I have to admit I’ve never been a fan of online gaming. I got pretty good playing split screen Modern Warfare 2 with my mate Graham, but I never made it online due to appalling internet. I’ve now moved house much further into the wilderness, but have surprisingly got a decent internet connection. I decided to try online gaming.
I started with FIFA 15, hoping my years wasted in front of the TV playing football games might stand me in good shape for playing online. I was horribly wrong. Although I matched people for skill I found every time I closed in for a win the other person disconnected. After about 4 goes of either losing or having the game ended early I decided to pack it in. On to the next.
Skyrim was my favourite PS3 game, so I grabbed the Elder Scrolls online to see if that would satisfy my online thirst. It didn’t. Forty minutes of wandering around a village entirely populated with characters just like mine almost drove me insane. I went to find a mission character, and when I got there twenty other players were stood around getting exactly the same mission! I felt claustrophobic in my own living room. It sold on Ebay for eight pounds.
I made a schoolboy error next time I ventured online. I decided to play a game that I’d never actually played before, but went online immediately. It was the most soul destroying experience of my life. I flushed two good hours away on COD World at War, walking directly into the fire of various snotty nosed kids from other countries. After one game I got a message that read ‘u so bad, u should sale ur Ps4’. I wittily made reference to the appalling grammar and how he should perhaps study more, to which he replied he was from Germany and aged 14. I took the game out of the PS4 and gave it to my Dad as a gift. I don’t want to be mugged off by foreign teenagers in my own home.
I would have given up there, but unfortunately EA chose to release Star Wars Battlefront without a tangible single player mode. The entire focus of the game is it’s massive online battles. I avoided it as I’d be burned all too often online. I immersed myself in Fall Out 4, a game blissfully devoid of any online version. I rule at Fall Out 4 and thankfully I won’t ever have some school kid prove otherwise and mock me afterwards.
However the lure of blasters and light sabres wouldn’t go away, and after watching the film last weekend I gave in and invested in a copy of the game. I tentatively placed my toe in the waters of online gaming once more. After the first few games I’ll be frank, I was pretty hacked off. I kept getting killed and everyone had better weapons than me. It was COD all over again, but without the mocking kids.
Seeing as the only person who could really witness my abject misery was myself I decided to persevere. The lure of playing a few minutes as Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker was enough to put aside the many times I got mercilessly and repeatedly murdered as an everyday Stormtrooper. After my fourth or fifth go I found myself in delight as I crept up on a battle in a little valley. I had a blast grenade and both Luke and Han were there for the taking. I launched my grenade and bagged two heroes in one go as a Stormtrooper. When the game finished I was ranked the best player on our team.
My abject misery went and I was filled with pride at having killed my two favourite characters from my entire childhood with a poxy grenade. I was happy because they weren’t just two characters on a game, they were two snotty nosed kids sat in their bedroom not thinking a 37 year old man was sticking the middle finger up to them. I was doing the same from the top of the leader board. Three game later I was third from bottom but it didn’t matter. I’d been there. I’d tasted the victory and it was as sweet as candy.
I was happy because perhaps at last I can start to enjoy online gaming.