Around mid-October of last year, I stopped playing games regularly. Of course there have been times over the years when my playing habits have risen and declined, but never to this degree. For a long period of time, I found difficulty in sitting down with a game for more than 15 minutes. I tried new games, went back to old ones that I loved, all with very minimal success. I would still play games with friends occasionally, but until late December, I had other hobbies. Throughout this gaming dry-period for me, I wrote even more, and listened to music in all of my free-time. For a while I thought I had simply grown out of games, but this couldn’t have been further from the truth. The game that got me back into the hobby is irrelevant, as I’ve now realized what exactly held me back from games for so long.

From what I can tell, playing games takes a hell of a lot of patience, something I didn’t possess, or didn’t realize I needed for a long period of time. After forcing myself to spend an hour or two with a new game, I started to learn the mechanics; and gradually became more invested until I couldn’t tear myself away. After this I began to play other games for longer periods of time, and reached roughly where I was before. I’m now hopelessly obsessed with what may be one of the most promising and varied forms of entertainment ever. If you’ve ever had the same issue as me, perhaps some of this will help to get you back into gaming. You may not even want to get back into it, which is fine too; but I can say with certainty that I’m glad the medium sucked me back in.

In the process of getting back into games though, I started to recognize some of my preferences. My love of gameplay and relative indifference with narrative was detailed in a previous post, which was an important step. This year was an extremely disappointing one for me in terms of new releases, but there’s no reason 2015 can’t buck the trend of broken or uninspired releases that peppered the market in 2014. Atmosphere is also very important to me, one of the reasons PT was my favorite game (demo?) of this year, and why I’m currently on my fourth playthrough of Fallout 3. Here’s hoping next year will deliver on these elements, and finally prove why the new consoles are worth buying.

I love games, and I expect to love them for years to come, but sometimes I have to look to the past to find valuable experiences. As I’ve started to do more and more gaming on my laptop, I’ve become increasingly interested in older PC titles. I’ve loved classic shooters like Shadow Warrior, Duke Nukem 3D and Doom, but I’d also like to branch off into other genres. I’ve tried and failed to get into CRPG’s like Baldur’s Gate multiple times, but if there are any, more accessible PC games you could reccomend, don’t hesitate to do so! I recently got into X-COM: UFO Defense, which has proved both brutal and rewarding, with the former occasionally overshadowing the latter. My biggest problem with the game so far has been figuring out what I do and don’t need to research and manufacture in the Geoscape. I feel confident in saying I’ve got a loose grasp of the turn-based ground battles, but figuring when and what to buy in the Geoscape has been tough. If anyone has any suggestions, or helpful guides to refer me to, it would be greatly appreciated!

I’ve also been playing a bit of Alpha Centauri, and I expect I’ll put up a post about that in the near future. In any case, what older PC games do you remember fondly, and think would be easy to get into?