A couple of weeks back I became acutely aware of something about myself…something which, in the grand scheme of things, is pretty minor stuff, but within the confines of my own ego deeply troubling. What I realised was that… I am just not very good at videogames. I am not very good, and slightly more worrying I seem to be getting worse.
This startling moment of realisation came when playing Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. The scene in question, a hair-raising car chase down a hill strewn with shanty towns and market stalls, was something that, one would have to imagine, had been streamlined to within an inch of its life so that even the most casual of players could enjoy the “POWER OF THE PLAYSTATION”™ at its brash and brawny best. Yet, by the time I reached the final climactic part and triggered the cut-scene (which was awesome by the way) I think my death tally was up to four or five. What was meant to be an exhilarating rollercoaster ride had turned, for me, into a bit of a slog. Honestly, I was relieved when it was finally all over.
Now, I could easily put this down to simple tiredness given that I was playing this scene around midnight on the Friday of a relatively long week, but I would only be kidding myself in doing so. The honest truth is, I have found myself dying an inordinate amount of times during my playthrough of Uncharted 4 and there has been little to no correlation between my death statistics and levels of tiredness during gameplay. When I found myself stuck in the middle of no man’s land being blasted in the face by an armoured goon with a shotgun, it was not because I had been mowing the lawn that afternoon, it was because I was engaging in bad practice. When I was spotted for the umpteenth time by the enemy as I hung off the crumbling ledge of a medieval monastic ruin and subsequently sent to an early grave, it was not because I had spent the day translating Japanese legal contracts, it was because my instincts of when to move from cover had been wrong.
At first, I was defiant…after all I had completed Uncharted 2 on Crushing once before. Sure, it had been a frustrating experience and one involving many, many deaths, but I had proven that I was able to deal with third person cover mechanics in a large 3D space. But as the deaths in Uncharted 4 began to accumulate with a decidedly alarming regularity, I had little choice but to concede defeat. As it turns out, I am simply not up to being the bad-ass swashbuckler that Naughty Dog wanted me to be.
And with that grudging acceptance, I have started to look back over my history with games and question whether I have ever really excelled at any one title…to look to whether I had ever been able to claim that I was up there in the top five percentile of people playing. And you know what I found? Nothing…
For example, I always felt like I could beat anybody at a game of Pro Evo or FIFA on my day, but if I’m being brutally honest with myself I have almost certainly lost more than I have won. I remember the day that I brought back home FIFA 10 (my second FIFA) from the shop and challenged a strictly Pro-Evo loving friend to a match, only to find myself at the end of the 90minutes on the wrong end of a 2-0 drubbing. As was ever the case, I dismissed the loss as me falling foul to exploits within the game, but the truth was that even when I used those same exploits in subsequent rematches I still tended, more often than not, to finish on the losing side. The exploits may have been a factor in my losses, but it was my own relative lack of ability that was the real reason I failed to win.
Even if I think back to playthroughs of single player games like Mass Effect, GTA or the Batman Arkham series, I was still no stranger to the death screen. Perhaps not to quite the same level as with Uncharted 4, but still the fact remains that I have rarely found these games to be completely plain-sailing. In fact, thinking back, I cannot remember any one game in the past twenty or so years where I have managed to make my entire way through the game without dying at least once.
An element of despondency is probably at play here in me suddenly feeling so inept at the entertainment medium that I love above all else, but there is nothing quite so humiliating as facing the prospect of dropping down a difficulty level in a mainstream release, just so I can get through the game without tearing my hair out. I mean, we’re not talking about Dark Souls here… These games are marketed to the mainstream and it is expected that anybody with any level of competency at games would be comfortably able to complete them on the default setting.
I console myself slightly in the fact that I am spectacularly solid at Spelunky and The Binding of Isaac, but even there am I really able to make those claims when I have only completed Spelunky once in a little over a 1000 attempts (albeit with the caveat that my past few hundred attempts have been with the sole aim of reaching and clearing Hell)? The truth is probably not…
I started writing this piece with the express intention of uncovering some sub-conscious reasoning behind my recent struggles with Uncharted, but the more I wrote, the more I realised that this was something that reaches back much further into my gaming history. All excuses put aside, there is little choice for me but to accept that I kinda suck at games.
But you know what? Who cares? I am just not that competitive a person and I am probably not alone in this (oh god, please don’t tell me I’m alone in this!!). It may sting a little when a friend mocks my attempts with derision, or when some random unknown on a message board tells me how I’m the worst player they’ve ever come across, but ultimately I am able to shrug off these criticisms and still enjoy all of these games in the spirit in which they were meant. Everybody has their own strengths and weaknesses and it would be ridiculous of me to get hung up on the fact that I keep dying in games (even though I put more time and effort into gaming than I do pretty much anything else).
And so, with that in mind, I will plough on with Uncharted and finish the blasted thing before the week is out. Come hell or high water, I will see the end to Drake’s story and I will write some prosaical review of my thoughts about it and I will post it here! The Uncharted games have played a pivotal role in getting me back interested in gaming, and I will be dammed if I’m going to let the last entry get the better of me like this! You may call me an amateur…you may laugh at my many failed attempts to finish a glorified FMV sequence…you may even think me an idiot for not simply lowering the difficulty, but you most certainly may not call me a quitter!
dublinperspectives 