Rare is the game that truly excites me. I get bored of games so readily, the interest exhausting like an after-dinner mint.
I find I’m fascinated with game systems - the more complex, the more compelling. Few and far between are those games that grip me for more than 20 minutes, seriously.
I think this stems from poor motivation. Mastery, as an end to itself, is not worthwhile to me. I am not willing or able to repeatedly play a game simply to become better at it, as some are. Some players have those games that they just grind into the ground - Tetris being a very common one, chess being another. They get very very good at the games, at least relative to their ability at others.
I sit down with a game, tinker with it, and once I figure out how to “beat” it, whether I can or not, I’m bored with it. When it’s just a matter of repetition to perfection I become easily fed up.
Those few games that hold me are those that are so infinitely varied as to never have a dependable and repeatable strategy, are so complex as to require vast amounts of time to figure out or ingeniously compel me to keep at them. For most games, this means narrative. I like stories, I am also an impatient reader - my ability to consume a book is never near as fast as I’d want it to be. So a game that tells me a story, even if I don’t make it myself, is infinitely more compelling than some fantasy simulator (I’m looking at you Animal Crossing).
There are other games though, even rarer, that actually compel me to get better at them because I fell rewarded for my increase in skill. I actually feel like I’ve accomplished something when I get better at the game. I think I can list those games without it being ridiculous:
Metal Gear Solid (the PlayStation original), Duck Hunt, Civilizations, Gran Tourismo and Tourist Trophy.
Metal Gear Solid became a sort of therapy for me. I would enter a no mind state and simply obliterate the game. My familiarity with the game was such that I would often pay no attention to the screen at all while I feverishly tapped the correct sequences to complete the VR missions perfectly - often besting the top computer time by whole seconds (which is seemingly impossible for some levels). They became video kata - I would do them over and over as a form of meditation - odd but true.
Duck Hunt is probably the only game that I’ve shown true innate skill at. I’m not particularly good at most other light-gun games - Area 51 still poses are pretty steep challenge for me though I got pretty good at Time Crisis. I have beaten all three modes of Duck Hunt. I have even beaten the clay shooting whilst laying on my back as far away from the TV as cabling would allow. This is with the original zapper - so I honestly have no idea how I would fare with the Wii controller. I was pretty good at it naturally so I decided to push myself a little further - and thus I played Duck Hunt well into the early morning for many a moon.
Civilization holds a special place in my heart. It is the only game where you can in the course of a session invent the alphabet, destroy the huns AND vote in the UN. Although less so now than in the past, I play this game reverently - as if I am performing some rite for the spirit of Sid Meier. Whether I intend to play it or not, I feel compelled purchase each iteration of the game - if only to do my part to ensure it’s still around for future generations. Civilization is an important game - it stands STILL, this many years later, as really the only successful comingling of educational content and entertainment - the game is FUN, seriously fun and it really is educational.
Polyphony Digital somehow got me. I don’t really know why I’m so obsessed with these games - it just doesn’t fit with anything else I do as a gamer. I like games that use dice and hit points. I don’t drive a REAL car and I really know very little about how automobiles work. Does this stop me from agonizing over gear ratios, torque values and weight distribution on my braking assists for my Lotus Elise? No. What I know about cars comes solely from this game - so I hope to god this thing is as accurate as it seems. The reason I play this game repeatedly is probably because the first time I played GT I totally blew. It was probably the most embarrassing experience I’ve had as a gamer - next to my foray into Einhander (more on that next article). I missed corners, fishtailed all over the road and crawled across the finish line (if I made it at all.) I still think I suck horribly at the game - and I do, but I had my come uppance when I demoed GT4 HD at EB ahead of what can only be described as a SuperAsian (he wore a god damn Dirge of Cerberus baseball cap and a Mike Forza T-shirt).
I ran the course, twice, very poorly compared to how I usually fare (I chalked it up to lack of familiarity with the route car and changes in physics - but could’ve also been the building pressure of 6 spectators) SuperAsian chuckled at me as I handed off the controller. He switched out from my Mitsubishi Lancer GT (I wanted something with good handling for the highly technical course, top-end speed is useless if you can’t get there) to a Ferrari. He runs the course 4 times and comes behind my lap times by nearly a full minute. The grudging nod of a frustrated SuperAsian made my agonizing months of sliding around courses and generally sucking at GT worthwhile.
This brings me to my prediction - the next game likely to be on this list. There’s a lot of obvious choices: the company of heroes expansion, Medieval II total war kingdoms, Age of Conan, Oblivion, and of course StrarCraft II. Although these are all venerable titles worth of obsessive perfectionist gameplay - I really think the next game that I’ll grind to death will be the gem from Turtle Rock Left 4 Dead.
It’s a first person shooter - not a usual choice for me. Marathon, Unreal Tournament and Rainbow Six are the only FPS series that I got into. Rainbow Six, of those three, is probably my favourite - if only because of my juvenile excitement at paramilitary stuff. Though my favourite part of R6 was being part of a team - a group of guys who worked efficiently together and got shit done. Unlike the chaotic UT/Q3A teams R6 teams had purpose, a laserlike focus to meet an objective and you HAD to work as a team - rare was the player skilled enough to carry a game (unlike, say, Counter Strike)
Left 4 Dead, strangely, reminds me more of R6 than Counter-Strike (even though Turtle Rock CREATED Counter-Strike) It’s the coherent focus and role based play that really hook me.
There is of course, the other amazing half of the game - ZOMBIES. My prediliction to zombie films is unhealthy, to say the least and my love for the shambling dead guys is actually what turned me off Resident Evil after Resident Evil 2 - they made the weird mutagenic enemies the focus of the game, rather than distractions to the masses of flesh eating corpses. L4D has LOTS of zombies. Moreover, you get to play AS a Zombie…now THAT is pretty awesome.
So, in review truly cohesive coopertive play + zombies = JeremySwoon.
I like games that hate the players - in a good way. I like games with hideously steep learning curves (MechWarrior series), disgustingly complex systems (I LIKED Master of Orion III, Pax Imperia) or controller chuckingly difficult gameplay (Mortal Kombat Anthology).
Left 4 Dead is probably the first game in a long time that excites me more when I see it than when I think about it what it COULD be.