(Moving posts over from Blogger to here. This is from Feb 2105.)

Two weeks, five days, twelve hours and a handful of minutes. That figure was the total amount of playing time I clocked up on the Gamecube version of Timesplitters 2. I was confronted with that figure when I thought I would take advantage of a rare day when I got the chance to break out one of the old consoles to try and remind myself of the golden age of my gaming life. Granted the figure is far below what I see people clocking up on DOTA 2 via my Steam account or other such time sinks but was still enough to knock me back into my seat.

I looked through my recent forays into games to see what the modern me had clocked up in comparison. Bungie, in all their worldly wisdom, have a rather in depth collection of data for Destiny which is where I have spent most of my recent digital vacation time so I headed on over to my profile. A discussion of the high and lows of my life within Destiny are large enough to warrant their own article but regardless of that it is unquestionably the game I have played the most in the last 6 months or so and yet when I saw the figures I saw that I had barely scraped into three days of continuous play. I was taken aback. I questioned whether the rather large amount of time waiting in lobbies was being counted but then as I didn’t ever play Timesplitters 2 outside of a same screen local multiplayer it would be just as fair if it isn’t factored in. The strange thing is, I wouldn’t have ever counted Timesplitters 2 as being the most played game I had at the time. I played it quite a lot but looking back I know I ploughed much more of my time into Halo: CE, Metroid Prime and Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker (and probably more) than I did Free Radical’s time traveling FPS. Currently, I feel that all I do is play Destiny. Sure, I dabble a bit in Minecraft when I get the Lego itch and there are a few other games I’ve started to see what they are like but not seen through to completion. This made me really think about what I was doing then to have so much time available to achieve such gaming hours and yet still function as a human being that I don’t seem able to do now.

I should point out that during this period of the 128bit console releases I had not long left university and was in a reasonably interesting full time job. Thankfully I no longer have access to the game files for the systems I had while studying as I fear the hours clocked up while there would give my brain even more problems on how I managed to fit so much controller based entertainment into the week. Although, if I did, I could fully explain the lacklustre mark I got at the end of my university career. On the surface the me at the start of the 21^st Century was not much different to the me of now. If anything, aside from working full time and being in a relationship I would even say that I socialised more then and had the time to play Sunday League Football every week. Yet past-times me was racking up the finished and replayed games at rate which I couldn’t even buy them at now. What happened? Am I just a big gaming flake?

A great deal has happened and not just to me. In particular, the games industry changed enormously. The internet got broader, options got vaster and the entire history of games got bundled up and made available to those who wanted it. All this in little more than 13 years. And despite on the surface feeling no different to the me who was venturing through his twenties, the late thirties me is a catalogue of worries and brain-freezes that seem to be common amongst almost everyone I know of my age. So while I fit into the tail end of the largest game buying demographic and consider myself an ardent gamer I’m clearly doing it wrong. So where am I going wrong?

So I did a little comparison of playing in the 2000s to the present by doing time log of an evening playing Destiny.

It read as follows:

1700 – Powered up 360

1701 – Looked through current Gold member offers

1709 – Wait while unnecessary and probably unaffordable purchase of a game I probably won’t play downloaded.

1715 – Think ‘while this is downloading I shall check on the slow cooker’ even though I have no need to as it is a slow cooker.

1720 – Select Destiny.

1723 – Get through the selection menus to the menu that lets you pick an actual part of the playing part of the game.

1727 – See who else is playing and then wait for them to finish their Crucible match to join up.

1735 – Find out they were about to log off have a chat about the price of DLC and whether it is value for money.

1745 – Go back to the selection screen, decide that I don’t fancy the daily heroic so have a browse around before going back to the character select screen to pick another save game to play. ‘Surely I will have more to do with a lower level player’ I think.

1750 – Start a story mission too high to play with my Level 6 Warlock get two thirds through and then die continuously until I eventually give up.

1805 – Go back to the menu screen and go back to a higher level character.

1808 – Select Crucible match.

1813 – Actually start a crucible match.

1817 – Leave Crucible match to answer the door.

1823 – Make a cup of tea for the visitor who shows an interest in playing Destiny. No local multiplayer means I get to watch them play.

1910 – Visitor leaves and prompting me to shut down 360 to have some dinner and actual real life interaction with my partner.

1940 – Turn 360 back on and reload Destiny.

1943 – Go straight to Crucible selection screen and try to actually start playing.

2010 – Everyone else who resides in the same block of flats as me decides now is the time to use their internet too thus rendering my data speed to a trickle and as a result convert my online game into a strange series of events that mostly involves other players glitching through time and space. Give up on Destiny.

2015 – Start browsing games to look for an alternative thing to play.

2045 – Come to the conclusion that everything I own is either too long, needs someone else or isn’t what I fancy right now.

2046 – Start the browsing again because I can’t believe amongst all those games I can’t find one to play.

2056 – Come to the same conclusion I had ten minutes previously.

2100 – Give up and start watching the news.

Compare this to a time log of me in 2002.

1700 – Turn on Gamecube.

1701 – Start playing Timespitters 2.

0200 – Realise I have to be in work in less than 6 hours and so turn off Timesplitters 2.

I do feel a bit bad using Destiny as the example as it is not the only culprit of this problem but it has been the most recent offender of prolonged menu viewing. This is mainly down to me only ever electing to play it in the vague hope I will one day get an Exotic Hand Cannon, which seemingly has the same likelihood of a positive outcome as buying lottery tickets instead of working to earn money would have. Sure it’s a nice chance to chat with your fireteam members over such interesting topics such as the loot we’ve not yet got, the stress of finding relic iron and why the eff I have still not managed to get any kind exotic bounties yet.

The thing is, it isn’t just the drawn out process of getting to start an online only game that is slowing things up in terms of actual game time consoles and PCs provide so much more other things than they ever did before. Upon turning the machine on we are bombarded by a series of links and adverts for other products we might be interested in. I realise that I am a sucker for this, perhaps a bit more than most, but surely I am not alone in pining for the days when slotting a disc or cartridge into a system almost certainly meant going straight into the game when powering up. I think I have spent more time browsing what I could buy on Steam than using it as a hub to start playing a game.

Maybe I am a bit of a relic now and I need to adjust to a changing marketplace. But it also explains my reluctance to purchase any of the current generation of consoles (or upgrade my PC). Added fidelity and even more space to make games larger than the ones I already found too large to complete anyway just aren’t enough to convince me to make the jump. I use the, “I can’t justify the spending.” line when asked but I haven’t ever really been able to afford any of the consoles I’ve owned but when you really want something you make the effort. I can’t ever say I would want retire as a ‘gamer’ but by not staying up-to-speed with the current platforms I fear I might give off that impression to those that do.

Strangely it is quite apt that it was the Gamecube version of Timesplitters 2 that I used as reference, as in that particular generation of consoles Nintendo’s little purple box was the first I got a hold of (not counting a brief fling with the Dreamcast that went no further than a quick cuddle before Sega neutered it). By the end of that round of console births I had a PS2 and Xbox but always favoured the Nintendo line-up more. Now, having had a Microsoft and Sony themed front room for nearly a whole decade for the first time in all that time I am tempted by a Nintendo home console. The Wii U for all its failings and questionable time of continued support seems to be the only console of the generation that seems to be about playing games and not taking over my entire entertainment setup. That and the fact that Mario Kart 8 plays like a dream and the upcoming Legend of Zelda game looks quite special might push me the closest to buying a new system since 2008.

However, if I decide to work my way through my backlog of games on the 360, PS3 and Steam it could be 2025 before I get around to getting one.