I've Been Lax (Super-Post)

Tuesday night I fired up my Xbox for the first time in over a month. I've four unplayed titles sitting on my shelf (Mass Effect, Dead Rising, Lost Planet, and Project Sylpheed) and five unfinished titles (Gears of War, Ultimate Alliance, Ninety-Nine Nights (ugh, but I'll still finish the damn thing), The Orange Box, and FlatOut), so it's pretty clear I'm not at a loss for games to play. So what the hell happened; why have I been so lax in my elite video-gaming responsibilities as Xbox player and hardcore, down-and-dirty, laser blade (pyew pyew) yellow journalist? I blame it all on the goddamn PC and those equally god-damned German developers.

Let me tell you a story concerning my gaming misadventures of the last month or so. Take it as a cautionary tale please, of the horrors games can wreak on one's mind, nay; his very existence!



Ok, it might not be all that bad, but it gave me an opportunity to ape some Lovecraft (poorly at that) and stick in a Cthulu picture. Look at that green tentacled bastard. Can you believe thay actually made a plushie of this damn thing? The Elder God is supposed to be the the physical unreality of the apex of human horror; a creature so unspeakably terrifying that humans cannot even perceive his true form lest they go absolutely mad. Now you can cuddle with the bastard?



Pffh.

It's almost as bad as the Companion Cube madness that ran through our hardcore gaming journalistic societies this past fall. I hate you Companion Cube. I reloaded your firey death many a time.

Enough digression, digression is what got me in this state of lax-ness (new word!) anyway. My story begins almost a year ago. I periodically review games for another website (free loot, woohoo!) and during this time Oblivion was still the big thing on the PC and a bunch of clones were starting to pop up (Two Worlds, I'm looking your way). One of these was a game called Gothic 3, third (obviously) in a popular series of German role-playing games. Whatever, I cared not about its origins just that it was sold to me as being as open-ended as Oblivion, but with the interactivity of a game like Fable. My black, Companion-Cube-hating heart did a-flutter at this description. Too good to be true? Nah.

Of course, this is a PC game and they never work right out of the box. This is just how it is. You wait for the damn patch; rules of the game. I knew this. When I tell you Gothic 3, even after two official patches, never worked, I do not lie. I exceeded the minimum specs for this game in all but one category, in which I met them, so I figure in low or medium settings I should be fine; as long as the game has an acceptable framerate, texture quality is secondary. Like the transmission to an old Chevette this thing went stutter-stutter-clunk more times than I can count.



Massive memory leak issues plagued this game and if I hit 5 frames per second in all my fifteen minutes of playing, well, Jesus smiled fondly upon me then. Of course, ever since I came out of the closet as a zealous Satanist, Jesus' smiles have been harder and harder to come by. Fifteen minutes of playing and a week spent tweaking every file or setting I could find in the games code or .ini file and scouring the internet for fixes, and the game just would not work. I was at a loss. My dream game. I could not play my dream game. Of course I blamed Jesus, but now I blame Germany because they made it.

Off and on through last spring and summer I'd try some new official patches and some new tweaks, but nothing worked. I could not play this game. I'd forget about it for whole months and then come back for a week or so, desparately trying to eke some fun out of what is surely my dream game. It was described using two games I liked, how can it be anything else but my favortest!

Three weeks ago: a breakthrough! I had recently upgraded my memory and decided on a whim to re-install Gothic 3 and check for updates. Bad news: The German developer has stopped support of the game, no more patches. The Good news: a community of Gothic players had relased fan-made patches that supposedly fixed the dreaded memory-leak issues. Yay! Satan smiled upon me today indeed!


Hands caked in the sweat and the blood of the unbaptized i hurredly installed the game that had been the bane of my existence, taunting me from afar. I installed the patches and started a new game.

It worked.

Glorious day it worked! I can run through grassy meadows, skirted along gorgeous coastlines, and wandered a virtual world that may even put Oblivion's to shame. On medium settings Icould play at a healthy 40-50 frames per second. Oh how I wept.

Of course, a few days into play I started to realize something. It couldn't be, yet, I couldn't shake the feeling. Gothic 3 is just a sucky game. Combat is clunky and awkward and the game is flat-out boring: littered with fetch quests and redundancy. It sucks. Not a fun game. Appeals to losers. I am the loser here.

It's still installed on my machine, but I'm not playing it. It's really even a waste of time to play. So I took a break from video games. I needed to find myself. Find my center again. This past Tuesday I came back: fired up the Xbox, played some Gears of War. A fun game that works; games can be fun.

I still <3 video games.

Fuck you Gothic 3.