
On January 25th, my birthday, I found myself having “the talk” with a guy I was seeing. You know the talk, the awkward one where you’re furtively investigating how serious you’ve become, whether you’ve made the leap to exclusivity or are still seeing other people. For whatever reason, having a boyfriend who didn’t game meant that I also paid less attention to my Xbox, especially as only a few months earlier I had finished with a guy who was as big a gamer as I. It was at this point I was playing Skate 2, the follow-up to one of my favourite games of 2007.
Skate 2 was meant to have me as hooked as the original, especially as Black Box had done a great job of building on and improving the foundations of Skate. Somehow it failed to be the game that had me itching to finish work just so I could freeskate around San Vanelona, which was odd as it was undoubtedly an improvement over the original. It wasn’t logical… I loved the original, and now I was playing an improved version of that, so there really should have been no reason I was struggling to get excited about Skate 2. Yet I was. Even though I had put my inability of getting hooked on Skate 2 as a direct result of my new relationship, it was to set the unfortunate tone for the coming year.
The first notable release of ‘09 (for me) was Resident Evil 5, a game I was pretty excited about being relatively unfamiliar with the franchise. Resident Evil 4 was the “it” game of 2005, and whenever I told someone I hadn’t played it, there was a look of ‘you’re really not a gamer unless you’ve played it and completed it and made babies with it’. Okay, maybe not, but it was a must-play game (apparently), so I figured I could regain some credibility by playing Resident Evil 5 and seeing what all the fuss was about.
Resident Evil 5 was a struggle to remain enthused about from start to finish. Perhaps it was because I expected something atmospheric and scary, which, in my opinion, was completely absent. Maybe it was because my attention span had suffered badly as a result of recently getting dumped (yeah, that relationship didn’t last long). Or perhaps it was simply the abysmal AI that hampered the whole experience (I did return to Resi 5 with a friend later in the year and had a much better experience playing through the campaign on co-op). So I ditched Chris Redfield for a camp Japanese dude.
Whenever playing video games fails to ignite any excitement, I turn to the safety net of genres — RPG’s. Yes, I love me some Role Playing Games, especially of the Japanese variety. There’s something about an epic story and vast, limitless world that does wonders for my imagination. Quite simply, it makes me euphoric about being a gamer. If a decent RPG fails to get me hooked then I know I’m in serious trouble, and as Infinite Undiscovery unfortunately highlighted… I was in serious trouble. Infinite Undiscovery is the first RPG I’ve simply not finished. And I always finish games. Even if they’re rubbish! I even finished The Godfather.
All was not lost, though, as I experienced a glimmer of hope by the name of Modern Warfare 2. Modern Warfare stirred those familiar feelings of anticipating the end of the work day so I could play video games. I even went so far as going to the midnight launch and booking the next day off work; I wanted the game as soon as I could get it, and then I wanted to play it non-stop without any interruptions. I’ve never done that before. It was a fantastic journey from start to end, my only criticism being the change in difficulty. I remember telling my friend I thought Modern Warfare 2 would be the game to get me “back into gaming”, and just after I finished it I wasted no time in buying myself a new game, Assassin’s Creed II, feeling reinvigorated about gaming.
Unfortunately, Assassin’s Creed II has went much the same way as Skate 2. The sequel is a vast improvement over the original (which I loved), yet I’ve not fallen in love with it like everyone else has. Sure, I’m enjoying it enough to progress, and I appreciate the improvements Ubisoft has made, but it’s not exciting me enough to really yearn to play it. Again, it’s just not logical.
With all that said and done, I don’t plan on giving in to this extended dry spell. Beneath the Christmas tree is Batman Arkham Asylum and Dragon Age: Origins, the latter being a game I can really see myself getting into. Then Mass Effect 2 comes out on January 29th, which I am hugely excited about having loved Mass Effect. With the exception of Modern Wafare 2, games that require little attention seem to be the ones I have enjoyed most (Lego Batman, Trials HD, Left 4 Dead co-op etc). I seem to have lost my footing a little in 2009, but throughout this dry spell I have still found myself excited about the thought of gaming, and so I hope that means I’m not actually transitioning away from being a gamer. My concentration just seems to have taken a hit, but I’m hoping a string of good games in 2010 solves this problem.
Has this ever happened to you?
I absolutely love gaming, and just thinking back over the past couple of years and how some games made me feel, I’d be gutted to leave that behind.
Hmm. Uhh. Yeah. Skyrim. It’s massive. The quests are never-ending. My character has a mohawk. My class is Breton. Don’t
Space Coyote