We dove in and bought an Oculus Quest 2, the first wireless stand-alone VR Headset, a few months ago. It has been a fantastic source of entertainment through the Covid Winter. We have been playing a lot of AMAZING games on it – Moss, Red Matter, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, I Expect You To Die, Beat Saber, and VR Fishing, just to name a few.

Tonight I was playing in RecRoom, which is a social app with games to play within it, and experiences to have with the many other people exploring it.

Sorry these are dark, but it was at night – ON THE TITANIC!

In RecRoom there is a Titanic simulation, and I love the Titanic, so I have gone and experienced it several times. Tonight I was hanging out on the bow when the Iceberg hit (you can see us heading right for it in the second pic), and a kid dressed like the Captain ran up to me and said “We’re going to sink! You have to get in the lifeboat! Follow me!” and led me to the lifeboat. Then he rounded up everyone else he could find and tried to get them in the boat. Some got in, some ran off. One guy wouldn’t get in without him, but he said he was the Captain, he had to stay with the ship. So we saluted him as the water rose up and our lifeboat floated free. It was very dramatic!

So I was on the lifeboat with a couple kids, we were all watching the ship tip up and break apart. Neither of them spoke english, in fact I couldn’t quite place what they were speaking. One of them broke out virtual pizza, and they brought me a slice, then they broke out bottles to drink and handed those out, so we enjoyed a virtual picnic while watching the tragedy unfold! It was weird and wonderful, and surreal.

When it was over we got back on shore and (my avatar is distinctly female) a boy ran up and said ‘How old are you?’ and I said ‘really old’, and he asked ‘Like, are you over 25?’ (like that’s REALLY old) and I said ‘yes, way over. How old are you?’, and he said ’12! So I suppose you have a boyfriend?’ and another kid interrupted and said ‘Dude, don’t ask that, what are you doing?’ and turned around and shrugged at me like ‘Kids, what are you gonna do?’ The whole thing cracked me up. I just wanted to share, it was just a fun, silly experience, and everyone was nice and having a good time.

So, here it is about 2 1/2 years after release, and I am still playing Grand Theft Auto 5 as my primary game of choice when I have a few minutes to sit down and play. And we still play together, Dave and I, on our two xboxes, one in the living room and one in the bedroom. It’s pretty fun. It is a wide open world, and you can do anything – though sometimes it seems like what I primarily do is crash planes.

These are all taken with the in-game camera…

 

This game is fun, beautiful, surprising, and exhilarating – even a couple years after release. I still keep finding new things to do. The other night I spent an hour trying to parachute and land in a church belltower. Such fun! And sometimes I’ll just park my bike and enjoy a virtual sunset over the ocean, and that’s ok too.

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I have been enjoying Grand Theft Auto Auto 5 for a whole year now! Crazy! I have wasted entirely too much time playing it. It’s my favorite thing to do to kill a couple hours before bed, and I don’t even want to admit how much total time it says I have played! We enjoyed it enough we finally bought a second XBox and copy of the game (found both used on CL) and setup the second console so Dave and I could team up and play together. So much fun! Here we are between missions. The masks are to protect our identity 😉

I’ve kind of maxed out what I can earn in the game, so sometimes I just go hiking around the game and exploring. It is stunningly beautiful in places.

A year later and this game can still amaze me.

One thing that wasn’t so amazing though is the kids I have run across while playing it. The other day I played with a 9 year old. This game is rated for 18+ for a reason! Do their parents not know, or not care?! The little guy had the mouth of a sailor too, I’ve never heard so many F-bombs – clearly he was trying to be a big guy to the other players. It’s just disturbing. The game is great fun, but it’s so inappropriate for a little kid to be playing it!

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Sometimes I feel a bit of guilt that I enjoy videogames so much. After all, there is a big wide world out there to explore, why waste time on the couch exploring a virtual world? To me, there is hardly a better way to spend the little bits of time left at the end of a day. I would so much prefer playing in a world I can interact with, compared to watching TV. In fact I can hardly sit still to watch a TV show or a movie. Sometimes younger people act surprised that I play videogames, but I’ve been playing them my whole life! OUR generation started out with Atari 2600s, why should we quit playing when games just keep getting better every year?!

At the end of September, Dave gave me a present for HIS birthday! To keep me entertained while he was away working on a play.

The ‘world’ is huge, and finely detailed. I could forget it’s a game. Sometimes it looks like a movie.(There is an ‘in-game’ cell phone that lets you snap pictures of your adventures. That’s where all these pics come from.) Sometimes I just sit and enjoy the view, listening to the waves lapping at the beach.

So you start out the game as a small time criminal, running around doing jobs for various mobsters. I created a woman character, and named her ‘Amanda Hugnkiss’. After a couple weeks I saved enough for a crappy apartment and a garage.

For the first month or so I did every mission on that pink sport bike, I loved that thing!

Though I frequently found myself ‘borrowing’ other vehicles, like this Patriot that I accidentally high-centered. It was totally stuck, wheels spinning in the air, I laughed my butt off!

I really enjoy flying, and trying stunts, landing in strange places. Like in front of my apartment, and causing a traffic jam…

Though many landings don’t go that well…

Eventually I worked my way up to a fancy apartment, and a BIG garage! I wish it was that easy in real life. Oh wait, I did have to kill a lot of people to get that, I guess I probably wouldn’t do that in real life.

Sometimes there are ‘glitches’ to enjoy – little things that shouldn’t happen. Like when I found myself able to walk around underwater.

Or when I followed directions from a YouTube video to sneak off to the secret, snowy land of Ludendorff.

And the time she inexplicably started sporting a beard!

And some joker gave us $2 Billion dollars to play with, which changed the game drastically. Eventually they cleaned it up and removed all the ‘glitched’ money, but it still changed the game. Instead of grinding away to make money, suddenly everyone had money for all the ammo and cars and planes they could want.

For Christmas the game designers gave us all a present – a snowstorm in Los Santos (it’s supposed to be Los Angeles)

Along the way I picked out a few favorite vehicles – like a pink Mustang

And my ‘Bifta’ Dune Buggy

And our Rhino Tank (posed on top of the tallest building in the city)!

So once Dave had time he started playing it too. We play it differently – I like missions, he likes running around randomly causing havoc. You share this world with other real players, and you can fight each other, or team up to make amazing things happen. It’s a sandbox, you don’t have to have any particular purpose, and that’s ok. This game has been loads of fun, probably the most I have enjoyed a game since Red Dead Redemption (an open-sandbox cowboy-themed game from the same people) and I’m hoping they’ll keep adding new surprises to it to keep people playing for quite a while longer.

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I wanted this game from the first time I heard about it, and now that we’ve got it, I am completely hooked, addicted, and can’t wait to get my hands back on it from the moment I put it down (which is usually when Dave says ‘it’s 1AM and we have to work tomorrow – come to bed!’)

It’s a cowboy game, and I’ll admit, my favorite part is that you get to ride horses – a lot! It’s by the people who made Grand Theft Auto, and we really enjoyed those games, running around in a free world, doing whatever struck your interest. This one is the same. There are missions to do, usually presented by someone coming up and asking you to do something. It feels very natural. I’ve been rounding up cattle, chasing down rustlers, and breaking wild horses – too much fun! Your faithful steed (once he trusts you) comes when you whistle 🙂 But you have to be careful not to get horse-jacked while out wandering around in the wilderness!

The AI that controls the horses has led to a couple funny situations. In one mission, I was on a posse and dismounted and snuck up with the rest of the posse to peek over the rocks and see what the bad guys were doing, and at the bottom of the screen I see these two horse ears – I look behind me and there’s my faithful horse, following right along! On another mission I retrieved a lady’s stolen wagon, and brought it back to her, whistling for my horse to follow. When I got it back to her and got out of the wagon, she was about to give me my reward when my horse tried to go between the wagon and the horse pulling it and knocked it over, and so the lady instead ran off into the desert crying about how her wagon was destroyed! I love it when a game is so open that situations you would never expect happen!

Along with wandering around in the free form world, missions occasionally break into cinematic cut-scenes so pretty you’d think you were watching a movie. The graphics outside of the cut scenes are just as nice, it really feels like you’re controlling a movie (if this was a movie I’d probably give it an R for violence and language). Having been raised with video games from the time of PONG, it makes me wonder how much more realistic can they get?! This game is just immersive, to the point you feel like you’re living in a spaghetti western. You can play your character good and accumulate honor, or play him bad and end up with a bounty on your head, and the game is going to have different challenges depending on which way you play, so I can already see this game is going to keep me entertained for quite a long time. What more could a geek girl want? 🙂

When Dave plays games he always tries all the unexpected things and does stuff the game designers never intended. It will be great fun to see what he does with this one!

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Our present to ourselves this year was a new Xbox 360 – something we have been waiting to get for a long time! It was well past time to retire the old xbox, and we are both videogame junkies given the opportunity – after all, we both grew up with Atari 2600 joysticks in our hands.

The new Xbox has some interesting twists though – the whole ‘Xbox Live’ thing is a new way of thinking about videogames. Being hooked up to the internet all the time, just like the other computers, makes for some interesting abilities old consoles didn’t have. We can watch streaming video over Netflix, or play games against other people far away. Those parts only work so-so, because our rural internet connection is not quite up to spec for intense gaming and streaming, but it works well enough. I decided to jump right in and check out some game demos, and found one I fell in love with immediately and had to download. Limbo.

The game is entirely in black and white. It’s not like any platform game I’ve ever played. It can be described as run, jump, push, pull, with occasional climbing and button pushing. Doesn’t sound very exciting, but the puzzles are incredible – real mind benders. None of the puzzles are the Mario type, where you have to memorize complex maneuvers and practice running the same thing over and over again until you get all your timing right – it’s not nearly as tedious as that! Things happen slower, and most of the time you have time to think before something kills you. Your little runner dies – a lot – and comes back ready for more. It’s just great fun. I was challenged by every puzzle, and delighted when I got through them. 

I can’t get over what an incredible little game this is. It only cost $15 and I got more entertainment value out of it than some games I’ve paid much more for, and that’s pretty unusual.

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