Skip to main content

Am I a gaming butterfly or a bird?

A recent  post on Tobold's Blog got me thinking about the number of games I play and whether I like to flit between games or spend a lot of time in one game. The truth is I get far more satisfaction from investing a lot of time in one game than from flitting between games and never the less I still do flit.

Sometimes flitting is an inevitable consequence of a game not appealing to me as much as I thought it would. If I move on from a game because I am no longer enjoying it then I don't feel particularly bad about it. Sometimes however I just get distracted by something else and temporarily take a break from a game I fully intend to come back to. Unfortunately these days there is such an overwhelming choice of games to play (often at very little cost)  that such temporary breaks almost inevitably become permanent. This ever growing list of  unfinished titles that I intend to get back to some day is a source of frustration for me.

To illustrate the above with examples here are the games I have played (a little or a lot) over thee last couple of months:

1. Total War Warhammer 2: I have been playing this game intensively since its release two years ago and have derived tremendous satisfaction from it. It has slipped into the background now and will probably remain there until the third instalment comes out in a year or so but I still fire it up occasionally.

2. The Outer Worlds: I expected to like this game a lot and to be honest I did like a lot of things about it but after playing through the first planet  for a few days I found myself getting bored by it. I don't feel any need to go back to it.

3. Battletech: This replaced Total Warhammer as my immersive strategy game and I played it intensively for about a  month before taking a break. Even though I have completed hundreds of missions and developed some mastery of the game I didn't actually finish the  main campaign but I got enough enjoyment out of this game to feel satisfied by it even if I don't go back.

4. Halo Reach: I played this before on console and I am long time Halo fan. When it was finally released on PC I had to go back in and finish the campaign all over again on the PC. You can bet I will be replaying the other Halo titles as well when they come to PC.

5. Gears of War 4: Played single player campaign to completion. Enjoyable but forgettable.

6. Gears of War 5: Played single player campaign to completion over a few days. I enjoyed this even more than 4 but again it is ultimately forgettable.

7. Metro Exodus: I really enjoyed the previous Metro games so I was happy to load this up from my Xbox game pass subscription. Unfortunately I got distracted almost immediately so this is still sitting accusingly on my desktop.  I will probably go back to this. 

Comments

Dylan said…
Left halo behind a long time ago, have just purchased a switch for one reason Zelda, the first open roam 3d game? still play ocarina of time on a emulator on my phone, the only other game that has grabbed me in the last few years is Fortnite, still waiting on that first win.

Popular posts from this blog

Android Tip 3: Sharing a Folder between multiple users of an Android device

Android has allowed multiple user logins for quite a while now. This is can be very useful for tablets which are shared by family members. Normally Android erects strict Chinese walls between users preventing them from using each others apps and viewing each others files. This is a useful security feature and ensures your kids don't mess up your work spreadsheets when screwing around on the tablet and should also prevent them from buying €1,000 worth of Clash of Candy coins on your account. Sometimes however you really do want to share stuff with other users and this can prove surprisingly difficult. For example on a recent holiday I realised that I wanted to share a folder full of travel documents with my wife. Here are some ways to achieve this. 1. If you have guaranteed internet access  then you can create a shared folder on either Dropbox or Google drive. Either of these has the great advantage of being able to access the files on any device and the great disadvantage of bein...

Portal 2 two screen coop on one PC.

I mentioned before that I intended to try Portal 2 in "unofficial split screen co-op mode. Well split screen on a small computer monitor is a recipe for a headache especially when the game defies gravity as much as portal. However a minor bit of extra fiddling allowed us to drive two seperate screens from one PC. The Steam forums describes a complicated method of doing this that I couldn't get working so this simpler method which worked for me might be of use to someone. 1. First I followed the instructions in this post to get split screen multi-player working: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1847904 A minor issue not mentioned is that you need to enable the console from the keyboard/mouse options menu I am using keyboard and one wired Xbox360 controller as suggested. Getting the controller to switch to channel 2 was tricky at first but as Chameleon8 mentions plugging it out and in again during loading works. The trick for me was to do the plug / p...

Exploiting Checkpoints in Deadspace 3

Dead Space 3 has a rather strange save system where inventory is saved when you quit the game even though progress through the story is lost. The game has both "hard" and "soft" checkpoints. The soft checkpoints are far more frequent but are not permanently saved. If you die while playing you respawn at the last soft checkpoint but if you quit the game  you will return to the previous hard checkpoint. Since hard checkpoints are relatively infrequent you can lose quite a bit of progress unless you are disciplined enough to always wait till the next hard checkpoint (indicated by a symbol in the corner of the screen) before quitting. This sucks of course and is the type of thing which convinces me that save anywhere is much better than rigid checkpoints. The developers of Dead Space 3 decided to soften the blow of losing progress by allowing you to keep your entire inventory and health when you quit even though you lose your progress in the story. Collecting loot ...