Gaming for the over 30's
Posted on June 03, 2007 in Gaming. - No comments
I always considered myself a fairly reasonable gamer. Hell, I grew up with the Commodore 64 back in the days when there were no walk-throughs (although we did have our handy action-replay cartridges and there were all those POKEs from the back of the computer mags!). Aliens were tough back then though. Aliens were real-aliens! When you’d wiped-em out once, they got meaner and you had to do it all over again. None of these namby-pamby cut-scenes, just hardcore xenophobic blasting! Hell, sometimes there wasn’t even a plot! The only thing you needed to know when playing these games were where the fire-button was!
The truth is, i don’t get much time to play games any more these days. Work and family life mean that I tend to dip in and out as time allows. Just when I’m getting into a game I’ll stop and not touch it for a month or two and then I’ll be back to the start again. Despite this, I’ve finished Neverwinter Nights, Half-Life 2, nearly finished Doom 3 and not doing too badly with Tomb Rraider Legend, although I’m not going to admit how long it’s taken me.
Where my lack of gaming prowess really shows up is when I play multi-player games on the net. I used to be able to hold my own playing the original Doom on the company network – or as we used to call it “stress testing” the network.
Take Counter Strike as an example. My usual experience of playing Counterstrike for instance is to spawn, panic as I try to remember which team I’ve just joined, fumble to get my hands on some weapons and then go for a lie down – having been shot multiple times in multiple places. Maybe now that I’ve reached (passed) my min-thirties my reactions are no longer up to the demands of such a game.
As a result of the lengthy gaming session in spectator mode, there’s one feature that I would really love to see in such first person shooters and that’s the button for “lie down and pretend to be dead”. At least that way at least I’d feel as if I was doing something a little more strategic.
It’s obvious that most of the people on-line are significantly younger than I am. The total incomprehensibility of their language makes me feel like an outsider, intruding into a young persons environment. It’s hardly surprising that more than once I’ve ended up being called “granddad” and if there was a skin I could download to show my character wearing a cardigan and a shawl over his knees, I’d feed obliged to use it.
Maybe there aught to be a “clan” for us older gamers, where we can safely compete without the dangers of being exposed to indecipherable text-speak or worse – l33t speak (or whatever!)
So here I am, counting down the days until the only game I can handle is a quiet game of solitaire (although I’ve heard that the Vista version is pretty extreme!).