Part three of “Getting Older Sucks”

What do most people do in their free time? Watch TV? Talk to friends? Cook? Clean? Play video games? For me, I used to play video games a lot in my spare time. I would find the newest sports title and just play it until I could win every game by calling the same play. Or I would get a new platform game, and obsessively play it through once til I beat it and found most of the hidden goodies.

Nowadays…they’re just not that important to me.

In the interest of disclosure, my personal life has been a bit in shambles lately, and that old trustworthy friend of Playstation just isn’t cutting it.  I’ve tried to find a bunch of things to pass the time lately, but when I turn on that old football game, it just seems like I’m past it. Over this time, I’ve come to the realization that for me, the only two ways I’ll play video games are as such:

1. With a Friend or in a group. This is the best way really. A co-op game is great because people can get together, work together, and achieve a goal (even if that goal is pointless…it’s still a goal). Group games are great too, like Wii sports with a couple of people is still a blast, and dusting off the old Rock Band is great for that too. Anything that gets people together and having fun is the way to go for me.
2. The game has to have a story that is of movie quality. There are very few games that come out like this that grab my attention. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword was a recent one that did that, but the ones that really got me, and are about to get me again are the Mass Effect games.

Mass Effect 3 comes out on March 6^th. It’s been a couple of long years waiting for the conclusion to this series, and it’s probably one of the last games I’m ever going to be excited for. Jason has covered Mass Effect before, but I feel like I have to have a go at it as well.

The game has that movie quality story that desire, along with intriguing enough gameplay to keep me coming back for more. Following Commander Shepard on his fight against the Reapers had me hooked from the moment I started playing. But the thing about this game that really has me jazzed up is the continuation of MY story.

The Mass Effect series, like many others, is a series that allows you to make your own choices, and therefore the game has multiple endings based on how you played. The difficulty that came from previous series was properly carrying those choices over into a next game. Some games tried it with a few lines of dialogue in the new game and others tried to just ignore it completely to create a new game loosely based on the last one. Mass Effect was the first one that properly saved all the important events, and then took that right into the next game. And now Mass Effect 3 will combine all the choices I’ve made in 1 and 2 to truly immerse me in gameplay.

When I say that this is the last video game that I’m truly excited for, I mean that. I feel like video games are fun, but as I get older I find that I’d much rather go to the gym, play in a kickball league, or fix my leaky toilet (eh…maybe not that one) rather than sit at home and play a video game alone. Thank you for all the entertainment you’ve given me over the years, video games. We’ve had a great run together, let’s have one last big fling before we go off on our own separate ways.