’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 Tomb Raider series means a lot to me, and while I admit it has lost its footing in recent years, I’ve always stuck by Lara. The latest Tomb Raider, however, has been completely re-imagined and – at some points – doesn’t even feel like a TR game. It’s a welcome change, though, and has me well and truly hooked.