I was awful at Halo 2. Walking into walls, shooting at air, trapped in an interminable die-respawn-die-respawn loop.
This year was about 2005 and my middle school friends hated playing with me online, which was like half of how we entertained ourselves. I didn’t blame them. I was entirely useless beyond comedic value — I was truly elite at finding novel ways to get killed. I’d get sniped trying, and failing, at doing something as simple as entering the driver seat of Warthog.
I wasn’t really against video games but I was genuinely bad at shooters and playing online was an exercise in embarrassment.
As a teen, I mostly played sports games, offline, by myself, at home in the evenings. I’d flop into the couch, fire up my Xbox 360, and spend hours engulfed in a dynasty mode — where you basically control every aspect of a team over the course of an indefinite number of seasons. I had no idea if I was good or bad at a game. Honestly, I was probably bad. I hardly ever played against my friends or my brother. It was just a nice, mindless way to pass the time playing against the CPU. My own little video game bubble.
My own little video game bubble.
In quarantine, I’ve fully returned to that little bubble. Mostly late at night, when I’m waiting for sleep, I’m going back to disappearing into sports games. I’m even playing on an outdated Xbox 360 with a janky disc tray. I don’t play online. Couldn’t even tell you my gamertag. Relatively speaking, I’m a video game caveman.
It’s fucking delightful. Especially so in a pandemic.
It took some doing. I played some NBA 2K20, but I really, really wanted to play the NCAA Football video game, which EA Sports was forced to stop making in 2014 because they were using college players’ likeness without compensation.One problem, I had lost my copy and apparently everyone else had the same idea: A copy of NCAAF ‘14 would run you about $160 online. I snagged a copy of ‘13 instead for about $70, which was fine by me. (Not for nothing sports personality Big Cat has had an extremely popular Twitch stream of his NCAAF experience that has captivated the real sports world.)
I’m now a couple seasons deep into a dynasty at the helm of Tulsa’s less-than-storied football program. I could tell you the (invented) names of all my stars and recruits: Bronson Branzino, Salad Johnson, Britt Listerine, Dallas Scraps, Gregory Crunch, etc.
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And, yes, the gameplay is fun. I contend it’s the best sports video game ever made and despite being 7 years removed from its release — you literally cannot play it on an Xbox One — it holds up shockingly well. The controls are simple and intuitive, you can customize pretty much everything about your playbook and team, and the gameplay is vastly more fun than Madden, the stalwart everyone’s heard about. It’s designed to be enjoyed, not broken or beaten.
To use the parlance of gamers — honestly I might fuck this up, don’t judge me — NCAAF is cheesy as hell, meaning there are loopholes for success. I don’t care that I can beat the system with certain plays — chiefly the HB Draw, Four Verts, and the Read Option. In fact, that’s why I like it. I stand a chance at actually enjoying myself because I’m not getting my ass kicked.
Playing this 2013 release entirely offline like a caveman, I’m able to fully escape into it. I capital-S Suck at other games. I recently tried to play the new Star Wars game — lightsabers, hell yea — and nope, I was so awful I couldn’t really even get beyond the levels that explain the basics of the game.
But there are no expectations when I turn on my 360 and start NCAA ‘13. I don’t have to play a 14-year-old who has spent every waking hour mastering it. I don't have to be online, talking with people who are also going through a pandemic. I don’t have to win. I don’t need to learn anything new. I can just get lost in a game and care way too much about dumb, AI-generated football players.
It’s unvarnished escapism. That sounds like an obvious appeal of video games, but that’s never really been the experience for me, someone who is absolute shit at most games. I mostly just tried not to get angry at sucking.
So it tracks that I never really got how people got lost in a game until the real world turned into a hellscape. Now, oh hell yea, I get it. It feels really nice to have no larger concerns than whether my pixelated quarterback Shayne Falco will recover from his back spasms. It replaces stress with minor worries and a pleasant brain-dead feeling you get from staring at a Good Screen versus the workday Bad Screen.
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I wouldn’t go as far as to liken it to meditation. But it is a feeling of release. And, to be frank, I’ve never really been able to meditate anyway.
Nowadays it’s so tough to sneak away from reality because the real world is so damn persistent, so unflinchingly awful. The days morph into one, monotony and bad news mucking up the landmarks that help break-up the human experience. What demarcates the weekend from the weekday if every day is relegated to the same four walls?
But, momentarily, normally at night, I’ve found a brief little escape in a silly video game from 2013. The graphics might be kind of shitty, the gameplay might be too easy for real gamers, and, yes, the old Xbox 360 toys with freezing all the time. But this outdated gaming lets me enjoy a different world for a short while and damn, if that isn’t a precious feeling these days.
