Every few months, I see a post online (usually on YouTube or Reddit), about someone who has “spent hundreds of hours playing Skyrim.” They talk about the freedom, the exploration, the endless quests, and the world that never seems to run out of surprises. And they can't get enough of it.

I tried to be one of those people. I really did. But it just doesn't work out for me. For one reason or another, I find myself switching to a different game and never really feeling the urge to get back to Skyrim.

I can see what makes it special to other people, but it just doesn't have the same hold on me.

A few days ago, after reinstalling Starfield yet again — this time to focus on leveling up my piloting skills so I can finally fly Class B and C ships — I realized something: what Skyrim is to so many gamers, Starfield is to me.

If my save file is to be believed, I've spent over 300 hours playing Starfield. And that's on the same character I started the game with. There's no other game in my library that I've spent this much time on.

I know a lot of gamers hate Starfield. I'm not sure if its because it launched as an Xbox/PC exclusive. Or if its because of the many flaws that the game has (and it has many). But every few months, I also run into posts that say Starfield is dead. And yet, here I am, loading up the game for the nth time, ready to take another crack at these Crimson Fleet pirates.

I might be in the minority here, but I think Starfield is a great game. And I just wanted to share that. I hope more people give it a try.

Tags: #Starfield #Reflection

At one point, I was perched on the roof of a building and jumped down to kill a Goblin guard. My character stabbed him in the back and then slit his throat. I kinda flinched at that animation when I realized my kids were watching it as it happened. There's also a variety of execution animations when fighting enemies. There's one where, with the enemy prone on the ground, my character grabbed his leg to twist him around, then stabbed him multiple times in the chest. There's one where the enemy gets stabbed on his side, then on his neck. There's lots of these brutal killing animations in the game.

To be fair, this is all fun to me, an adult. I feel like older teenagers will feel the same way. I feel like such a badass taking down Goblins and Orcs this way. But again, this is not exactly kid friendly content. And since my kids usually watch me play, I end up stopping to pick another game to play. Eventually, the game gets uninstalled to make way for other games that I could play around my kids.

I wonder how other parents who play videogames, handle this kind of scenario. Do you simply play that specific game when the kids are asleep? Or do you just accept the fact that your kids will be exposed to violence and gore eventually, and try to explain it ahead of time?

Tags: #Reflection #Journal

This is an interesting take on the Forza Horizon series of games. While I don't agree with everything the presenter said, I do agree that the Forza Horizon 5 game became boring to me after a few hours. A lot of what was said in this video is true. In Forza Horizon 5, you start off with great cars and that kind of makes attaining other cars meaningless. Why spend time earning money to buy other cars, when after just a few hours of gameplay, you've already got multiple supercars in your garage to choose from.

Like what did I even do to earn that new Corvette Stingray, or that new Lamborghini, or even that Lexus LFA? Nothing, I did nothing. These are the kind of cars that I feel like you should only get later in the game, after you've done your fair share of racing, after you've earned the money to purchase them. But not in Forza Horizon 5. You just get new cars every 30 minutes or so. It's kinda crazy. The game just sort of hands you cars left and right. And because of that, after a few races, I pretty much lost interest.

And if the game is not handing you cars for free, it's giving you easy money. This makes buying cars that are hard to buy in real life, very easy in the game. I get why they did it, it's a videogame not real life. But they're making it too easy and that is taking away any sort of satisfaction you get from being able to purchase a certain car.

They took away the grind and progression, which made for a really shallow videogame experience. It's more like driving a racing movie than playing a racing videogame.

I honestly now play Forza Horizon 5 just to drive around and take screenshots. It has amazing looking graphics and so I love taking screenshots. But that also seems to be the only thing I want to do in the game. Even the driving around is not that fun to me. I try to do the “Barn Find” missions to sort of give me a goal when driving around. But other than that, I'm just there to take screenshots.

After reading all that I wrote down above, the answer just dawned on me. I now understand why Forza Horizon 5 is this way. It's all about instant gratification. This need to satisfy players with instant gratification, is ruining modern videogames.

Tags: #ForzaHorizon5 #Forza #Reflection