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Kalmado

I love gaming, I think?

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A friend stopped over last night and we were talking about gaming. I gifted him Dark Souls 3 so we could co-op. I asked him how it was going and he said he's just not in front of the tv/pc like that anymore. Also, Iudex Gundyr smoked him! It got me thinking about myself and my gaming habits. Ever since I stopped being a daily FFXI player back in 2011 I've had trouble finding games that really grip me. Games that I can't wait to get home from work just so I can play it. And while chatting with my friend last night I think I may have found a small reason as to why.

First lets talk about my time after FFXI. I quit because in a way I was miserable and also to be blunt idiots were still buying accounts and I wasn't making shit as a brand new insurance sales guy. So I said screw it and sold the account. I had my 360 and had bought enough games in the past to keep gaming. And once I started making some money I bought a PS3, played the exclusives there, and got hooked big time on The Last of Us. In 2013 I was at a much higher paying insurance gig and decided to make the jump to PC gaming. I built my first gaming PC and it was off to the races. The first two games that got me were Skyrim (the mods!!!!!) and Bioshock Infinite. I was so amazed at how much better they looked and my brain about exploded seeing full time 60 FPS. And then I was loving how much cheaper the games were! We'll get back to that.

So from 2014-2016 I was loving my new PC, and also constantly rebuilding and upgrading it. I did buy a PS4 for the exclusives and that has seen its fair share of gaming. We had some life stuff happen and to be candid I was in a very bad place mentally from late 2016 to really just now, and I'm still not out of it fully. I could make a huge post on it's own about the insurance job I worked from 06/01/2017 to 05/17/2019. Shout out to Starby for suggesting The Body Keeps The Score to read. Only 15 pages in but I can already see the worth this book will have for myself. But yeah, just wasn't really gaming anymore. I did create a new FFXI account and did that for awhile because I needed something that I could enjoy and with how easy current XI is and how solo friendly it is I just needed that. Once I got to the point where if I wanted to progress gear/content wise I needed to be in a good size group I quit. Why? I've realized I hate doing co-op content.

Before returning to XI I had played some multiplayer online games. I mean, just about every game has some online multiplayer mode it seems like. And I was a hardcore Call of Duty 4 player. The first multiplayer game I tried on PC that required me to be on a squad was Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege. I loved Rainbow Six Three on the original Xbox so I was pumped to play this. Loved the tutorial mode and was looking forward to playing matches. I'm a level one and I'm put on a squad with experienced people. Match starts and I have no idea what I'm doing. There is bickering going on but I'm just trying to find my way. I get shot at. I shoot back. I run around. Next thing I know I'm the last one on my squad getting hunted down by two people. And then the yelling starts. No, the screaming starts. This guy is going ballistic and it's about how I'm playing. I eventually die and he just doesn't stop. And it's all the things you would just assume he's yelling about. Basically I suck and I should kill myself. The words do not bother me at all. It's the wild fact that this is how people act in gaming. Found the same in some other online games so I didn't bother with them. Downloaded Apex Legends and the first match as soon as audio is live it's nothing but a guy screaming making weird scream noises. I just quit out. Oh, and the very first bit of XI newer group content I attempted was Dynamis [D] where SNK was just trying to help me out. I hadn't read the requirements so this was done in a hurry and I didn't have something to enter. A guy in the alliance was not pleased and let it be known how I'm wasting everyone's time, I should stick to doing noob things, etc etc. All because I took up literally two minutes to get the KI. I just said fuck it and quit out after we entered because even after the leaders told the guy to shut up he kept going on. That's the last time I've done anything in a group.

So what do I play now? Well, I play a ton of MLB The Show 2016! Let's be fair here, it is baseball season and baseball is my favorite sport. I'm going to win the triple crown! I had bought Red Dead 2. I find it boring. Horizon Zero is neat but so far forgettable. Was jamming with Mafia 3, until the "story" was me doing the same mission essentially for ten hours straight. The last game I played from start to finish and really enjoyed it was Yakuza 0. Fun fighting, good story, kept me wanting to come back. As of now the latest game I've tried is The Surge and it's fun, I guess?

Oh, so back to that thing about PC gaming and sales. Over the last 5 1/2 years roughly I've amassed 42 Uplay games, 40 EA Origin games, 46 GoG games, 6 Epic Launcher games, 37 Twitch Launcher games, and 830 steam games. Now some of these games are duplicates across launchers. For instance GoG will give you certain games for free if you own it on Steam (see S.T.A.L.K.E.R.). But for math's sake the addition tells me I own 1001 PC games. I also have PS1/2/3 games downloaded or ripped for emulation. Because of how frequent PC games go on sale, bundles, and also frequent free offerings of games (and great games at that) it's easy to amass a huge catalog of games.

Something that does go hand in hand with PC gaming is having the hardware to run games. Oh, and you gotta have storage for all those games! Over the years I've rebuilt but I've settled on a build since late 2017 and it's serving me very well. I have a PC that can run 1440P on mostly high at 50+ FPS and even 120+ FPS depending on the title. Oh, and I spent the dough to see if the 144hz hype is real. It is. 1440p 144hz > 4K any day. This is after having a 4K monitor for over a year. I currently have 2x240 GB SSD storage with one dedicated for games. I have 19 TB of mechanical drive storage. That's between four drives with two of them going four years strong. I bought two large capacity drives in the past two years because of sales and I wanted to have that freedom to download damn near everything so if I felt like playing a game I wouldn't have to wait.

As my friend and I are talking last night I thought maybe I'm like him. I'm just not like that (gaming) anymore. I opened my Steam account and I have so many untouched or barely played games that are considered classics, must play, etc. I look at my list of games and all I see is words. I said to my friend I feel like I've spoiled myself buying all these games just because they were cheap and now I'm in a way overwhelmed with options. I thought of back in the day before having internet and no TV. The only way to find out about games being released were magazines, TV, or word of mouth. I frequently would go to Best Buy just to window shop the shelves. One day after work I went and I saw Max Payne 2 and was about jumping out of my skin with excitement! Back then I was budgeting literally to the dollar every week but I didn't care. I'd make things work because I had to have this game. The anticipation of opening the game to read the instruction manual was pushing my foot hard on the gas. I don't even know how many times I played that game and yes I do have it for PC now. I can't recall the last game I felt like that for and I have a feeling of why.

It's a few things but for myself I think it's everything being so accessible and also how it seems like every AAA game nowadays is touted as being the next greatest thing ever. Oh, and a huge reason, no it's the main reason I rarely if ever buy a game at launch is DLC. I hate DLC with a passion. To clarify, planned DLC. I miss the times where the game on the shelf was the game you bought. That's it. But I digress. We now have streamers to check out games and Youtube to get hours and hours of pre-release post, and continuous coverage of games. I feel spoiled. I don't feel hype anymore. The last time I felt hype was waiting for Dark Souls 3 with season pass to go on sale because I knew I'd love it, and to this day it's my most played game on Steam. Do any of you remember going to work, class, party, etc and someone says, "Hey, have you checked out <game> yet? It's amazing you gotta check it out!" We don't even really need that anymore because all we gotta do is search google, YT, Twitch, etc and we'll get a million takes on it.

So yeah, I sit in front of my PC that I love with all the games and yet I have no idea to play. My buddy asked if I had a mic. I do. He said we should record and he'll do commentary because he's a stupid idiot in a fun way (at least to us) and it will give us something new and fun to do. That will be good for a day out of the week, maybe. So how about the rest? I am friends with fellow BG'ers on Steam and Uplay. I've never connected online with anyone though. I haven't connected with Discord really and I don't know if people do set up game nights with each other here. I'd for sure be open to that because I can't imagine I'd get the same nonsense I got from other multiplayer games. I feel I owe it to my catalog and to not have spent all of this money and effort for these games to just be words in a list.

Comments

  1. Cantih -
    Cantih's Avatar
    You like gaming. You like gaming with people more. But not all people are equal.
    Randos are always available, but have too much of a chance of being a jackass. Friends are best, but often don't have the same availability or commitment, especially to any particular game at a time.
    There, really isn't any viable solution for this currently besides the legwork of finding people.

    As for what to play. I think there's a number of Steam roulette/randomizer/game picker thingers, just a matter of finding one that works.
  2. Kalmado -
    Kalmado's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Cantih
    You like gaming. You like gaming with people more. But not all people are equal.
    Randos are always available, but have too much of a chance of being a jackass. Friends are best, but often don't have the same availability or commitment, especially to any particular game at a time.
    There, really isn't any viable solution for this currently besides the legwork of finding people.

    As for what to play. I think there's a number of Steam roulette/randomizer/game picker thingers, just a matter of finding one that works.
    Allow me to share a specific moment. My buddy's dad bought for himself a 360 when they first came out and bought CoD 2. We got him to buy a Live sub so we could play death match and what not. We were playing that hardcore. That's when I decided to buy a Live sub and started playing Rainbow Six Three. I teamed up with a group who all new each other. During the match they were playing (loudly) Lou Bega's Mambo #5 and his other songs. These guys if I had to guess were mid to late teens and it was just a great time. It was difficult to concentrate playing because of how much we were laughing.

    I also did truly love and cherish times with my groups in XI. 75 cap a small group of us concentrated on low man content. Hakutaku 3 man Bst, Despot solo, etc. Post 75 a group of 4 of us were doing a lot of Abyssea. Solo'd Monk WS coins in WoE alone or duo. Was some great times.

    I think if I had a group to do random gaming with I'd be reinvigorated. I'm in that category now of not wanting to be on a schedule, yet that ruins the chance of having a blast doing say a group run of Borderlands 2 before the third one hits.
  3. PaulBackstrom -
    PaulBackstrom's Avatar
    This always happens when you finally get a gaming computer. I really like your game set, I have about the same collection. The main thing is that the game world does not become addictive for you. Although I can not imagine the real world without my favorite shooters. If there is a need for a new gaming computer, see more here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjOwBtondGQ , a useful video.
  4. PaulBackstrom -
    PaulBackstrom's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by PaulBackstrom
    This always happens when you finally get a gaming computer. I really like your game set, I have about the same collection. The main thing is that the game world does not become addictive for you. Although I can not imagine the real world without my favorite shooters. If there is a need for new gambling, see more here: https://rocketpayz.com/blackjack-online-paypal/, a useful video.
    I'm interested in what kind of Gog games you played. I love this service of digital distribution of computer games without DRM.