How I Game

Want to know how I play? No? Well read on anyway.

I’ve been writing here for a little over five months now, usually trying to keep things interesting. I’ve had some hits (THE LONG DARK IMPRESSIONS: CANADA SIMULATOR was a high point), a few duds that I probably shouldn’t have published (smh at MOBA-IZATION) because I’m honestly not even sure why I finished them, and a ton that I have thrown in the trash.

It all started with my About Me page really, and sort of expanded from there. I’ve touched on my gaming preferences a little, but didn’t talk much more about it at all.

So how can I add anything to this, you may ask?

MORE BACKSTORY

First, I’m primarily an Xbox gamer but I am not going to drone on about that. I have my reasons why and that’s something I elaborated on in another article. What I didn’t talk about much was my gaming habits in general.

I’ve branched out a lot over the past decade of gaming really. Even just looking back about my teenage years where my gaming habits began to take hold, I played only shooters and real-time strategy games. I despised most racing games, horror titles, almost all Japanese games, and anything that didn’t have guns in it. Those were the days of Blockbuster Video, the PlayStation 2, original Xbox, the underappreciated GameCube, and my family’s PC.

Again, I branched out. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was my first purchase on the Xbox 360 alongside Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. Around that time I was enamored with World of Warcraft and studying to start a game development career. I had graduated from Blockbuster to Hastings for my game rentals and fell in love with role-playing games. Mass Effect became one of my favorite games of all time, melding my fascination with science fiction, firearms, and RPGs (not rocket propelled grenades).

But a tight budget constrained my love of gaming which forced me to miss out on many great things. I couldn’t afford the ridiculously expensive PS3 and my PC was severely lacking. Not that I could afford to buy games on the PC anyway, as Steam had just started to take up roots. Remember the days before massive Steam sales? Yeah, me too.

I continued on until I took up a job at GameStop, where I took full advantage of the employee discount and game borrowing policies. I experimented with a ton of games as a result. That’s more or less how I ended up the way I am today.

GAMERTYPE

I’m very much a marathon gamer. I like to plop down for hours at a time if I can, just whittling away at whatever game I’m currently stuck on. I go through bouts of gaming depression sometimes, with this last one being the longest. I haven’t gotten sucked into a game in a long while, but it always passes.

I also exhibit the tendencies of an addict when it comes to games (but I’m not an addict, damn it!), spending weeks at a time stuck on a single game. I don’t take breaks from anything I’m playing. For instance, I played The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for what I swear was a month straight, though I did stop to eat and see my girlfriend (she’s my wife now so I didn’t screw up my relationship with her, obviously).

As of right now at least the only things I don’t play still are sports games and Japanese RPGs. I have nothing against them for the most part, even though a great many Japanese games have some fairly creepy tendencies when it comes to portraying women. Not that they’re alone in that, Far Cry 3 and 4 being notable examples of gratuitous fan service.

CURRENT GEN PLATFORMS

I know I’ve said it before, but I do own both a PS4 and Xbox One personally. My wife has her own Xbox One and we share a desktop and laptop. I won’t go so far as to list the games I own on any of those because it would take up most of my time to jot down everything. It was another perk of being a GameStop manager: getting free games from publishers. I’m kicking myself for giving away my code for Bloodborne, though I did buy it recently and am pleasantly surprised.

My multi-platform games are all on Xbox for the most part, with a few on my PCs. The PS4 won me over with the port of The Last of Us along with Infamous: Second Son, Bloodborne, and Uncharted 4. It was worth the cost of entry for those three games alone, though I’m still pretty stoked the No Man’s Sky is coming out sometime this century. My PS4 is just a standard model with the 500GB HDD and I don’t see the reason to go through the moderate hassle of increasing it.

My PCs are a different story altogether. Prepare for a bunch of gibberish.

One is a cheap Dell that I bought for college:

• An Intel processor with an integrated graphics chip that I don’t care to check for because it’s a piece of garbage
• 8GB of RAM
• A 5200RPM 1TB HDD
• A Samsung 720p, 32″ TV for a monitor

It’s nothing special but it gets the job done when I want to play an older game or write something on my blog when the wife is using the laptop.

Our laptop is a Sager:

• An i7-4710MQ processor
• An Nvidia GeForce GTX 960M with 2GB of GDDR5 VRAM
• 16GB of DDR3 RAM
• A 7200RPM 1TB HDD
• A 13.3″ 1920 x 1080 LED screen with HDMI output so I can hook it up to my 46″ TV

It’s also not top of the line but it gets me by with my Steam library. I won’t exactly be playing Batman Arkham Knight but let’s face it, who would play that on the PC anyway?

All in all, I can play pretty much anything I want to play. Granted, I don’t have a Wii U, so Nintendo games are off the table. The thing is that I’m not really a Nintendo kinda guy anymore. I don’t have a principled stance against Nintendo or an antipathy towards their games, I just don’t want to play their games enough to plunk down $300+ to buy their system.

AND NOW WE COME TO A CLOSE

So this leaves me curious, dear readers. What do you game on? What are your preferences? Your hang-ups? Are you a Pony? An Xbot? Are you part of the PC master race? A… Nintendork?

Is that a thing? Nintendork?

 

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