gamering-ism

I don't talk much in the old blog about gaming.

Well, there was that obsession with Civ3 a while back, but that was a separate issue. The main reason I don't talk about it is I don't do a lot of it.

I have a slightly love/hate relationship with gaming. There are a few reasons for that. One of the most important is that the types of games I enjoy tend to be those that you have to really get involved with to get the most out of.

I mainly play real-time strategy (RTS) and first-person shooters (FPS). Both of which generally have levels that last a long time. A good RTS level can take hours and so can an FPS level, especially if it's some way into the game and it's getting more difficult.

This means to really play the game you need a good few hours and I generally don't have that much free time kicking about.

Another reason is that I'm just not very good at games. It's not so much that I get annoyed with dying or anything, it's more that I'm just not very good. So I get shot a lot in FPS's for example, which if the game mechanics aren't kind means I die and then that means restarting.

Also, I can get annoyed at some of the bizarre attempts at realism. One of my "favourites" is the 'you can only carry two guns' thing. This just seems patently ridiculous to me--it' a game, just give me bigger pockets. I mean, how realistic is it that I can survive a shot-gun blast at point-blank range, and yet oh-no, I can only carry two guns.

I also worry slightly about gaming--I mean, is it a grown up activity or not? I mean, if I still played with toy trucks or Star Wars figures people would think I was werid right? So isn't playing computer games on a par with that? Shouldn't I just read a good book instead?

Anyway, this entry was a bit inspired because I spent most of Sunday gaming. I was playing Company of Heroes, which is an RTS.

I picked this up actually mainly because I understand that Dawn of War 2 will use the CoH game engine and I wanted to check it out.

I can't say I've been wonderfully enamoured. Not that it's a bad game or that it doesn't look gorgeous or play well, it's just I'm not really feeling it. I mean, I don't quite feel connected to it--there's no individual character that I can relate to.

The game uses an entire company of soldiers (Able company) and it's kind hard getting to feel that I have a vested stake in their activities. It's like the classic trick is to have 'hero' characters--leaders or special characters who stand out and give you that feeling, but here there aren't. If one unit gets mown down by machine guns, I just build another.

They also don't do the classic C&C trick of referring to me the player as "Commander" or anything. In fact the briefings are all phrased as "we need to do this stuff" not "you need to do this stuff" even though it's me that's controlling everything.

I just hope they include hero characters in DoW2 - the stuff I've seems to suggest they will.