One week down, and I am happy to report I have made progress in my Four in February challenge. In case you are just tuning-in, you can catch up with the introduction here. I would love to tell you, dear reader, that I have already completed a game out of the four. Alas, that did not quite come to pass. Still, I am happy with what I was able to get done this week but am also left with a philosophical question about what this challenge requires.

I am still deep in my obsession of Destiny. I am a Destiny apologist. Yes, it has some issues as a game but those are minor compared to the enjoyment I get from playing. Since its launch, it has been the only game I have played on my PS4 except when my wife and I play a game together. So, my first step to completing this challenge was to stop playing Destiny, or at least make room in my gaming time for games that are not Destiny. To this end, I was mostly successful. Tuesday, the day the servers for Destiny reset for the week, was still devoted to Destiny but I played games other than or in addition to Destiny every other day of the week.

I did not play any Infamous: Second Son. I did take it out of its wrapper and get it installed to my PS4. That is progress, right? I will get into it next week. Of course, that is the same attitude that placed it on my Pile of Shame in the first place.

I was very excited to start Shadow of the Colossus. As I sat down to play, I hoped that I had already downloaded the game. I have a slow DSL connection so game downloads are generally an overnight affair. The good news was I had already downloaded the game. The bad news was that I needed a system update for my PS3. Luckily, I have a PS+ subscription so the update was already downloaded and I just had to wait for it to install. A few minutes later and I started playing.

My initial impression is that this game is beautiful. Its age shows a bit, even in the HD enhanced edition, but not enough to overcome the art direction and atmosphere of the game. I took off in search of the first colossus, soaking in the well-crafted environments. I got to the cliffs, and started to run into the real challenge of the game. The control scheme for the game is not intuitive. The button combinations and overall control scheme takes some adjustment. For example, what the game calls “normal” and “inverted” in the options menu is the exact opposite of what I expected them to be. I played for a bit and took down the first two colossi. I stopped there because I want to enjoy this game and if I played longer I was worried I would be frustrated by the true enemy of the game: the controls.

The game that got the most play time from me this week was FTL. If you are unfamiliar with this game, it is a strategy game in which you are commander of a spaceship on the run from the rebel fleet trying to stop you from delivering intelligence about that rebel fleet to the Federation’s leadership. In order to do this, you have to make a series of faster than light jumps between navigation beacons in star systems. At each jump, there is a chance for an encounter that often involves some space combat. You have to manage ship resources while doing your best to not die. You can collect scrap that you can then use to upgrade your ship’s systems to hopefully make your future encounters easier to survive. Meanwhile, each jump you make brings the rebel fleet closer in pursuit, so you cannot just take a pleasure cruise around the universe.

I have had a lot of fun playing FTL but I have come to the conclusion that I am not very good at it. On normal difficulty I have not yet made it past the third stage. So, I kicked the difficulty to easy and was able to get to the final stage but have yet to defeat the final boss. I will keep trying.

I only played through the tutorial stage of Uncharted: Golden Abyss before pausing. My main complaint with the Uncharted series has always been the shooting mechanics. They have always frustrated me, especially since I like the stories in the series so much. I do not like the gameplay getting in the way of my enjoyment of the experience.

This concern leads me to my philosophical question. Does finishing a game on easy difficulty negate this challenge? As a younger gamer, I was time rich and game poor. Megaman was awesome in part because it was hard but I had a lot more time to devote to that single game. Now that I am older, I still game as a hobby mainly because of the experience I get from the games. That experience can be different for different games. I do not get the same thing out of playing Peggle as from The Last of Us, but they are both valid gaming experiences. I have nothing to prove to anyone about the validity of my personal game experience. Therefore, I am going to play both Uncharted and FTL on easy difficulty setting and not feel bad about it. As I said in the introduction, gaming is supposed to be fun, not a chore. I will play these games to get the most enjoyment out of them.

That is all for this week. Check back in next week and see if I manage to complete any of these games.