Older and slower, but still gaming

Hard to believe the last time I wrote about gaming was January 15, 2015. But I didn’t feel well enough to play for much of last year, so I guess it shouldn’t be such a surprise.

Back then I went from Destiny to Far Cry 4 to Shadow of Mordor, which I’d gotten for Christmas. As it turned out, I didn’t finish FC4 or Mordor. There was a quest in FC4 that I couldn’t get through and it was part of the main story line, so I couldn’t advance. Hated giving up after having finished FC2 and 3, but there was nothing I could do. I ended up not finishing Mordor either. At some point I realized that I’d made enough mistakes to seriously, permanently handicap myself so I drifted away from it.

Annoyed by my failure with those two games, I tackled Witcher 3. That failed primarily because I simply couldn’t read most of the data on the screen; it was too small. And everything — quests, crafting, health, etc. — was displayed that way. Just too small for my old eyes. Too small for a lot of other people too. The game was eventually patched to make the type larger but by then I’d given up on it.

It wasn’t an entirely lost year, however. I started and finished Dragon Age: Inquisition, the original game and the first DLC (downloadable content, new game content from the publisher).

Then I spent a good part of this last winter playing Fallout 4. I’d played and finished the previous Fallouts, along with most of their DLCs. But Fallout 4 didn’t go so well. After putting in many, many hours of play, I got to a point where I wanted/needed to revert to a previous save. I should have lost less than an hour of progress. Instead, the game threw me back several levels, equivalent to quite a few hours of play. The worst part of that was having to repeat several long quests. When it happened again a few days later, throwing me even farther back than the first time (about 4 levels as I recall), I gave up. I was not going to play through those quests a third time. Maybe, someday, I’ll go back and pick it up again. But it will be a while.

That’s when I went back to Battlefield 4 and Destiny because I can play both of them with my son and/or grandson via Xbox Live. Great fun, although I’m far behind them in both experience and skill. I hope I’m bringing something to the game and that they aren’t just humoring me. At the very least I’m a distraction to the enemy, or cannon fodder as the case may be. I do feel I help in BF4 by flying a MAV (micro air vehicle) and spotting for teammates on the ground. And that way I’m not getting killed all the time (which penalizes our side).

So that’s about it for now. I have several games in hand that I can start any time, and several more that have been released in the last six months that I’d like to get (eg, Far Cry Primal and the latest Tomb Raider).

But the weather’s getting warmer (or will after this week, they say) and unlike last summer, I need to get out, have some fun, and get some exercise.