The funny thing is, I always have this burning urge to play games. I absolutely love gaming as a hobby and the escapism it offers perfectly balances out all of the stress and worry that I get from my job. However, I've got a particularly addictive personality and tend to latch on to things that give me any form of gratification and just take it way too far, and because of that I've got this huge catalogue of games that at times seems like a great, white mountain to climb.
All of these choices overwhelm me to the point that while I do feel like playing games, the options of what to play are so abundant and my self-restraint is so minimal that I just end up staring at all the game icons on my desktop and don't really end up playing anything at all. It's like trying to pick out your favorite friend from your whole group of friends.
So to make my choices easier, I look at all my games and see what they have to offer. Which game has the most interesting mechanic, or unique approach that differentiates it from the others. Not exactly a bright way of trying to pick one out, since these days every developer is trying to break the mould and not produce something similar to another developer. So each game is unique in it's own way and offers something different, thus making my decision just as hard as it was when I was staring at icons.
However, I'm missing the point entirely and taking these two days away from gaming made me realize that.
I'm fucking spoiled. I'm like one of those girls you would find on My Super Sweet Sixteen who bitches at their parents that the cake doesn't have enough layers, or that the Mercedes they got me is of the wrong colour.
When I was a kid, I had a Super Famicom and that was the only console available for me at the time. Sure, the Sega Megadrive was out during the same period, but who had that kind of money to spend on a "TV game"? I had 4 games at best and I played the absolute shit out of them. I played those games so much that I knew every level, powerup and optimal route for fastest completion. I had that shit down.
This was mostly because back then, games weren't releasing at the rate that they are these days. I was lucky if I saw a new Famicom game once a year and even if I did, my parents wouldn't get it for me, so I had to make do with what I had and I fucking loved it. Even though I had played those few games so many times, I loved it because it was something else for me. It was creative and it poked at my brain and stirred my imagination in a way that kept me entertained for hours. The gameplay wasn't all that important, but the concept that I was a little blue robot man, jumping and shooting at other robots immersed me in these games for hours.
These days, with games getting produced quicker than sneakers in a Chinese sweatshop, it's all about what the game has to offer. Which is the shiniest, most innovative, most praised game? These are the things I have to ask myself when making a purchase in a market that is so saturated by choice, that the signal to noise ratio is completely out the window.
Well, while I was away my friend gifted me Assassin's Creed Black Flag. I have never been particularly fond of the Assassin's Creed series, but since it's a gift, it's only courteous to at least try the game before it ends up on the dusty shelf of games I might play when the zombie apocalypse is upon us. So, I've been reading up on it and what it's about and the whole pirate theme really piqued my interest. It was at this point that I decided I'm going to revert to my younger self and let myself be immersed in the games as I used to, instead of focusing on all the shiny, gimmicky shit that apparently makes the games good.
Tonight, I'm becoming a fucking pirate.
