Down, but not out.

It’s been over six months since I started my yearlong mission to clear my 50-game-tall Pile of Shame. 28 weeks and 25 games later, and I’m feeling a bit down in the dumps.

Generally I’ve been getting my head down and hammering away. The weird thing is that when I take a moment to lift my head and take a glance at what’s going on in the gaming world I find that it’s not exactly how I imagined it would look when I started this journey.

Imposing a twelve month ban on purchasing any games is bound to be hard on a gamer who clearly loves to amass new titles. I had visions of new games coming out during this time, and me sitting there desperate to play them, champing at the bit to be enjoying them at the same time as everyone else. But it seems that every game I had kept an eye on hasn’t really made me that desperate to play it at all.

There are a couple that seem to have been received quite well, but they didn’t exactly set the world alight. Hitman: Absolution, Need for Speed: Most Wanted, Crysis 3, and Dead Space 3 all came and went without much fanfare in regards to either greatness or calamity.

Then there were the failures. From the extremely mixed reviews of Assassin’s Creed 3, to the disastrous catastrophe of Aliens: Colonial Marines, right through to the laughably unplayable Sim City, I find myself sitting there not really feeling like I’m missing out on anything. Even GTAV got pushed back, how good is that!

So why am I feeling in a funk? I’m not really missing out on anything. I can play my way through my pile. I can have fun, and I can achieve my goal. I should be happy. So why am I so glum?

Oh yeah, that’s right. Because I’ve been playing Dirt3.

I know I’ve previously gone on about how annoying this game is, but honestly, this game makes me so mad. The loading screens, the endless fucking loading screens, oh my god, enough already. I must have put twenty hours into this game, and I swear I’ve only actually been driving for about eight of them. I know that sounds like a total exaggeration, but I played for an hour and twenty minutes this morning and I tallied up the total amount of time I spent on the track.

It was a mighty 37 minutes.

That’s how long I was actually playing the game for. Even though I sat there for 80 minutes, for 43 of those minutes I was resigned to watching dozens of loading screens, and listening to those bastard douchebags carrying on. And the worst thing is that this is a good game, the driving is really enjoyable. It’s so infuriating that it’s buried under so much ugly trash.

It’s like going out on a date with someone you know is attractive, good looking, and fun to be with. You wait for them to turn up at the arranged location (they’re late, of course), but when they arrive they’re wearing really shit clothes, and they’ve done something weird with their hair. It’s just so off-putting. You know that underneath there’s something you really want to get your teeth into, but you just can’t get past their abysmal presentation.

Then they keep disappearing off to the toilet every five minutes, and each time they come back they’re talking in a different obnoxious, stereotyped accent, spouting bullshit catchphrases and trying to give you high fives, before fucking off to the toilet again for another ten minutes. Utterly infuriating.

So the date with Dirt3 ended, and I settled the bill. I left it at its doorstep with a polite peck on the cheek. There won’t be any future dates unless it gets an extreme makeover.

One game that I did successfully take out to dinner this week, and enjoyed copping a feel of its afterburners, was Tom Clancy’s Hawx. This fighter jet action game stood out as being utterly unique within my pile, so I decided that this would be a nice companion to Dirge3, and the combination of two vehicle games was actually a great start to the second half of my journey. Hawx was a standard military affair, blow up this, attack this, defend that, but it was fast paced and I enjoyed its company. I’m struggling to find much to say about this one. Complaining about Dirt3 has thoroughly worn me out.

27 down, 23 to go.

London. Acid. City.

Many people moaned about the ending of Mass Effect 3, enough people that I don’t feel the need to chime in with my take on whether it’s good, bad, or the worst thing to happen to gaming since whatever it was those people were moaning about the week before Mass Effect 3 came out.

I didn’t really care. I knew that the game wasn’t going to have a complex branching system that contained dozens of possible endings, like in Heavy Rain. It seemed obvious that there’d be slight variations in the endings based upon who lived, who died, and what colour jumper you had Commander Shepherd wearing when you started the last mission. I cared about whether I had fun playing the game itself. So I jumped in and thoroughly enjoyed immersing myself in the game, soaking up the fantastic worlds, characters, music, and atmosphere. It was truly about the journey and not the destination for me.

What I loved most about Mass Effect 3 was that it felt like the video game version of the last few seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine when the entire Alpha Quadrant was at war with the invading Dominion. The first two Mass Effect games had set the scene, introduced us to the species and shady organisations that populated the universe, outlined threats, and shaped alliances. The third game then threw the galaxy into all out war and the work done in the first couple of games meant that I was fully invested in this rich and detailed experience.

As a Londoner I also loved that the last big fight to save the galaxy took place in my home town. I was even amused to see the famous red phone boxes amongst the ruined remains of my old stomping ground, which is normally that sort of thing really annoys me no end. Yes, that’s right Americans, red phone boxes are on every corner, we all drive minis with union jacks on the roof, we all have butlers, and eat nothing but fish and chips and crumpets. It’s like a Hugh Grant movie come to life!

Still, all wanky stereotyping aside, I was glad that the major Earth city being destroyed wasn’t New York, the go-to destination in movies and games for famous landmark destruction and devastation. It made for a nice change.

I was also pleasantly surprised to see one of my favourite London landmarks pop up in the racing game Dirt3 that I've been making a dent in. Dirt3 has a practice/stunt section at Battersea Power Station, a location made world-famous in that made-for-TV MacGyver movie in the mid-90s, where it doubled as a defunct Soviet Nuclear power plant. It’s a fantastic, iconic building that was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, who was also responsible for the famous red phone boxes coincidentally enough.

Last time I was back in London I bought a mug that has Battersea Power station on it. Look, here’s a picture:

Anyway, when I purchased Dirt3 it was on a whim. I was looking for a rally game that would capture the great times I had playing games like V-Rally back in the late 90s and early 2000s.

Unfortunately this is not what I got. Dirt3 has several big problems. The first is that for every one minute you spend playing the game, you spend another three in loading screens. You do a 90 second rally section, then there’s a three-minute loading screen. You then pick your next activity to race, and once again there’s two or three minutes of menus, loading, and general thumb twiddling. To make things worse the loading screens are accompanied by some terrible music, a whole heap of autotune, chart music drivel, the sort you used to see featured on those mobile phone ringtone ads on TV.

Then, to add insult to injury they have decided to assault your ears some more by having three complete dickheads ‘narrate’ your rise to racing stardom, giving you tips and updates over the lengthy loading screens for the entire game with no way to turn them off! But at least they’ve got a nice mix of nationalities to piss off everyone and keep shitty international stereotypes chugging along nicely.

First off you have the posh English girl, a typical Sloane Ranger who has an undercurrent to her voice that says, “I’m prim and proper, but I’d love a good rogering.” She updates you on the various racing teams’ interest in your particular skills, but her lame congratulations seem forced and oddly condescending.

Next up there’s a nasal Aussie who is supposed to give you car and course advice, and who can only be described as being a totally useless turd. Honestly, the guy once told me before a race that ‘being the fastest driver is a good strategy for success’, without even a hint of irony. I’m just shocked he hasn’t said ‘Crikey!’ yet. Well, give it time, I suppose.

Then comes the biggest twat of them all, the Yank college jock arsehole who spouts utter nonsense about how everything is ‘Sick, Broseph!’ ‘Rad to the max!’ and so on, before chugging another shit American lite beer, chanting ‘show your tits’ to a bunch of underage spring break girls, and then stumbling off to dabble in some date rape.

If your ears can stand this unholy triumvirate of fucktards and their awful background music, and if you have the patience to partake in more loading screens than actual gaming, then surprisingly enough there’s actually a fun little racer to be found here. It’s just a shame you have to wait at the endless traffic light loading screens, put your brain into reverse, and then navigate the chicanes of ear-bleeding douchebaggery to find out what it actually has under the hood.

Oh, I almost forgot, this game even has a ‘Cheat Button’. If you crash you can actually press a button that rewinds the action five seconds, and then you can try not to smash into that house at the side of the road this time. Not only that, but you can do this five times in each event! Seeing as most events are only 60-90 seconds long you pretty much can’t fail.

So if you like your games to feature annoying Lady Gaga style music over loading screens that never end, obnoxious dickheads gabbing at you the whole time, and consequence free racing, then this is the game for you.

I’ve done about a third of it so far, and I can tell you I’m pretty sure it might not be for me.