Adventures in Linux Gaming

Last month I wrote about Playnite and GOG Galaxy 2.0. What I forgot to mention is that, for me personally, the major downside of each is the lack of Linux support.

I've been using Windows 7 for a long time. I didn't like the look of Windows 8 when it came out, and never saw the point in switching. Having used Windows 10 at work, I definitely have no interest in using it on my home PC, regardless of all the spying it supposedly does. I just don't enjoy using it. I suppose I don't particularly enjoy using Windows 7 either; I've had my share of problems with it. It just happens to be the best version of Windows which is still officially supported. Unfortunately, with that support ending at the start of next year, I would be forced to "upgrade" to a worse version of Windows if I want to continue to get security updates.

Do I really need security updates? I don't know. Is Windows 10 really worse or am I just biased? I guess it's a little of both. Ultimately, though, it probably doesn't matter. I've been somewhat unhappy with Windows in general, and... well, Linux is free.

Switching to Linux, and Why You Should, Maybe

Switching to Linux is seen by some as a daunting task, and perhaps there's good reason for those with no experience with Linux to be just a bit intimidated. To those terrified Linux beginners, I would recommend a user-friendly distribution like Linux Mint. That's what I'm using, despite several years of experience with Linux as a software engineer. It's just incredibly convenient. The Cinnamon desktop environment is fairly Windows-like, and Linux Mint comes with nearly all the features you need in order to avoid ever touching the command line if you don't want to. The installer is also very easy to use. Some casual PC users might not know what all of the options mean, but for those users, I think the defaults are probably fine.

Of course, no matter how automated the installer and how fully-featured the desktop environment, every Linux user will inevitably run into some kind of problem. The very same is true on Windows; the difference is that, when you search the internet for a solution to a problem on Windows, you'll almost certainly find a solution posted by someone who uses the same version of Windows. There are many Linux distributions, though; if you're not using one of the popular ones, you might find solutions which aren't quite what you need, or you might not even find any reliable documentation of the exact problem you're experiencing.

When I turn to the internet for help with installing something or fixing some error on Linux, the solutions I find are usually tailored to Ubuntu, which is fine because Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, but it's not always the case. Sometimes the answers I find are all about Debian or Fedora. Sometimes it doesn't matter. Other times it does. I'm not saying that troubleshooting on Linux is a nightmare. These days, it really isn't. However, the fact that there isn't just one Linux comes with some inherent problems, such as this one, and troubleshooting does require a bit more patience.

But the fact that there are so many distributions means that, if you hit a roadblock and absolutely nothing works, you could always just try a different distribution.

How I Ended Up with Linux Mint

When I first decided to install Linux on my home computer, I tried Ubuntu. The installation process was mostly easy. I had some difficulty setting up dual-boot with Windows 7, but it wasn't Ubuntu's fault. It was because, while attempting to install Ubuntu from a USB stick, and I had inadvertently booted to my USB stick in UEFI mode while my Windows installation was using legacy BIOS. If you don't know what that means, don't feel bad; neither did I.

The short version of this story is that, when I booted my USB stick in legacy BIOS mode, the installation and dual-boot set-up went smoothly. However, I found Ubuntu's default desktop environment difficult to customize and annoying to use in general. Even after a bit of research, I couldn't figure out if my problems were the result of bugs or just obtuse design. Ultimately, for this reason and others, I decided that Ubuntu just wasn't for me.

That's when I tried installing Debian. The installation process seemed to work perfectly. Then I tried to boot to Debian, and nothing happened. I got a black screen. I did some research but there was really no way for me to try any of the solutions proposed to others who had similar problems, because I didn't even have a working terminal. I couldn't enter any commands. I assume that it was a video driver issue, and I could have attempted to fix it, but I decided that it wasn't worth my time. I had heard good things about Linux Mint, and I hadn't tried it yet, so I dropped Debian like a hot turd and started downloading Linux Mint.

That turned out to be the right decision; Linux Mint was easy to install, it booted up just fine, and to this day I've had no significant problems with it... except when trying to run games that were never meant to run on Linux.

Gaming On Linux

It always takes me a while to get to the point.

Linux Mint is great as a general-use desktop operating system. It comes with Firefox, LibreOffice, a media player, etc. But how is it for playing video games? Well, I'd say it's just as good for games as any other Linux distribution, and gaming on Linux today is better than ever, thanks in part to Steam.

Steam Play and Proton

A Linux version of the Steam client has been available since 2013, allowing Steam users to play any games which happened to have official Linux versions. It was only about a year ago, however, that Steam rolled out an update to the cross-platform Steam Play feature, allowing Windows games to be installed using the Linux client and providing a Wine-based compatibility tool called Proton which allows many of those games to run on Linux with very little effort from the user.

Installing Steam on Linux Mint doesn't require any command line usage, nor does it even require a web browser. You just open the Software Manager, search for Steam, select the first result, and click the install button. Meanwhile, enabling Steam Play for all games is just a matter of checking a box in the Steam settings menu. If I remember correctly, this option is disabled by default, and initially Steam Play is enabled only for officially supported games, which is no surprise; it's sensible for anything that isn't guaranteed to work to be disabled by default. But the option isn't hard to find, and often no effort is required to get games to work even if they're not officially supported.

ProtonDB tracks how well Steam games work with Proton by aggregating user-submitted reports. Games without native Linux support are rated on a scale of Borked (meaning it won't run at all) to Platinum (meaning it runs perfectly out-of-the-box), with three ratings (Bronze, Silver, and Gold) in between. I'll let the statistics on ProtonDB speak for themselves, but they appear to indicate that the majority of games are playable.

My own personal experience with running Steam games on Linux has been better than expected. Of course, I've been using ProtonDB as a resource since the beginning, and I haven't bothered to install games which are definitively rated Borked. In general, I've gravitated more toward the games with higher ratings. Therefore, I can't claim that the games I've tried playing on Linux via Proton, of which there are about a dozen, are a random sample. However, even when I've tried to play games rated Bronze or Silver, I've been mostly successful, as I've found solutions in ProtonDB's comments to some of the minor problems I've encountered. And the only game rated Borked which I've really gotten the urge to play since installing Linux Mint is L.A. Noire, and for such games, I still have Windows 7 installed on my other hard drive.

I won't describe my experience with every game in detail, but the first Windows-only game I played on Linux Mint was Max Payne, and... frankly, it just worked. It worked perfectly, actually. The only difficulty I had was not with the game itself but rather with the unofficial widescreen patch, and it was only a momentary setback. The comments on ProtonDB quickly set me straight; I added WINEDLLOVERRIDES="d3d8=n,b" %command% to the game's launch options in Steam and even the widescreen patch worked perfectly.

Similarly, Max Payne 2 works perfectly in Linux, and getting the unofficial widescreen patch to work simply requires adding WINEDLLOVERRIDES="d3d9=n,b" %command% to the game's launch options. Playing Max Payne 3 was a bit more difficult; initially, it wouldn't launch. Following the advice of comments on ProtonDB, I added PROTON_USE_WINED3D11=1 %command% to the game's launch options, and it worked, but with some bugs. The minor issues with Max Payne 3 which remain can probably be fixed, perhaps by trying one of the other Proton versions offered by Steam or by further modifying the runtime configuration, but I had only installed it for testing purposes anyway. I was really more interested in playing the first two games in the series, so I didn't spend much time troubleshooting the third.

Non-Steam Games and Wine

Despite needing the occasional web search to find the correct configuration with which to run a certain game, Steam Play with Proton is actually so convenient it's easier than ever for me to ignore the games I bought from other online stores such as GOG. While there are games on GOG with official Linux support, the GOG Galaxy client does not have a Linux version (despite a lot of GOG users wanting one). Downloading games directly from the GOG web site isn't hard, but clients such as Steam and Galaxy do offer a lot of convenience.

Furthermore, although I could probably use Wine or other tools to play many of the Windows-only games from my GOG account on Linux, it would require more effort than running Windows games via Steam, which very often just works automatically. I did install Wine with the intention of playing non-Steam Windows games, but I just haven't used it yet, because Proton — when it works, which it usually does — is just so effortless. If I'm trying to decide what to play, and I've narrowed down my choices to one GOG game and one Steam game, I'm likely to pick whichever is easiest to run on Linux, and that's going to be the Steam game nine times out of ten.

That might change a bit when I get around to trying Lutris, a game client not associated with any particular store, which also claims to reduce installation of many Windows games on Linux to a zero-effort, one click process. It looks like a promising solution for playing some of my GOG games on Linux. For what it's worth, though, installing Lutris is one extra step. I'm going to have to be a jerk and say that Steam still makes it easier by having Proton integration built in to its own client. So many of my games were already working on Linux as soon as I installed Steam that I haven't taken the time to use much of anything else.

So I don't have much to say about running Windows games with Wine, via Lutris or otherwise. I plan on experimenting with it eventually, and once I've done so, I'll probably write a sequel to this post. Right now, though, I'm looking at a huge Steam library and a high success rate with using Proton with very little tweaking, so I probably won't be straying away from Steam very often, except for the sake of experimentation. When I just want to play a game, Proton is often the best way to make it happen.

The Classics

There is one category of games for which I've already strayed outside the Steam bubble: Old-school shooters. I've got to have them.

The Steam versions of The Ultimate DOOM, DOOM II: Hell on Earth, Final DOOM, Heretic, HeXen: Beyond Heretic, and HeXen: Deathkings of the Dark Citadel all run in Proton. They were all, in fact, officially tested by Valve with specific versions of Proton, so that they show up in my Steam library with labels like "Proton [version number] selected by Valve testing" and will run with the indicated Proton version instead of the default I selected in the global Steam settings.

I find this rather amusing because the Steam versions of these games run through DOSBox which, if I'm not mistaken, has a Linux version. However, I'm not suprised that the game's publisher, id Software, hasn't made the effort to repackage these old games with the Linux version of DOSBox for an official Linux release on Steam, especially given that most users who are computer-savvy enough to use Linux will just take the game files downloaded via Steam and run them in a source port instead of DOSBox anyway.

That's what I did with all of these games, immediately after installing them. There's a Linux version of GZDoom, which isn't a suitable source port for anyone who wants the games to run exactly as they did in the '90s, but it's good enough for me. Like any sane person, I did disable major gameplay options which were not in the original games (such as vertical freelook in the DOOM games, jumping in DOOM and Heretic, and ridiculous stuff like crouching), but the graphical upgrades don't bother me.

Getting GZDoom to launch with the correct options for each game was a bit of a hassle, but no more than it was on Windows. The only real problem is that GZDoom, on my system, encounters some kind of error when I close it, which might have something to do with the fact that it doesn't seem to save changes to the gzdoom.ini file unless I enter the writeini console command while running GZDoom. Knowing the workaround, I'm not really bothered by it.

Satisfied with the DOOM and Heretic/HeXen games, I moved on to Wolfenstein 3D and its expansion Spear of Destiny, and installed the source port ECWolf. To my surprise, it seems to work perfectly despite being, in my estimation, less widely used than GZDoom. So then I moved on to the Marathon trilogy, available as freeware since 2005, and attempted to install the source port, Aleph One. That, unfortunately, could have gone more smoothly.

Not Everything is User-Friendly

The official Aleph One web site has some pretty basic instructions for installing the Linux version: Unpack the .tar.bz2 file and, in the unpacked directory, run ./configure && make && make install. Unpacking the file was easy, but I started having problems as soon as I ran the configure command. I won't bother going into all of the messy details, but I went through several iterations of trying the installation, which would fail due to missing dependencies, and then installing those dependencies.

Synaptic Package Manager, included in Linux Mint, makes finding and installing missing packages about as easy as it can be; doing it on the command line using apt or apt-get isn't very hard either. But I had never needed to hunt down dependencies like this. When installing software through Linux Mint's Software Manager, or even when installing a program using apt install, all dependencies are installed automatically (which I now regard as a miracle). Installing software manually, however, isn't quite so easy. Perhaps I was to blame for not knowing what all of the dependencies were beforehand, but it was getting frustrating.

When I finally got Aleph One installed, I was able to launch Marathon, but it printed some errors to the screen and there was no HUD. Searching the internet for a solution, it turned out I was still missing some "optional" dependencies, and installing those made things worse; my next attempt at installing Aleph One failed outright, seemingly due to a dependency which I had already installed.

That's when a comment on the Aleph One GitHub repository, posted only eight minutes before I saw it, clued me in to the fact that I had gone down the wrong rabbit hole. The easier and more reliable way to install Aleph One is to clone the Git repo, go into the root level folder, and run ./autogen.sh followed by make and make install. I had to install git (which I've used extensively but not at home) and I was still missing a couple of dependencies required by the autogen.sh script, but it told me exactly what the dependencies were, so installing them was just a matter of running the correct sudo apt install command.

So I've got Marathon and its sequels working on Linux now, but installing Aleph One took more than an hour after all was said and done. I've learned a lot, though, and ultimately the solution to every problem was revealed with a simple internet search. This story could scare people away from trying to play games on Linux, but it's important to keep in mind that I had this much trouble only because I was trying to play a 25-year-old game. Doing that on Windows isn't always easy either.

I still haven't installed the classic Quake games, and I think those are next. I can only hope installing their source ports will be a bit easier.

Conclusion

I guess the moral of this story is that installing and running games on Linux can take a bit of patience, but I only came close to running out of patience when I tried to do things that only an old-school game enthusiast determined to use Linux at all costs would ever try to do. With Steam, many of the games that work on Linux will "just work" and, for non-Steam games, I'm told that Wine isn't very hard to use either. However, I do know just enough about Wine to know that it requires some effort. The average consumer expects things to work with a single mouse click. They want one-click install and one-click launch of every game.

For games with native Linux support, you can have that. For the rest, Steam comes pretty close to providing that level of convenience. Until other stores like GOG implement some kind of compatibility layer like Proton into their own clients, Steam will dominate Linux gaming for the same reason that Windows dominates gaming in general: It's just easier.

On Killing Thousands of Robots

For the past few months, during my unintended (laziness-induced) hiatus from updating this blog, I've been playing a few different games. I spent some time on Planetside 2, which is fun with friends but isn't something I would ever play without them. I also tried and failed a few more times to make further progress in The Binding of Isaac, whose randomly generated dungeons and mostly unexplained item system are a great source of replayability despite all the frustration that inevitably comes with such a strongly luck-based game.

More importantly, however, I've wasted far too much time playing a game called Hard Reset and also I've fallen back in love/hate with another time-sucker called Ultratron. I didn't expect much, since I didn't pay much — Hard Reset came as part of a $4 bundle from Bundle Stars, and Ultratron came in a $1+ bundle from Humble Bundle — but I've played almost 50 hours of the former and nearly 40 hours of the latter, so I probably got my money's worth.

Hard Reset is a gorgeous first-person shooter with some interesting weapon design, a minimalist heads-up display, and a heavy emphasis on using environmental hazards to destroy the seemingly endless waves of mechanical bad guys. The game was developed by some of the same people who made Painkiller and, like its occult-themed cousin, Hard Reset is often described as an "old-school" shooter — a throwback to the days of Doom and Quake. To some extent, this is accurate. Unlike so many modern video games, this one doesn't try very hard to be a movie. It's not filled with excessive dialogue and exploding set pieces and scripted action sequences. It's non-stop running and gunning all the way through. It's all about challenging the player. It's a real game. It does attempt to tell a story — perhaps it even tries a little too hard — but, just as in Painkiller, it's not a very good story and it should probably be ignored anyway.

Most of the exposition takes place during loading screen cut scenes, drawn and badly animated in the style of a comic book. When you get to one of these loading screens, I suggest that you go and make a sandwich or something. The plot hardly makes any sense, the acting and writing are both profoundly awful, and the protagonist (made immediately ridiculous by a hilariously typical video-game-action-hero voice) was apparently designed by some 12-year-old kid who thinks the unnecessary use of profanity is just the coolest thing ever conceived. For all intents and purposes, Hard Reset doesn't have a plot. It's far more story-driven than Painkiller, but even if you manage to decipher what's going on, you're not going to care in the end.

Where Hard Reset really strays from its old-school shooter roots is in the adoption of some modern gameplay mechanics. If you'll allow one more comparison to Painkiller, I'd like to point out that its demon-slaying protagonist could run circles around almost any enemy... or, more accurately, he could jump circles around any enemy. While running speed was rather slow in Painkiller, the player could accumulate a lot of extra speed by repeatedly jumping. Although this trick was not explained in any tutorial, it was crucial. This high mobility was a staple of Painkiller gameplay, and provided an advantage over the enormous hordes of enemies that would otherwise surround the player. Hard Reset, on the other hand, has painfully slow running speed and no "bunny hopping" ability. Instead, you just get a sprint button which allows a modest boost in speed for only a couple of seconds.

The limited sprinting ability does manage to be useful, but only marginally so. I must stress that "a couple of seconds" is no exaggeration. The protagonist runs out of breath faster than a morbidly obese pack-a-day smoker with one leg. The result is a game that feels maddeningly sluggish to fans of the same fast-paced old-school shooters to which games like Hard Reset and Painkiller draw so many comparisons. The problem is exacerbated by certain enemies whose attacks often seem unavoidable and — I'm convinced — sometimes are. Running at the speed of a tortoise, armed with only two seconds of slightly-faster-than-tortoise sprinting, can be extremely frustrating when you're being bombarded with missiles and you can't think of a way to output enough damage to kill the enemy before his carpet bombing attack kills you.

Even switching to the right gun can be a bit of a chore — a waste of time when there's no time to waste — thanks to the game's interesting but gimmicky weapon system. Most of the first-person shooters of my childhood days would allow the player to carry a totally unrealistic number of weapons (usually the game's entire arsenal) at once for the sake of fun. On the other hand, most  modern shooters limit the player's holding capacity (usually to two or three guns) either for the sake of realism, or for ease of access when using a console gamepad instead of a full keyboard, or for the increased challenge that might be faced by the player when he or she is forced to drop a useful rocket launcher in order to pick up a needed sniper rifle. The weapon system in Hard Reset almost seems like a parody of these modern trends in that, technically, only two guns exist in the entire game.

The player is immediately given an assault rifle and a plasma rifle. The gimmick is that each of these guns can be upgraded with up to four additional weapon modes, and most of these weapon modes have both a primary and a secondary function. So you'll get your shotgun, your grenade launcher, your rocket launcher, your lightning gun, and your big laser canon. You'll even be able to hold them all at once. Unfortunately, all of those functions will be crammed into two weapons, which means you often have to switch to the correct gun and then to the correct firing mode instead of just going directly to the weapon you want. This can be a problem when you need to pull the right weapon quickly, especially since the timely use of stunning weapons on fast enemies is all that compensates for the protagonist's lack of speed.

Despite these issues, Hard Reset is pretty decent. You'll need to adapt to the unusual weapon system, and you'll need to get over the fact that the main character can't run twenty feet without taking a breather, and you'll need to pretend the laughable plot doesn't exist... but none of these are reasons not to play. If there's a reason not to play, it's a lack of patience and an unwillingness to lose a lot before winning. Hard Reset is a rarity in modern times — a truly punishing game whose higher difficulty levels will be deemed impossible by many players.

As for me, it seems I'm a masochist. After starting at the easiest difficulty setting, I decided to work my way up to the hardest. Normal mode all right, Hard mode was frustrating, and Insane mode nearly caused me to smash my computer on numerous occasions. At this level, the game becomes a nightmare. The toughest enemies are bullet sponges, practically unavoidable projectile attacks can kill you in seconds, and you're forced to adopt strategies that weren't necessary before. The use of immobilizing weapons, like stasis grenades and EMP bursts, becomes an absolute necessity, and players who fail to utilize environmental hazards like explosive red barrels will find it difficult to overcome the cruel mathematical problem of dealing enough damage to the enemies before inevitably being shredded to pieces. The infinite waves of little enemies that harass you during boss fights are suddenly a real threat, and they'll kill you as often as the bosses themselves do. Splash damage from explosive weapons will kill you even when you think you're behind cover. When playing the higher difficulty modes, you will die a lot, even if it's not your fault. The game isn't fair.

But I beat it anyway. I kept trying even when I thought it was impossible. I responded to the game's unfair tactics with some unfair tactics of my own. I had an all-out battle of patience and reflexes and wits against a computer and won.

The only problem is that Insane mode isn't actually the highest difficulty. There's one more, called Heroic mode. It's even harder. Worse yet, mid-level checkpoints are removed. You have to beat entire levels without screwing up at all, and the levels are long. Throughout most of Insane mode, I died at least once or twice in every fight, and dozens of times in others.

I think this is where I give up. I don't think I'll ever get through Heroic mode. Even if I'm capable, I just lack the willpower. I've played through the entire game four times and it's no longer fun enough to justify that kind of frustration. And that's okay — I'm fine with that — except that my completion of the game will forever be stuck at 98%. There are just two achievements left: one for beating Heroic mode and then, stupidly, another achievement for unlocking all achievements.

It's just so close that I can't not be annoyed.

I don't usually care much about achievements. Some people can't get enough of them, and some people absolutely despise them. Most of the time, I'm indifferent. Optional challenges are great, as long as they're actually fun, and whether those optional challenges come in the form of "achievements" or some other functionally equivalent feature with a less silly name is irrelevant. If I play all the way through a game and I want to play it some more, the additional challenges are something worth considering. Sometimes I decide to ignore them.

But that's hard to do when I've already done all but a couple of them. It's not even about the pride of reaching 100% completion; it's about leaving things unfinished. It's about the fact that achievements on Steam are a permanent record that I have to see whenever I look at the game in my library, even if it's not installed. It's about something being so close to perfection and not being perfected. As far as I'm concerned, 0% is just as good as 100%, but numbers like 1% and 99% are the worst.

I have a similar issue with Ultratron, the other beautiful, chaotic, punishing, evil-robot-themed game I've been playing recently. If you understand that the title is a reference to Robotron: 2084, you probably already know that this one isn't a first-person shooter. Ultratron is a top-down arena shoot-em-up with highly stylized faux retro graphics and a multitude of ridiculous power-ups. Much like Titan Attacks, the over-the-top Space Invaders clone made by the same developer, Ultratron starts out slow and then gradually becomes an unforgiving hell of colorful projectiles and flashy explosions. And it's more addictive than heroin.

I loved Titan Attacks so much that I played it until I had all the achievements unlocked. I thought I loved Ultratron that much too, but a few of the achievements are just stupidly difficult. Once you're past a certain point, the game becomes extremely intense, and you only get a checkpoint every ten levels — after, not before, each boss. Worse yet, some of the most challenging achievements require a certain number of kills, and the counter resets to zero if you start playing from a checkpoint. If you want the game to count your 10,000 kills, you'll have to get them all in a single playthrough without ever dying. It doesn't have to be all in one sitting, since you can save at any time, but that save disappears after it's loaded. Saving is for taking breaks, not for backing up your progress.

I got fed up with Ultratron after a while, and stopped playing it for months, but I'm back at it again. I told myself I was just going to play a few rounds, but now I'm looking at those last few achievements and saying "yeah, I can totally do that." And I probably can't, but 94% is so close to 100% that it's hard not to try. I should also note that we're not really dealing with additional challenges, in this case, since Ultratron is one of those arcade-style game that goes on as long as you can keep winning. The game doesn't have a real "ending" so the completion of achievements is really the only form of "winning" there is.

Sure, it's silly to be so irritated by falling short of 100% completion, but at least I have the sense to know I'm being silly. At least I'm not so determined that I'm willing to keep playing these games past the point where they stop being enjoyable. When I wanted to unlock the last few achievements in L.A. Noire, just for the sake of neatly wrapping up a fairly enjoyable game, I just used a walkthrough for those idiotic scavenger hunt achievements (Star Map, Auto Fanatic, and Hollywoodland) because doing it myself would have taken so long that I would have hated the game by the time I was done with it.

Not everything can be helped with a walkthrough, though. So should I try to beat Ultratron? Should I bother to clear that last hurdle in Hard Reset? Surely I've blown up more than enough robots this year, with a combined 85 hours in these two games alone (plus whatever uncounted hours I spent playing them with Steam in offline mode). I guess the answer is "maybe someday."

Or maybe I'll just use Steam Achievement Manager — a tool whose use I never understood before now — to unlock these practically impossible achievements just so I'm not tempted to waste endless hours actually attempting them. Trying to master everything I play is exactly why I'll never get through my backlog.

Unskippable Cutscenes & Other Pure Evil

I often say that if a single-player video game isn't worth playing twice then it's not worth playing at all. That might be a slight exaggeration — surely "game worth playing exactly once" does lie somewhere between "game worth playing twice" and "game worth uninstalling" — but honestly, if I get to the end of a game and I don't want to do it again, it probably wasn't very fun. In my opinion, one should be able to enjoy a game multiple times, twice being the bare minimum.

Surely, some people will disagree, and their counterargument will most likely go something like this: "After the first time, you already know how it ends!" Well, yeah, it ends with me winning. If your experience with a game is spoiled because you already know the end of an underlying story, which probably exists only to provide context to some otherwise meaningless depictions of violence, the game isn't a very good one. It's supposed to be a game, after all, not a movie. Do I like story-driven games? Sure. But a game needs to be fun for reasons other than its plot twists. Otherwise, it should have been a movie, and anyone who likes it could have watched a movie instead. Moreover, if there's a game whose plot is the primary appeal, it should have a plot that's good enough for an eventual second run. Lots of people like to watch a good movie more than once, right?

But let's say the plot isn't so great that I want to see it and hear it again. Let's say I'm about to play a game a second time because the actual game was fun, or because I missed a few optional objectives the first time, or because my high score isn't high enough. If that's the case, I shouldn't be forced to see and hear the story a second time, and since no reasonable person would ever disagree with that statement, I don't understand why any video game developer ever thought unskippable cutscenes were a good idea.

I recently finished L.A. Noire. Played well the first time around, this game might not warrant a second play-through, but I missed plenty of clues and botched more than a few interrogations, so I decided to go back for the five-star ratings (and a few achievements) I missed. And it would have been pretty fun if I didn't have to watch every single cutscene a second time. Why can't we skip the cutscenes in L.A. Noire? I have no idea. I've heard that cutscenes in Max Payne 3 are unskippable because the game uses that time to load, but L.A. Noire has separate loading screens, so I doubt it's the same situation. So, disguised loading screens aside, why would a game ever have unskippable cutscenes? It turns out that there are no good reasons.

Sometimes we wonder why and how a serial killer would decide to brutally murder dozens of people. That a human could do something so senselessly awful is almost beyond comprehension. Two possible explanations come to mind: either the serial killer is very simply insane and his or her actions are the result of a mental defect, or true evil exists in the world and it lives inside that person. Unskippable cutscenes are a much lesser crime than repeated homicide but the same two explanations apply and I can't think of any others. The developers of a game must be crazy (or profoundly stupid) to think that a person playing the game for the second time won't be annoyed by the inability to opt out of re-watching something as pointless as a cutscene. On the other hand, if they do know that such a restriction annoys players, the only reason to implement unskippable cutscenes would be to annoy players and that's pure evil. Surely it's a lesser evil than murder, but the evil is still pure because the only conceivable objective is to cause suffering.

Whether it's intentional or not, the unskippable cutscene often acts as an irritating punishment for failure. In games that forbid players from opting out of having a mediocre story shoved down their throats, there always seems to be a difficult boss fight (or a difficult something) preceded by a long and boring scene that's only entertaining once. And you end up seeing it fifteen times. If that's not bad game design, I don't know what is. Fortunately, none of the cutscenes in L.A. Noire are extremely long and no particular part of the game is likely to be repeated numerous times (since nothing in the game is very challenging and there's an option that allows awful players to skip action sequences). Still, there's no reason for unskippable cutscenes, especially since the concept of skipping a cutscene has been around for approximately as long as cutscenes have existed.

I guess the developers think their story is so important that we shouldn't attempt to enjoy the game without it. They think they need to save us from ourselves by preventing us from "accidentally" missing something important. Sometimes, a story is important enough that it shouldn't be skipped; if I saw someone skipping cutscenes while playing Alan Wake for the first time, I'd probably recommend that they just play a different game. But that's no reason to take away options.

This is one of those things that would cause us to boycott a game if only we had an ounce of self control. Unfortunately, we don't. It's unforgivable, but it's still tolerable enough that the developers and publishers are unlikely to suffer financially as a result, so they won't learn any lessons no matter how much I complain.

Midlife Crisis, Part 4

I won't pretend that the following is some kind of revelation brought on by my somewhat recent decision to splurge on a shiny new computer. I've known it for a long time, and I've probably mentioned it before, but right now — at the beginning of a new year and the end of a string of posts regarding my PC-building experience and all the second-guessing involved — just seems like a pretty good time to bring it up.

Playing video games doesn't seem nearly as fun as it used to be.

And it's not just because I've grown up. It certainly does have something to do with my lack of free time as an actual adult who works for a living, but it's not a change of my own personality that makes it more difficult to sit back and enjoy what used to be incredibly entertaining. I mean, let's face it, I'm still a kid on the inside. I'm in my mid-20s but I have a blog about video games and I still think playing games (in moderation) is a perfectly good use of time. That alone, according to almost anyone, probably makes me a man-child in a man-man's body. I think I've grown up enough to convince people that I've grown up, but I'd still rather play a video game than read a newspaper, and I'd rather argue about video games than argue about politics. As far as I know, this isn't so abnormal for guys my age. Incidentally, I'm told I belong to an entire generation of man-children who don't know how to be real men — that I'm the product of the downfall of society and that it's probably the internet's fault — but that's a discussion for another day.

The problem isn't that I've grown out of video games. If I really had, there would be no problem at all and I wouldn't care enough to write this. The problem, in fact, is a bunch of problems.

A lot of my friends have grown out of video games, and I have fewer people with whom to enjoy my pastime of choice. Society as a whole thinks I should grow out of video games, so unless I work in the industry (which I do not), I can't openly express my enthusiasm for the medium without inviting all sorts of assumptions about my character (only some of which are true). Have I ever mentioned that I'm using a pseudonym? For the same reason I don't just go ahead and list "gaming" as a skill on my résumé, I don't really want potential employers to find this blog when they do a quick background check on me. It's both irrelevant and potentially damaging. So is most of what I've ever posted on Facebook, so I should really double-check my privacy settings or just delete my account.

Playing video games, in some ways, has become a pretty lonely activity, and it's not just because so many of my friends have left the party. It's also because I'm interested primarily in single-player games these days, and nobody wants to watch me play them, not that I expect them to. Oddly enough, in my youth I felt that video games were very much a spectator sport. Enjoying a new single-player game with my two brothers didn't necessarily involve taking turns, but those were the days when we had nothing better to do on a weekend than watch each other get mad at the final boss in some nearly impossible 2D sidescroller. People watching people play video games isn't actually such a weird thing — search for "Let's Play" on YouTube and see for yourself — but everyone I know who still has any interest in video games only seems to like massively multiplayer online stuff anyway. So screw me and my apparently bad taste, I guess.

To some extent, my trouble with maintaining an interest in any of the recent games I've played might also be a case of unrealistic expectations. In comparing today's games to those of my apparently idyllic childhood, the verdict is always "meh." Feelings of nostalgia make objectivity impossible and I have plenty of those feelings for video games I played when I was 10 years old.  Maybe I just think I'm having less fun because nothing can live up to that rose-tinted version of reality. It could also be that, having played so many games over the years, I'm less easily impressed. The first time I played a first-person shooter, it was really fantastic. After a hundred of them, it takes something really crazy to keep me interested.

This post probably wouldn't be complete if I didn't at least half-heartedly entertain the notion that games themselves are actually getting worse, but I think what's more important is that modern games are always made to cater to people who never played a game before. The depth I crave would probably alienate new players, and the mandatory tutorial levels that new players need are boring me.

All of these are contributing factors, but my lack of free time is by far the most significant. I work 40 to 50 hours a week doing something I don't enjoy, and when I get home it's hard to do anything but sleep. I spend the majority of my free time with my girlfriend, who doesn't care that I play video games but doesn't care to play them herself, so it's not something we can do together. When I do get some time alone to waste, it's rarely more than a couple of hours, and rarely can I find the motivation to start a new game when I'm on such a tight schedule. So I just end up browsing the web or loading a save in the middle of something I've already finished. Even on the weekends, the prospect of going back to work on Monday is so distracting that it's hard to enjoy anything at all. You know, I think I'm just depressed. This isn't helping to shrink my rapidly growing backlog of things I really want to play eventually.

Maybe part of me thought that buying a new PC would somehow fix all of this. I guess it has, at least a little, since there are more games that I can actually play and I'm excited about playing them. I have to admit, I've enjoyed replaying Crysis with the graphics turned up to crazy (even though this only gets me around 40 frames per second most of the time). But I haven't had the time or the patience to dive into L.A. Noire or Mirror's Edge or Dead Space, all of which are on my Steam account with only a few minutes logged. Maybe, one of these lazy Sundays, I'll have a chance to make some progress in one of them, and maybe the experience won't be ruined by thoughts of the impending Monday.

Midlife Crisis, Part 2

My new PC is up and running. All of the parts arrived about a week before Halloween, I put everything together on a Friday night, and I started installing drivers over the weekend. Since then, I've installed and tested a few somewhat-high-performance games, namely Crysis, Alan Wake, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, L.A. Noire, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. They all run rather well on the highest graphics settings. I've also played a bit of Metro 2033, which I got for practically nothing from the Humble THQ Bundle last November, and it performs well enough on maximum settings as well. There's some stuttering, but that's probably the result of poor optimization and there might be a fix somewhere.

For obvious reasons, I don't own any truly "next-generation" games at the moment, so I'm not sure what kind of performance I'll get out of those. In any case, however, I'm better off with this new rig than without it. My old PC worked surprisingly well with some games (running the Metro 2033 demo at a playable frame rate on low settings), but it totally failed to work with others (namely L.A. Noire which, for whatever reason, was getting about two frames per second). Games ported to Windows from the upcoming generation of consoles can certainly be expected to work my new PC much harder than anything I've played so far, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it performs. On the other hand, I can't really say I'm looking forward to seeing what my new favorite toy can't do. After all the time spent on this thing, from finding the parts to powering it on, I want to believe it's perfect.

I breathed a sigh of relief when the final parts arrived — with any luck, I wouldn't have to shop for computer parts again for a few years — but there was still plenty of stress ahead of me. The first hiccup was a return of my supposedly new Gigabyte motherboard to Amazon, since the retail box was not sealed and had some rips in the corners. In other words, it looked like it had already been opened, though the parts inside were still in plastic. Despite my complaints, however, the replacement's box was in roughly the same condition, perhaps slightly worse. Again, however, the inner parts were still in plastic.

I don't know if Amazon was trying to screw me by selling me returned hardware as new, or if Gigabyte was to blame, but I figured I could just get it replaced if it was indeed broken or damaged so I decided to use the motherboard anyway. This might prove to be a mistake, but I was getting impatient. Besides, if Amazon couldn't send me a box that looked shiny and new, I'd have to buy it from elsewhere, and I wasn't confident that other sellers would be more trustworthy than one of the biggest online retailers in existence.

So I started building the computer. Long story short, the motherboard was not dead on arrival, and I've been careful to keep all the paperwork I received for warranty purposes in case something happens later. All of the parts, in fact, seem to be working nicely, even the cheap optical drive. The process of actually assembling the computer was quite an experience, though, since I'd never done it before.

Now that I have done it, building another would probably take less than an hour, but this first build took several. Most of that time was spent reading instructions, looking up computer-building tips, and wondering how hard I need to push to get one part to slide into another. Getting the stock CPU cooler into the motherboard was particularly terrifying, because there's no way to accomplish this without pushing harder than I ever though delicate electronics should be pushed. The same was true of installing the processor itself. I was afraid I'd break it, but those fears were unfounded, since I was doing it correctly and there was no other way.

After getting all the parts into the case, I experienced another momentary freak-out when I thought the fans on the case were totally incompatible with the motherboard. (The motherboard had four-pin headers and the fans had three-pin connectors.) I was wrong — they can, in fact, be plugged in — but it doesn't really matter now anyway, because I opted to plug the case fans directly into the power supply instead. My only concern now is that I might have created air bubbles in the thermal paste when installing that troublesome CPU cooler, since I picked it up again after letting it make contact with the top of the processor. So far, however, the temperatures don't seem to be reaching dangerous levels.

Given all the minor difficulties I encountered — all of which could have been much worse with a little bit of bad luck — I completely understand why the path I chose is less traveled than others. Most people buy consoles or pre-built computers instead, and I don't blame them. Consoles, in particular, are super easy; they plug in and work. You don't have to worry about whether a game is compatible as long as it has the right logo on the box. Moreover, they're affordable, and while performance might only be "good enough" instead of great, it's hard to tell when you're sitting on a couch ten feet from the screen.

People who choose PCs over consoles are sometimes seen as elitists in the so-called "gaming" community, and it's probably because some PC users feel the need to participate in the embarrassingly pathetic "console wars" that break out between fans of competing systems. Xbox fans and Playstation fans like to argue amongst themselves about which console is best, letting their brand loyalty metamorphosize into some kind of vendetta against everyone who bought the other product as they collectively provide Microsoft and Sony with all the free advertising they could ever want. But the PC user, whose system is built from various parts by different manufacturers, doesn't necessarily have any brand loyalty unless he has an affinity for AMD over Intel, or vice versa. The stereotypically elitist "PC gamer" thinks he's above the petty squabbling of console owners, but he stoops to their level nonetheless when he proclaims that his PC is better than any console and says not-so-nice thinks about everybody who bought one. So I'm not going to do that.

It's true that a good computer can outperform any console, because a console is just a specialized computer and it's never made of the best hardware available. For the right price, a PC can surpass a brand new console on the day of release. Even a cheap PC can beat a console in mid-generation, since PC parts continue to improve while consoles stagnate for up to eight years. The PC user, in a way, is right about his system's superiority. That's why console fans who brag about graphics will usually turn around and claim that graphics don't matter once the PC guy joins the discussion. Either that, or they'll pretend it costs over $2000 to build a PC that plays console games at console-equivalent settings, or they'll insist that the only games worth playing are console exclusives.

But there's really no need to grasp at straws so desperately, because consoles do have their purpose. While a PC is good for the hardcore game enthusiast, a console is a much easier solution for casual play, most often for a lower price. A console is a hassle-free, plug-and-play, guaranteed-compatible alternative for the living room. Let's just leave it at that. I might have considered buying a console myself if I weren't in need of a new computer anyway. It was a choice between a console plus a cheap computer, or one good computer, and I chose the latter.

The worst thing about choosing a personal computer over a console is all the second-guessing that comes naturally with an abundance of choice. Now that I have my PC, I won't be buying another for a few years unless something goes terribly wrong, so I won't get to try all the other hardware presently on the market. I guess that's why some people get paid to review this hardware, but there's nothing like first-hand experience, and I'll never be able to make my own comparisons unless I go and buy more parts than I can afford. Console users have fewer decisions to make when buying their hardware, but people are generally happier this way because they don't have to worry as much about making the wrong choice.

As for me, I'll just have to clear my mind of all those what-ifs, and be content with what I have. That is, unless it breaks.