Gaming in a Foreign Land

 

Alright, so it's just the UK, but still. I'm only here for a few months, but I've run into my fair share of difficulties trying to keep up on my gaming habit. It's strange to say, given that gaming is a habit some people struggle to break, but the less games are a part of my life, the less I feel like myself.

 

Yeah, Europe blows.

 

I'm still keeping up with industry chit-chat, writing semi-daily for Kombo and Gamezone. The NGP looks amazing – I don't see how Sony could screw this one up, though of course I won't put it past them. I even got to play the 3DS again this past weekend at one of the public events they're holding throughout London. My friends and I stumbled across it at the hip kids-street fair they hold at Brick Lane every Sunday. The little thing hasn't changed much, and while it's impressive, I can't help but be more excited by the possibilities of the NGP. I've never liked 3D that much anyway.

 

Speaking of 3D, I can't believe 3D movies here cost £15 – that's almost $25. Dates are expensive, and tangled was cute, but hardly worth it. What was I talking about? Oh yeah..

 

So for one thing, Steam only works intermittently. That's not entirely Steam's fault, as my Uni (Goldsmiths College) purposely blocks the ports that Steam requires to connect. If Steam allowed you to mess with its connection settings a little more, I might not have this problem, but it is what it is. In offline mode, my games, paltry as the selection is (I'm on a Mac, naturally), tend to freeze up every few minutes. Steam support seems mostly stumped on this issue, though their most recent solution may have actually done the trick.

 

So PC gaming is finicky at best. Bringing a console would have been pointless – there's no TV in my dorm, and the wacky power outlets they use over here would have probably fried my already-stressed out Xbox 360. Lugging my original, 80-gig PS3 halfway around the world would have been ludicrous, and as for the Wii, well, who the hell plays Wii anymore?

 

That leaves my PSP, DS and iPhone. The DS has seen practically zero use, despite a friend kindly lending me her copy of Golden Sun: Dark Dawn. I think the problem is that I'm just sick of the DS. I'm sick of the entire system. Flipping it open, the battery-draining sleep mode, my stupid scratched-up touch screen, dropping the stylus on the bus.. I just don't feel like dealing with it anymore.

 

As for the iPhone, roaming is a bitch. It stays on airplane mode 100% of the time – I just can't risk the charges if it decides to ignore my wishes and tries to send me my Words For Friends notifications or something. Mostly I just use it as an iPod now, and since most games tend to interrupt your music as soon as you start them up, I just don't really play games on it anymore. I might, if there was a universal setting that prevented apps from pausing your music, but Apple apparently hasn't thought of that yet.

 

So that leaves the PSP, which has seen the most use of any platform I have here. I've got a healthy library of games at my disposal: Birth by Sleep, Jeanne D'Arc (which has been on my pile of shame until now), Ghost of Sparta, and Persona 3 Portable. There's a lot of variety there, though I think I'd be playing a lot more if I hadn't brought Kingdom Hearts. I've been struggling to finish it for months, but it's just such a stinking pile of crap.

 

I've actually got a pretty good metaphor for this: trying to be thrifty, I picked up a pint of Sainsbury's (a general grocery store) brand scotch a few weeks ago. Imported Jim Beam and Jack Daniels are too expensive here, so I figured, why not? I filled up my flask and went to see a play (a normal day in the life of Mike Rougeau).

 

Do the math.

 

But it turns out the stuff is awful – and my full flask has been sitting on a shelf, unused, for weeks. I can't drink it, but I can't bring myself to pour booze down the drain, either. The Sainsbury's scotch is preventing me from day-drinking – just like Birth by Sleep is preventing me from playing PSP. There are a lot of lessons to be learned when you move to a foreign country.

 

I solved the flask problem by letting a friend drink all the scotch. Now I've got an empty vessel in which to pour whatever I want. I can't exactly wait for someone else to finish Birth by Sleep for me, though. In fact, I may just write it off entirely so I can get to Jeanne and God of War – far superior games that I'd much rather be playing.

 

It's frustrating to have to sit back and watch a  game like Dead Space 2 come and go while I twiddle my thumbs across Europe. There's ads for it plastered all over the subway. I'll also be missing the launch of the 3DS – another thing I can't seem to get away from, yet won't have access to until months after everyone else does. And as grateful as I am to have Steam on my Mac, the cross-platform library still blows. Left 4 Dead 2 and Deathspank are pretty much it. The first thing I'm doing when I get home (besides grabbing some In-N-Out) is firing up Demon's Souls.

 

I do like to complain, but – and I'll be honest here – there are worse places to be, and I know I'll get to resume gaming soon.