I am a console gamer, through and through. Gaming for me has always involved holding a minute piece of plastic in my hot little mitts and controlling the action on a television set. Rarely, if ever, do I spend time playing games on my PC, to the point where a keyboard not only frustrates me, but intimidates and scares me. Like one of those “Let’s see if he notices!” tests, where the host swaps the victim’s controller with one that has 47 buttons and requires a separate implement to work.
Which isn’t to say that I’ve never played any games on PC. Disregarding frivolous stuff like The Magic Schoolbus Activity Center, I’ve actually spent significant time with a few games for my desktop. My family never owned a computer I felt comfortable with running current games, but I managed to sneak in a few past their initial shelf life.
My first major PC game was Mech Warrior 2, which game with my mom’s Gateway that we bought in 1998. At the time, I kindled a love for a crappy Fox cartoon based on the Battletech franchise (called “Battletech,” because why the hell not), and I was amped up for some fast-paced action against Clan Jade Falcon. Fast. Right. As anyone who spent time with the Mech Warrior franchise can tell you, operating a mech often feels like driving a tank, or at least a fire engine, with nearly every button on the keyboard affecting the machine’s performance. Still, I played deliberately easy scenarios against the AI and had a fun time doing so.
I also picked up the StarCraft Battlechest for twenty dollars at some point, not realizing that I wasn’t too crazy about RTS games but figuring everyone had gone to bat for the game, so I might as well play it—the videogame equivalent of buying Green Day’s “American Idiot.” I am, and continue to be, absolutely awful at RTS games, but I was enamored by StarCraft’s lore and storyline; praise be to the guy who included such detailed backstory in the Prima strategy guides that came with the Chest. Wanted to see how the game progressed but without the need to fiddle-faddle with actually playing the game, I simply broke out an array of cheatcodes and facerolled through every encounter with at least 30 Siege Tanks. Bless those cheatcodes.
The final, and only, game I ever truly cut my teeth on was 2001’s Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. Prompted by Game Informer’s 9.75 review and knowing that Goldeneye taught me that I liked first-person shooters, I purchased MoHAA brand new, expecting a fun, exciting way to exterminate Nazis. I grossly underestimated it, and it’s right now that I’d like to remind readers that before Call of Duty, Jason West and Vince Zampella worked at 2015 for EA, and it’s in this game where we can see the Call of Duty penchant for tense scripted encounters and overwhelming the player. MoHAA is still one of the best shooters I’ve ever played, and I think it positively affected me as a gamer; it showed me how interactive game worlds could be, and their potential to harbor moments as intense as any movie.
Nowadays, though, I don’t feel the urge to fire up my PC for my gaming needs. I bought the previous Humble Indie Bundle, along with a few Steam curios, but I never quite feel comfortable with hopping in front of my computer to play videogames; it’s not the TV, dagnabbit! Call it bias or unfamiliarity, but I don’t identify myself as a PC gamer, and this likely has just as much to do with why I don’t touch PC games as it does my unfit-for-modern-gaming computer system.
There’s also the matter of the keyboard, and how it is resolutely not a controller. It’s not just unlearning where buttons are: it’s a whole different play mentality that happens when using a mouse and keyboard, one I am unused to. There is a wired Xbox 360 controller available on Amazon (and it will make Super Meat Boy waaayyyyy easier), but not all games support controllers, and I have a feeling it will be a while before I shuck my console-gaming sensibilities and take the platform for what it is.
There are a few PC games on the horizon that I do want to play, though. The PC-gaming world is going bananas over World of Warcraft’s new expansion, Mists of Pandaria, which drops today. Being the iconoclastic bugger that I am, I’m planning to try to play Rift during Pandaria’s first week, and I’m doing so for two reasons: 1) I have heard good things about Rift and I want to try to finally experience what it has to offer as a game, and 2) I am an ironic twit. I would also like to experiment with Torchlight II’s demo after hearing the praise heaped on Ruinic’s latest effort in the dungeon-runner genre. I’ve never had much interest in games that rely on pathfinding AI to handle my character (fifteen minutes of LoL solidified these impressions), but I’m willing to try again for the sake of a polished experience. Besides, I purchased and enjoyed the original Torchlight several years ago, and this new one runs on my netbook. Also, there’s that whole Diablo III thing that happened, and I want to play that other big, lauded dungeon-running game because 2).
If I want to review games, I need to at least be reasonably informed about trends across all of gaming, PC included. That doesn’t mean I have to spend all of my time there, but if I know what’s good for me, I’ll make more time for my computer in the near future. Now, let’s install some of these here drivers…
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