The spectrum of conflict

This week I reached a landmark in my journey. I completed the 20^th game from my pile of shame, and it was thanks to my friend and neighbour, Simon. Simon is a father of two kids under 3 years old. Like most parents he spends a lot of time looking after his children, and not a lot of time indulging the child within himself. 

About a year ago, on a rare night off, he came over to enjoy some beer and games. I asked him what sort of game he wanted to play, and he said that he’d heard a lot about Call of Duty, so he fancied having a go at one of those. I put out a selection of COD games, and he selected World at War. We got through a few levels, he really enjoyed it, and so we decided to see the whole thing through together.

Every now and then we’d get together for a couple of hours and wage war against the Nazis and the Japanese. Each time we’d complete a little bit more of the game, taking small amounts of territory in a fashion similar to that of the real campaigns. “We’ll have to win that war soon,” we’d tell each other every couple of months, trying our best to arrange some gaming time, with varying degrees of success.

Then, last week I saw Simon and he announced, “I’m proposing an end to tyranny and oppression!” “My God, you’re getting a divorce?” I asked, having spent a great deal of time lately watching old British sitcoms on The Comedy Channel. As it turned out he wanted to lock in a time for us to make the final push and finally complete World at War.

And now I am happy to report that a great day has come to pass. We have succeeded! We have conquered evil on two fronts. It was a magnificent victory and a thoroughly enjoyable experience.

It was made all the better because the whole experience harkened back to those days of yore, a glorious and bygone era. No, not World War II, the Eighties and Nineties. Playing through this game with Simon reminded me of all those times growing up when you’d play a game with your friends and share the whole experience with them. Having someone sitting on the sofa next to you, passing the controller back and forth, cursing and laughing at their failures, cheering their successes. It’s like watching a really long interactive movie where you enjoy it together, and then recall all your favourite parts when it’s finished.

I remember when I was about 10 years old I would go round to my best friend Thomas’s house. We would have a terrible time trying to get his ZX Spectrum to load. We’d play the tape, it would make those horrible, horrible noises for what seemed like twenty minutes, and only at the very end of the whole process would we find out if it had even loaded correctly. It seemed that more often than not it wouldn’t have, and we’d have to repeat the process, desperate for at least one game of 'International Karate Plus' before I had to go home. It was our own little war with the ZX Spectrum.

One time we got so pissed off that we started the tape, and then went foraging for conkers on the common for half an hour or so. When we came back we found that, much to our delight and surprise, it had loaded! We had won this particular battle through absence.

From that point on we were convinced that it would only load if we were out of its line of sight, so we’d set it up and hide so that the Spectrum didn’t know we were there. It was a surefire guarantee of success! There we would be, hiding behind the sofa, mucking about and stifling our laughter in case the Spectrum heard us and chose not to load. It seemed like we had almost as much fun waiting for the game to load as we did playing it. But the joy we felt when it did work and we could finally play those classic games was unparalleled.

Even now, 25 years later, those memories bring a smile to my face. I didn’t realise how much I’d missed the shared fun that comes from gaming in the same room as another person. Online gaming can put you in contact with people all around the world, but it doesn’t always bring you closer, or provide a memorable and enjoyable experience. The co-op experience Simon and I shared with COD: World at War was a thrilling, laugh-filled affair that brought back a lot of great memories, and I’m keen for more of the same.

So that’s one Call of Duty off my list, one more to go. I’m tempted to suggest to Simon that we play through that one together too, but lately I’ve really been feeling the pile of shame breathing down my neck, and I’m not sure that his commitments would really be able to mesh with timeframe. But you never know, we may just overcome insurmountable odds. After all, what fun is going to war without your brothers beside you?

20 down, 30 to go.

Time to pick up the pace.

When I started this journey I hoped that I’d complete one game a week in order to stay on target. I’m in the 21st week and I’ve now finished 19 games. That’s not too bad, especially considering that Christmas and New Year ate into my gaming time a lot more than I had originally envisaged. I didn’t complete any games, or even really play much of anything for nearly three weeks, a shocking lapse. So now is the time to really start ramping it up in terms of effort and dedication. I did that by finishing off game number 19, Max Payne 3.

This game was pretty much the same the whole way through. Take cover and shoot some guys. Enter slow motion and shoot a bunch of guys. Jump forwards through the air in slow motion and shoot loads of guys. If you really wanted to switch it up you could jump sideways though the air and shoot up some guys... in slow motion!

But you know what? This game was fantastic. It just goes to show what presentation and polish can really do for a game. The grim tone, maudlin narration, excellent cut-scenes, and the driving, pulsing soundtrack made this an entertaining and immersive affair, one whose repetition could be overlooked in favour of the experience as a whole. Besides, the shooting was so tight and so much fun that it didn’t really matter that that’s all there was. Rather than being a Jack-of-all-trades, it was a master of one. I loved it. I wanted to restart on a higher difficulty level as soon as I’d finished it. But that’s strictly against the rules. There's too many other games sitting there unfinished.

So then, what do I do about that pile of shame? It’s going down, but it’s still pretty intimidating. I was looking at the games that I’ve completed so far. Some, like Skyrim, were ones that I knew would take a fair amount of time to get through, so it’s good to have that one out of the way. I look at Dark Souls, sitting there barely touched and I know that that one is going to require a massive investment.

I think the best thing to do is to commit to one longer game, while trying to get through shorter, lighter fare at the same time. I can chip away at something like Dark Souls or The Witcher 2, and then jump into something a bit less challenging and involved, such as Halo or Super Mario 64. Hopefully that will keep the pile of shame decreasing, and the pile of pride steadily increasing.

19 down, 31 to go. Stay on target.

First impressions matter. A lot.

I remember one time about fifteen years ago, when I was a brash twenty year old, I’d just started seeing a new girlfriend. She lived in her parent’s house, the garden of which was undergoing a renovation, and a delightful crazy paving was replacing whatever had been there before. She told me all about how she had to suffer these weirdos that her Dad employed to do all his odd jobs and manual labour. Apparently they were all old, ex junkie, recovering alcoholic types that rented rooms in his nearby B&B business. They were keen to be friendly and polite whenever they saw her, engaging her in small talk and the like, asking after the family and her general health.

The first time that I stayed over she reminded me that I might see some guys who were working on the garden in the morning, that I shouldn’t be startled if there was some scruffy looking freak in the kitchen getting a glass of water or a cup of tea, as her Dad liked these guys to get started early.

After a night of boozing, the morning came. We awoke, and headed into the kitchen to make a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich. I had my head in the fridge, searching for the bacon, as I heard the patio doors slide open. “Oh, Hi,” I heard the girl say, “Tom, this is Glen.” I glanced over my shoulder, and saw a weathered little man standing in the doorway. He wore skimpy, tatty work shorts and a faded old t-shirt. His craggy face creased as he squinted at me over his twitchy nose. He wiped his dirty hands on his equally dirty shorts. “Alright, mate,” I muttered, and returned to my search for the bacon. “Hello. So, er, how’s your sister this morning?” this Glen bloke asked, and a less than interesting conversation played out behind me. I pretended to search for the bacon long after I had found it in an effort to avoid having to make small talk with the strange, ratty little man.

Eventually the painful exchange came to end. “Nice to meet you, Tom was it?”  the Glen-thing said. “Yep,” was all that I could mange to muster, not even bothering to glance in his direction. It was early, I was hungover, and the sooner he left, the sooner we could make our bacon butties. He pulled the patio door shut and went back to his work in the garden. I started to pass her the ingredients from the fridge. As I did so she casually said, “Sorry you had to meet my Dad before we’d even had breakfast.” I froze, lettuce in hand, inwardly cringing, my bowels tightening. I replayed the encounter in my head. Then I replayed it from his perspective. Ouch.

I was with that girl for a good few years, and my relationship with her father was never very good, as you would imagine after that sort of introduction. Sometimes we got on ok, we could manage to joke and laugh about stuff, we even found some common interests, but it was always a strained relationship. There was a tense undercurrent, as if he kind of liked me, but he was always waiting for me to fuck up again. This is exactly the same relationship that I had with Skyrim.

It is a rare occasion that I buy a game as soon as it comes out. I normally wait for a bargain, but Skyrim looked so good that I jumped on the hype train and ran out and bought a copy. I excitedly rushed home and threw the disc in the PlayStation. I clicked 'Start New Game' and readied myself to embark upon a sword and sorcery fantasy experience of epic proportions.

The game started, my character’s eyes opened in first person perspective. I looked around. I was in a cart that was trundling along a mountain track, a prisoner along with several others. One of them started to talk to me. “So you’re awake”, he said, “We wondered...” The character that had been speaking to me was silenced midsentence. Everything on the screen had frozen. The controls were unresponsive. I couldn’t believe it; the game had crashed in the very first minute.

I stared at the screen in disbelief and annoyance. I was disappointed, mildly disgusted, and left with a generally unpleasant taste in my mouth. A memory emerged from the depths and surfaced. This was how that girl’s father had felt as he stood in the garden, staring through the glass of the patio door at the useless lump that he’d just been introduced to.

Annoyed, and shamed by the memory of that embarrassing encounter, I restarted the game. This time it seemed to work well enough for an hour or so, and then halfway through the character creation it shit itself again. This was a recurring theme. It would work for a while and I’d be getting along with it just fine, and then it would have a seizure of some sort. This potential threat was always there in the back of my mind. I knew that it had the ability to be fun and engaging, but I also knew that at any moment we could be right back where we started, with the game unresponsive, and me sitting there thinking ‘I knew this would happen’.

The other day I finished Skyrim. It has been a love/hate relationship. I encountered the odd problem here and there covering varying degrees of frustration. Crashing, temporary freezing, catastrophic collapses, bugs that made quests impossible to complete, dragons that flew backwards, graphical glitches galore, all were present and accounted for. It was good fun, but it was also infuriating. The whole experience was laid out in those first couple of minutes. If it had worked well enough at first and then the problems started to crop up the further I got, then I might have been able to be more forgiving. As it turned out, that first impression was something that I just couldn't shake. Now I know exactly how Glen felt. Sorry, Glen.