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.
