Low Fidelity

I can’t bear it anymore! Having kept a secret for many dark and seedy months now, the pressure has gotten too much and I feel I must confess. I’ve been unfaithful. And not just once, oh no.

Allow me to explain. Typically I have always had a very monogamous relationship with my games, only ever seeing one at a time and always breaking up amicably before moving on to pastures new. Each time I would fall head-over-heels, enjoying every minute we shared, until things felt like they had run their course. And then, when the time was right, we’d part ways and never look back.

This one-game-guy approach had its ups and its downs. With the thrill of a new relationship, there’s the incredible feelings as the new bond grew and blossomed, that feeling of something special developing, of getting to know everything about a game, of learning its intricacies, and of being surprised when it threw a challenge your way that you weren’t expecting. In short, we had good times.

The only negative was that this approach always meant I was playing catch-up. Living with my girlfriend for the last three and a half years means my gaming time has been significantly lessened than when I lived alone, making it difficult to find the quality time needed to really get into a game. With less time to play and many Xbox 360 titles that had caught my eye falling into my price range, The Pile was born, and with it came the ever-increasing pressure to blitz through my games as quickly as possible to get through the ever-developing backlog.

For a time, I ignored the pressure, continuing down the path I’d set off on, playing a game until I’d deemed it finished and only starting another when the time came. But then something happened. Something I hadn’t accounted for. Something that changed everything. A new release was but a few weeks away;  it’s several trailers dropping my jaw with each new detail revealed. It’s name was L.A. Noire. And damn it for the trouble it caused.

Forgoing my policy of waiting until a game has come down in price, I rushed out and bought it when it came out, dazzled by its incredible performance capture technology and promise of a thinking-man’s adventure. And for a while we had a good time, sometimes a great time. But having completed around 75% of the story cases, something I hadn’t expected happened. I became bored. I felt like I had seen everything the game had to offer. I lost the lust for completing the game, never seeing it through to its end.

Instead I started looking for shorter experiences, something to perk me up and give me that sense of conclusion I was lacking. Looking at The Pile, I picked out The Orange Box and made my way through Portal. Only, when I got to the final stage and things started getting a bit too tricky, I did the unthinkable. I stopped playing.

In the confusion that followed I began stringing along a handful of games, failing to find the time or the desire to devote myself to them and quickly forgot how I got to the point I got to. Unwilling to start from the beginning, I pushed them aside and began other adventures, before reaching this dreadful state I’ve since found myself in.

To an extent, I feel like I’ve lost my mojo, and that maybe I’ve forgotten how to be a gamer. Games frequently confuse me now. I started the original Assassin’s Creed a couple of weeks back and just can’t get my head around it. Playing as master assassin Altaïr, desperate to prove himself to his superiors after making a mess of some mission (or something), I dashed around the open world with glee until the HUD started beeping at me, somehow telling me when I’m meant to walk and when I’m meant to run, who’s allowed to see me or not, and how many side-missions I need to do before I can crack on with the story. I find the controls unwieldy, difficult to memorize and internalize, and that combined with my difficulty in following what I’m supposed to be doing has led to a general feeling of bafflement. Do I really want to return to it, battle through the confusion to find something special. I don’t know.

The last game that really captured my imagination was the superb Limbo. Perhaps the game’s comparative simplicity – it’s a stunning,  challenging and intuitive 2D platformer – is one of the things that drew me to it, and compelled me to play until I felt I had mastered it. Getting the game’s last achievement, where you must complete the game in one sitting and die no more than five times, was a thrilling challenge, one that I knew I could do and that I invested a fair amount of time in pursuing.

Playing Arkham City on the other hand, I’ve seen and enjoyed everything the main story has to offer. I feel no compulsion to struggle through New Game Plus, no desire to collect each and every of the 400 or so Riddler trophies. I feel like I’ve gotten what I want out of that game. I don’t feel like I’m missing out by not spending hours scouring the game for everything it offers.

To be fair, I never gelled with Arkham City in the same way I did with Arkham Asylum. I had enjoyed Asylum and felt like I was pretty good at it, but I never found that bond with City. Its controls and mechanics always just out of reach for me, keeping me and my appreciation of the game at arm’s length.

In a time of confusion where finishing games has become an alien concept to me, perhaps I can turn this around. Perhaps I just need to take some time to find the right game and settle down, or stick with XBLA titles for a while. Hell, the physical and digital versions of The Pile ain’t getting any smaller.

Time will tell if I can turn this around.