The Letter F Six Times

 

With a child in the house now, my wife has been cracking down on my language. Even though I’m sure that if my son was dropping the effer there would be little repercussion as we live in Japan, it’s probably best for me to grow a larger vocabulary.

Playing VVVVVV made this a difficult task.

The game is cruel, albeit delightfully so. With so many checkpoints and quickly resuming after death, the game is almost relaxing in its challenge. When trial, error and persistence are king, being able to resume quickly is the strongest part. VVVVVV offers that very well.

The most vulgarity inducing part had nothing to do with the actual gameplay, however.

After playing for a few good hours, two of them spent exclusively on trying to complete Veni Vidi Vici, I loaded up the game one day and found Steam downloading it again.

I was confused and first and then quite upset when I loaded up the game and found my save state gone. Not having looked at exactly what was going on, I cursed Steam for once again causing me ill will.

I’ve not had much luck with them. Firstly, I can’t use my American credit card with them as I live in Japan. I understand their reasoning, but if I can inform my bank to allow my use of the card here, I don’t see why Steam should be interfering. Covering their own end, I guess, so I try to let it slide.

I’ve heard I can contact them directly and get my count approved for doing such. But I’ve had my share of fun with them in that department as well.

I had forgotten my password and no matter of attempting would let me get to the reset page. Going through the client would cause time outs or other errors with cryptic messages. Luckily, my password came to me one day but had it not, I probably would not have used the software again.

To be entirely fair, a lot of this is on my end. I forgot my password, I don’t feel like applying for a Japanese credit card, I don’t feel like dealing with Steam directly.

But the lack of these little bits of ease just make the whole system unappealing to me. I don’t want to put in legwork. I just want to play games. It’s the same reason I tend to not play PC games to begin with. Then again, all of this Steam talk I’ve been going on about has been with the Mac version, which I’ve been told isn’t up to snuff compared to its PC counterpart.

Does it sound like I am damning Steam? I don’t particularly intend to. It is just a system that I don’t feel works exactly with how I want to play games. Not being informed that the update to VVVVVV would get rid of my save before it happened was a bit of a disappointment. Is that Steam’s fault? The developers’? My own?

I’m not particularly sure and in the end it did’t particularly matter as I started the game over again and had a blast completing it. VVVVVV is an excellent game, but I probably don’t need to tell you that.