There was a time many years ago when I was pretty decent at video games. I playedCall Of Duty 4in a team that went to some of the early tournaments in the UK, and later I was a topApex Legendsplayer on Xbox. I spent almost 4,000 hours on Apex during the pandemic. I could’ve learned how to play the piano, or finished my novel.
Instead, I spent my days drinking beer and playing video games with a bunch of scaffolders from Portsmouth I’d never met. Because of this history with FPS games, whenever I play a new game I’m innately competitive. But I’ve had to come to terms with a difficult truth: I suck at games.
FragPunkhas been a recent obsession of mine. I’ve never been a tactical shooter kinda guy, although, like everyone else, I’ve got a few hundred hours in Counter-Strike over the past 20 years. I never played Valorant, though I watched some of the esports from the sidelines. FragPunk feels like the ideal combination of the sweaty head-tapping of Valorant with the more goofy and fast-paced nature of modern CoD games. It’s the sort of game I would’ve loved as a hyper teenager. However, it turns out that any remnants of my ability to shoot people in the head completely left my hands when I turned 30.
Falling Behind…
I can still hold my own with the game sense of an aged veteran, but I can’t spin, twirl, and flick like I used to. There’s like some sort of delay between what my brain wants to do and what I can do with the mouse. Never has a game been more humbling than FragPunk. It has an extremely fast time-to-kill, which means reactions are more important than in a game like Apex, where you have plenty of outplay potential if you have good movement. Headshots also deal enormous damage, so if you are able to quickly tap on people’s heads you’ll win most gunfights.
As a result of my poor performances in games, where I’m usually going negative K/D and feeling bad about letting my team down, I’m starting to think I’m just not cut out for it anymore. The amount of time and effort I’d need to put into the game to even get halfway decent just isn’t worth it. I’m competing against the people that play for ten hours a day or have only played tac shooters for decades at this point. I’m old. I’m washed. I can’t keep up.
I am completely unable to play competitive games without getting wound up. I’ve sworn to never buy FIFA (or EA FC) again, have ditched Marvel Rivals, and FragPunk is about to go in the bin as well. In fact, I’ve just uninstalled it. There are so many games out there that I don’t need to spend my precious time dying to a juiced-up gamer half my age.
There must be a way to enjoy these games casually, but I just can’t. The last shooter that even had a shred of casual play left to it was Battlefield 2042, a half-baked game on all accounts. I am still excited for Battlefield 6, though, for that exact reason: it’s a game I can play even as an old man.
Of course, I could spend 100 hours in AimLabs perfecting my aim. I could buy a new mouse, upgrade my mouse mat, download some tiny crosshairs, and spend every waking moment when I’m not writing about sucking at games trying to get better at them. Or, I could download Keep Driving and pick-up hitchhikers, try out thenew Crusader Kings 3 DLC, and conquer the world in anotherCivilization 7playthrough. My days of FPS games are over. In the end, it’ll happen to you too.
