Post-Apocalyptic Badassery in a Mid-Pandemic Wasteland

Whenever I’ve need to get away from the dark melancholy of a world overrun by a deadly viral pandemic I’ve been retreating to a virtual world overturned by a stark nuclear winter.

My Playstation Plus subscription came coupled with a collection of PS4 games that while they don’t showcase the capabilities of my new top-of-the-line, next-gen gaming system are games I never got around to playing much or at all.

Fallout 4 was on both lists, the list of games I hadn’t played much of and the list of games that came along free with the annual subscription I bought from Sony.

And when I logged in to check my trophies and gaming profile I was a little surprised to see that not only hadn’t I earned many of the achievement that go along with this RPG but also that my time-in-game had passed 30 hours over the last couple weeks. Those two data points didn’t exactly jibe.

Fallout 4 is a role playing game (for those unfamiliar with the franchise.) This means that you start off as a character in the game where character is all that really matters. “Character” doesn’t necessarily mean upstanding character, but rather that the point of the game is to develop and enhance the characteristics of your in-game character to advance through a story and accomplish various tasks and goals.

The main big-picture goal is that of finding you abducted son, who was stolen away under shady circumstances while you were locked in a hibernation chamber waiting out two hundred years of post-nuclear fallout.

The small-picture tasks are generally killing undead radiation creatures while you hunt the wasteland for bigger guns and loot to satiate your endless ammunition needs while you make sketchy friendships with settlers by building them crappy shacks to live in and then filling it with mouldering furniture.

Yes, I’ve actually spent more than 30 hours of my life doing this… during a pandemic. Uplifting, huh?

The trickiest part of the new console though is finding games that balance playability and fun on one side with watcher-enjoyment on the other. The PS5 is hooked up to our main television in a common space where schedules usually converge on three people looking to make use of that screen at the same time.

In other words, if I want to play a game (even though it’s the television I bought — welcome to fatherhood!) I get less pushback if its a game that’s entertaining to watch as a spectator.

I’m not one hundred percent sure Fallout 4 is that game but as I progress deeper and deeper I’m finding myself reading up on the lore and in-game plot threads so that I can narrate the backstory to what’s happening to anyone else in the room who finds themselves stuck watching me V.A.T.S. a raider with my nuclear powered shotgun for the two-thousandth time.

Getting trenched in on an RPG is the point of an RPG. Finding immersion in the story, and seeking to drive the plot forward through the progressive adversity of increasingly more difficult is what game makers aim for, I think. I enjoy RPGs because throughout my life, every couple of years, I find myself entrenched in one and loving the time I invest in it.

Some that stand out in my memory are Ultima VII, Final Fantasy VII & IX, Chrono Cross, Skyrim & Breath of the Wild. I’m getting to a point where I could easily see myself adding Fallout 4 to that list… even as it brings a different level of twisted gloom to an already gloomy era.

Avoiding the Cold in a Virtual Snow-scape

I have started to realize I’m not a normal gamer. Whatever normal is anyhow.

Here’s the thing.

First, I bought a brand new PS5 (luck of the restock lottery!) and though I’ve had it for about a week, I’ve used it almost exclusively for PS4 games so far.

Then, I bought a PlayStation Plus subscription which came with a few great monthly free-to-play games, and a large collection of classic PS4 titles. Instead the game I’ve been playing the most was a title I bought on the side called Steep.

Not to mention that it’s been 20 degrees below zero outside all weekend and I’m inside on the couch playing a video game about winter sports.

Not normal.

I’ve logged roughly ten hours on Steep over the last week.

Snowboarding games and I have a long history. When I bought my original PlayStation in the ’90s, I added in two games to take home with me that day: Crash Bandicoot and Cool Boarders 2.

After picking up a PS2 half a decade later, I quickly added SSX3 to my game collection and then upgraded that with a PS3 and SSX a few years later. (Don’t ask me about the game numbering conventions here!)

It was only fitting, I suppose, that the first game I have really dug into on the PS5 (or my overkill PS4 if you’re a console purist) turned out to be a winter sports title.

The game is beautiful.

I slink through reviews and discussion boards online and the loudest, most caps-locked voices seem to be yelling and screaming about resolutions and framerates and OMG how dare this game NOT be 120 FPS in 8K, I WANT my MONEYZ baCK!!

Old gamer alert: I’m still sitting here with my HD screen, so… 1080p … I think. And if you told me it was 60fps I’d probably … dunno … shrug?

Having gone through the eras, remembering when my little teenage mind was gobsmacked blown away at Super Mario Land on my friend’s Gameboy (I mean, I went home and tried to literally draw a picture of how amazing it was for my little brother to comprehend how cool Mario… in your HANDS could be!) … I digress. I think my point was just that I’m easily impressed. And blah blah something about gameplay and fun and enjoying myself as I slide endlessly down a beautiful mountain in the virtual snow.

The old virtual snowboarding legs returned pretty quick. The folks who developed this title must have played some of the same classics that I had over the years. It took me merely half an hour before I was flipping and sliding and jumping and barely even crashing at all through the powder. I also quickly learned about the joys of ragdoll physics.

Of course there are a million new features that I’ve barely dabbled in.

I mean, I put a classy grunge outfit on my dude.

I tried a bunch of the other sports, like gliding … and jet crashing your head into a cliff something or another sport.

I unlocked a sled, yes a toboggan on a ski hill, and spent a whole evening telling my wife the same bad joke about bringing a sled on our next ski trip. (She said no, BTW.)

And I’ve ignored a whole bunch of multiplayer online people who seem to want to “group together” for some reason I can’t fathom in a sport where I can neither keep track of where I am virtually, and tend to lose people (sometimes deliberately) on the real mountain when I do this kind of thing in real life.

So it goes that as I wrap up my first week with this new PS5 console, I’ve been hiding away from the crazy-cold temperatures on the other side of the window. I’m avoiding the winter (avoiding the pandemic, avoiding the fact I can’t see anyone in real life, avoiding the lack of travel and fun and other winter joys of a normal year) by enjoying a virtual winter scape.

Chilling, as we used to say. See what I did there?

Jumping the Sharks with Maneater

It figures. The first next generation console game that would spark my interest and capture an hour or so of my precious free time would be a gore-filled fish-based role playing game about a killer shark.

Yesterday morning a large brown cardboard box landed on my doorstep. When I slit the tape and pulled the slightly smaller white box from inside, extracted the even slightly smaller and whiter box from inside that … then unpacked the contents of four or five significantly smaller white-ish boxes from inside of that … the tangle of cables and electronics left behind on my media shelf perfectly resembled the Sony PlayStation 5 gaming console that I’d seen online.

This was ideal… because a PS5 is exactly what I had paid a lot of money for just late last week.

Rewind. The story of my finally deciding to buy a PS4 about eighteen months ago (then not actually buying one when I saw the release announcement for the PS5) and the long-wait, ultimately leading to me receiving a box with the hard-to-find console on my doorstep yesterday is a long, boring, and whatever story. In fact, that was pretty much the whole thing. Yet, there a PS5 now sits. Having skipped an entire generation of console game systems, I find myself with a vast collection of new-to-me titles at my fingertips, and expectations more closely aligned with older systems.

Also, I opted to pick up a Plus subscription because (a) they were still on sale, (b) I think I’d like to try some multiplayer online, and (c) it comes with a boatload of free, eclectic and/or older games (that, again, are all new-to-me).

…including this one (first) game that I downloaded last night called Maneater.

The game cinematic starts off as if you are about to be thrown into the deep end of a video game version of Deadliest Catch with flashy introductions of the harpoon-lugging guys driving a shark-hunting boat as they trek out towards open water to take on a villainous aquatic predator…

…you will explore a large and varied open world encountering diverse enemies – both human and wildlife.

store.playstation.com

But wait!

You are the shark. You kick off your adventure by breaking through some basic control orientation, and then out into an open harbour. That’s when the fight begins. One of your first challenges is to brutally attack a happy little beach full of swimmers then defend against the angry shark hunters that (surprise!) want to hunt you down for doing just that and…

Maneater is a single player, open world action RPG (ShaRkPG) where YOU are the shark.

store.playstation.com

But wait!

Boom: you’re actually dead. Channelling some serious Moby Dick vibes, the angry Deadliest Catch captain cuts a baby shark from your limp belly, maims it for spite, then curses its name as it bites off his arm and swims away and…

But wait!

You are now the baby shark, and role playing game adventure ensues as you navigate through a swamp on a quest of…

Starting as a small shark pup you are tasked with surviving the harsh world while eating your way up the ecosystem.

store.playstation.com

So. I haven’t played much further than that.

I just downloaded this last night, remember?

As much as I have sudden access to a small library of new games, clever and quirky titles often entice me the most. See, I’ve played as many zombie shooters as I ever need to in my life. Platformers are stuffed with nostalgia, but I’ll always compare back to my childhood full of Mario games. And I’ve already queued up a snowboarding classic called Steep for some zen, downhill action, and I’m looking forward to spending some time with it on the PS5, but those kind of games just make me look longingly out the window at the real snow.

Call me a sucker for novelty, but I’m looking forward to some more shark adventures later tonight.