As I’m sure I have mentioned in previous posts, I’m not much of a gamer these days. The trend seems to be that I buy a game, play it once or twice, and never touch it again. I can’t quite pinpoint when this started, but a prime example is Civilization V. I bought it on Steam with the intention of playing it with the wife. We could make decisions together on how to progress. Unfortunately, it ran kind of slowly on my computer, but we still made the best of it. Twice. And I haven’t booted it up since. I did the same thing with Dead Island. It was cheap, and used, and I love the Left For Dead series so I figured why not? I played it twice as well.
(The big exception to all this is the NHL series of games. I can’t explain it myself. It’s repetitive, there’s no story, and irritating music. Despite all of that, I go back to that well time and again. Even just this act of writing about it gets me jonesing to play. In fact, I could stop writing this and go play it right now. Must. Resist…)
I picked up two games recently that are starting to reverse this trend. And they couldn’t be more different. The first is Call of Duty: Ghosts. I am not a fan of this series, but there was a weird deal at Future Shop recently where you could trade in any game for it, so here I am. (I can’t resist a deal.) The typical first person shooter for me is something along the lines of Halo, or Mass Effect 3 (yes, yes, I know it’s third-person), or something equally sci-fi-ey. So, I’m used to shields, and body armour. It turns out, those games are ridiculously forgiving.
If you get shot two or three times in this game, you are dead. No health boosts, or phoenix downs to bring you back to life. This has made multiplayer a brutally frustrating experience. I don’t understand how these games sell so well considering such a small fraction of the players actually win. It’s really not all that fun. But maybe I’m just not playing with the right people.
Single player is a little better. There’s a marginally interesting story, and some fun game mechanics – like the zero-g space station battle. Or, taking control of your dog to eat someone’s face. My biggest problem with the single player, though, is something I first experienced with Rainbow Six. The computer controlled members of my squad are so good, I basically feel like I am hampering them. A lot of the time I apologize for getting in their way, or slowing down our progress. It’s not a good feeling.
Which brings me to the other game I got recently: Marvel Puzzle Quest. This game is about as far from Call of Duty Ghosts as you can get. I play it on my phone, and the main game mechanic is matching coloured jewels. And yet, there’s a silly storyline featuring all of the Marvel characters worth knowing. You collect heroes, and upgrade their powers which do different things if you collect enough jewels. I think what appeals to me about it is just how simple it is. There’s no mandatory tutorial, you can just pick it up and play. The difficulty matches to the level of your team, so if you haven’t got the best powers yet you can’t be overwhelmed. I’m pretty pleased with it, and find myself playing it while Call of Duty is loading yet another opportunity to watch my head get blown open.
Graham Becksted is collecting Movember donations at MoBro.co/GrahamBecksted. He is also the author of Graham’s Grumbles, the second blog by that name that is listed in Google results when you search for Graham’s Grumbles. If you would like to be his 95th follower (thank you, bots), he can be followed on Twitter @GrahamBecksted.
