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I’m not what you’d call a hardcore gamer. I don’t queue for the latest titles, I couldn’t tell you the spec of my machine and I don’t even like Half-Life. I am casual at best, but there are periods, phases if you will, when gaming becomes my central preoccupation.
I am currently gripped in one such era, and so far have happily completed Mass Effect and happily returned Too Human because it was rubbish. Replacing that travesty is the truly lovely Bourne Conspiracy.
These Gaming Cycles vary from a few weeks to a few months, but they are almost always broken by the same cause.
Game Fear.
You will have heard of this, maybe by another name, or p, but if you have ever played a game then you have felt The Fear.
It’s that tension, the anxiety you get from finding yourself on a particularly difficult part of any game. It’s peak comes when you are deep into the level/challenge and the possibility of failure looms heavy in the air. You know that if you die or run out of time you’re gonna have to do the whole thing all over again.
Imagine, if you will the game Halo 3. There is a bit at the end where you are driving the military vehicle called The Warthog. It’s an unwieldy task for the best of us, but on this occasion the floor is falling away in random chunks and you must swerve to avoid falling in a race against time.
You are squaring off against time itself but there is no indication when your number will be up. The floor will simply drop from beneath you and that’s that. So you’re bombing around, unsure of where to go, where you are going and how long you have to get there as huge squares of the brittle landscape detach and disappear all around you.
Can you feel the tension? Imagine the anxiety?
Well I feel like that on every game all the time.
The constant fear of dying or failure in a game has forced me to abandon some of the most lauded titles out there. Gears of War? Didn’t even get passed the 1st level. Grand Theft auto 4? Second island . Dead Rising? I got on to the guy in the cinema, with the sword. Sean I think his name was.
I get sweaty, my heart races, I start to panic. In a very real sense I am scared. It’s ridiculous honestly, and I know that, but I haven’t always been like this.
Back in my early teens I was all over games, like we all were.
I actually held the world record for completing Metal Gear Solid on the PSOne [for about an hour, when I was trumped some Korean kid] so while I had a lot of years away from games, only having played here and there until I was around 22, I was confident I could still bring the old magic.
One day, while at my parents house, I stole away to the spare room to have a blast on some games. You get bored at your Mum’s and one man can only drink so much tea. I popped in a game I had never played, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty.
As much as I adored the first MGS, for whatever reason I hadn’t rushed out to get the sequel and felt at that point like I may have missed a trick. I was greeted by all the familiar sounds, the menu clicks etc… and a nice long FMV sequence to open the game. All familiar territory for me.
Rather than thrust you straight into the action, MGS2 allows some initial breathing space for you to get to grips with the theme of espionage over action. It’s all about subtlety, and your first thought is to get by the guard at the top of the stairs without being seen. In the first game this involves hiding under a water tank and shooting a dude in the leg with a tranquilliser. I intended to take a similar approach in this instalment, checking my radar for the guards patrol pattern and his field of vision. I tried to position myself in an area where I would not be spotted, but became increasingly aware of how timid I was in coming out from my hiding place.
I kept slowly crawling out, seeing the guard approach and darting back in again, like a frightened vole. I did this for about half an hour, coming a few feet out of my safe zone, levelled the shot at the guard and then turning tail and scarpering when he approached, just in case he somehow extended his eyeline and saw me.
Having found myself physically and mentally unable to overcome the first guard on the first section of the first mission, I washed my hands of MGS2 forever and haven’t since so much as attempted to play again.
I’ve tried escalating the inherent difficulty of the games I play. Start off with something relatively easy. The Simpsons Game. Got through that without any major issues, so I levelled up and took on Halo 3. There are several parts of that game which elevate my Game Fear to steam out the ears/heart palpitation areas, but with some support I managed to get through it. Even that bit with the Warthog, although it took a few tries.
Shortly after my triumph with Halo 3 my gaming obsession faded when I couldn’t get any further with the aforementioned Dead Rising, and another one didn’t crop up until the release of GTAIV [which I actually did pre-order AND queue for]. That only lasted for a period everyone was in love with GTA4 [every conversation at work for that entire month involved some cool new thing or trick one of us had found on the game, to the point where GTA4 talk was banned by management]
Once I realised I was NEVER going to complete the game I abandoned it, and it hasn’t been looked at for about 5 months. Then this month, from nowhere really, I got the bug again. It came from being unemployed I think. The desire to actually achieve something, no matter how trivial, while I was sitting in the flat in a dressing gown waiting for Wednesdays Job paper.
So I hopped on down to Computer Exchange [because I had no actual money and was already stuck on every game I owned] and traded in a couple of titles [The Simpsons Game being one of them] and for no money got Mass Effect, which I think is mint. Although once I’d completed it what then? I was still up for more gaming but as I say, had no money. Back to CEX I flew and away went Mass Effect for the abysmal Too Human, which mere days later [having played it once and condemned it] I traded THAT in for Bourne Conspiracy.
I hope to one day overcome my abject Game Fear, but when people gush about the release of the latest innovation in home entertainment interactive gaming technology that’s got aliens in it and uses the Unreal Engine, I am bemused and segregated, because while Gears of War 2 could well be the Best Game of 2008, I will never play it.
I’m too afraid.
Game Fear - Brought to you by Gazz Wood -