Entries in "Games"
My limited gaming ability
Since I have something of an interest in programming games when I leave here, it's probably a good thing that one of my summer suitemates rekindled my interest in actually playing the things -- by getting me hooked on Halo 2 for the Xbox, no less. Console gaming has never really been my cup of tea -- the controllers frustrate me and it annoys me to play games on a dumbed-down computer when I have a perfectly good PC sitting in my room. The Xbox, to my surprise, has a controller that I can actually use, but it still does nothing to address the latter point.
Part of the reason that I don't play that many games is that I'm only mediocre to decent at it; part of it is that I don't usually have the time; and part of it is that I don't really have the money to maintain a gaming system or to purchase new games at $50 a pop. However, with an interest in the industry, I thought it behooved me to start taking a closer look at the current state of affairs.
My computer is getting older -- piecemeal upgrades keep it running respectably, but the core of the system is still an Athlon XP 2000+. It's not mind-bendingly terrible, but it's definitely moving toward the low end of the spectrum. Most of my games, like my computer, are several years old now, and I thought perhaps it would be a good idea to pick up a more recent title or two and try them out. I generally stick to shooters and driving games, so Half-Life 2, of course, sprang to mind. A bad experience with poor framerate during a weekend test of Halo for PC (I had forgotten about its inherent video performance problems) left me somewhat spooked about playability, though, so I opted to grab the demo and see just how badly it would run on my system.
The demo runs beautifully. The game, as gamers everywhere know, looks fantastic, and to my delight I had no issues whatsoever with performance at medium settings. There is, however, a problem: I don't enjoy it. I never played Half-Life, and somehow never managed to really pick up on the tone of the sequel in all the previews and demos I saw back around the release date. I don't enjoy stay-alive games with monsters leaping out at you from dark corners when you least expect it. I don't enjoy trying to hack my way through the door out of a room I think is clear and finding myself under a sudden assault from two monsters behind me. Watching Sigourney Weaver squish aliens in the harsh blinking light of a futuristic industrial setting can be entertaining, but after about twenty to thirty minutes of a gaming experience along the same lines, the adrenaline gets to me and I have to quit, feeling nauseous.
I didn't, and never will, bother trying to play Doom 3 for precisely this reason.
Half-Life 2, as far as one may judge from a demo, is a brilliantly executed game. The atmosphere is great. The gameplay is good. Graphic and sound design are well-done. And it runs very well. I find it somewhat regrettable that a game with such obvious merits belongs to a sub-genre which I find nearly unplayable.
And now I find myself searching for a title, preferably a recent and good one for PC, that will keep me gaming for a while.
