Wish List: Gaming

I used to be a gamer. Well, I don't know if you'd go so far as to call me a Gamer, but I played many games. I owned many consoles through the Xbox 360. I played countless mobile games and games on the computer.

But that fell off once I got a real job. Over the years, my gaming time has gotten less and less until nowadays, I play maybe once a month, and that's always a very casual game. I'll pop into Hearthstone for an hour, play a battleground session, and then shut it down until the next time I get the itch.

I do sometimes game on my phone, but that too has seen a sharp decline in recent years.

Really, though, this problem isn't new. I've always been a streaky gamer. I have some Xbox 360 games that I bought that I never played. They're still in the wrapper. I can name the games I've actually beaten on one hand (Heavy Rain, and several Call of Duty games). My attention span isn't that great. That's why casual games are usually more my speed. Hearthstone, a TCG, is probably the game I return to the most. And even that has outgrown me, as they have introduced a lot of mechanics to the card game that I just don't know about or how to use.

I can't keep up. I won't spend money to get my card collection up to speed, and I don't play enough to make free to play an option.

But I Want to Game

The thing is, I feel a need to get back into the gaming scene a bit. I doubt I get that far into it—as I said above, my record of sticking with gaming isn't great—but I still want to. Why?

Well, the short answer is: the world sucks right now. I read a lot (as you'd know by the rest of my blog posts being about books), but that hasn't been enough escapism for me to tune out all the apocalyptic bullshite that has been going on lately. So I figure that I can spend some time in games and have some fun.

And I could do with some fun. I've hurt my knee lately, and I'm much more laid up than I used to be, so having something fun to do that isn't reading or messing around with Linux when I'm not working would be good for me.

I also have a HUGE Steam library full of games I've either played little of or not at all. Nearly 80 games there, most not even downloaded. I've spent many hundreds of dollars in Steam sales over the years—it's time to put that money to good use.

What to Play?

Well first, I'm going to get back into Cities: Skylines II. I haven't played it much since its disastrous launch last year, so it will be nice to see how well it has come along.

I also want to finally play Cyberpunk 2077 and maybe beat GTA V if it still plays on Linux (I seem to remember something about them taking GTA away on Linux). Then I will probably play Halo.

The problem I will most likely face is that I'm old. And I wasn't good at games back when I was younger. I was okay, but never good enough to beat the kids who played it 24 hours a day. I just didn't have that kind of time back then, and I don't now either. So, I will also look into some more casual games and see how that works. Things like Euro Truck Simulator, which is a game I've always wanted to play but haven't, or maybe revisit The Sims 4, a game I've not played in 10 years—things like that.

I have so many options. I figure I'll pull my ADD out of the bag, dust it off, and end up playing everything I own, and then stop playing altogether if my pattern holds true.

But maybe along the way, I'll have some fun. If only to forget about some of the other nonsense going on out there.