The Little Things

Just today (at time of writing) I said that I love the 2005 Monolith game, FEAR. It's memorable, action-packed, densely atmospheric, it's great, it's one of gaming's classics. Yet, my hours on Steam amount to 8.6. Compared to the amount of I've played various DOOM, Half Life, and Halo games, that doesn't make sense.

Why don't I play this game more often? Am I lying to myself about how good I think it is? Am I just blending in with the internet's conscientious? No, but I am being dishonest about how much the game's nagging technical issues truly bother me.

Games in 2005 weren't attempting to predict high DPI mice, nor were they thinking Widescreens would be conquering their desks within two years. So whenever I revisit FEAR, I realize immediately, oh, I'll have to tweak the mouse sensitivity, find a widescreen patch, maybe boot up the config.ini and adjust certain values.

I'll boot up its Extraction Point expansion pack, and find everything I did there doesn't seem to apply here, and have to spend multiple minutes online searching for fixes all to play a five hour gore-fest that's supposed to have me turning my brain off with a gun, not turning on my brain with a keyboard.

Meanwhile DOOM, Halo, and Half Life are all games that I launch immediately with minimal adjustments made in menus and absolutely no configuration files required.

And what I've grown to realize is these small things have prevented me from binging games that I'd otherwise massively enjoy.

Steep is one of Ubisoft's better games released in the last few years. It's a gorgeous looking, well controlled, finely tuned Mountain Sports game that is the closest you can get to reliving your SSX memories. I'd spend hours doing a single wingsuit course with friends trying to nail the smoothest, sexiest twenty second runs possible.

Or I would've, if the game didn't have a permanent bug where launching it immediately forces windows to crank your microphone to 100%, blowing out the ear-drums of any friends who tag along with you. It'll even reset in the middle of gameplay sometimes.

I've recently heard of a fix for Rainbow Six Vegas 2's hilarious but annoying bug that results in hearing permanent gunfire at max volume until the next loading screen, and I'm hopeful, because without that bug, I'd revisit the Vegas games with friends far more often to relive those memories of awesome T-Hunt sessions.

These aren't issues that ostensibly ruin the mechanics, pacing, gameplay, visuals, sound, etc... but they're annoying, and sometimes, that's all it takes to avoid.