After I no longer lived in shared housing with friends and didn’t invest in a gaming PC or console for myself, my gaming pursuits stagnated from the mid-2000s. I re-kindled my love of gaming in 2007. I had little disposable income so concluded it would be more cost-effective to get a previous generation console, the original Xbox, and cheaper pre-owned games but impulsively left the store with an Xbox 360. I didn’t regret the decision as the 360 was a massive jump up from the original Xbox. I would argue, in terms of differences between generations, this was the largest. I spent all my time with my best friend who lived in the flat above but he wasn’t really interested in gaming at all, so Xbox gaming was a solitary affair for me for a couple of years.
My Xbox 360 had gotten the infamous red ring of death but my friend had sourced us both a good deal on a couple of Xbox 360 slims in 2010. He struggled for a long time to get the hand-eye coordination needed for first-person shooters and even driving games. It was agonising to be frank. It felt that no sooner had we got the consoles, then I’d moved from Birmingham to start a job down South. I would play on the 360 on the rare occasion but for the most part we’d both shelved our consoles. He’d discovered Fable II (wasn’t my sort of game) and loved it and I, in turn, had discovered Minecraft. We would play the odd game online together such as Battlefield 1943 but most of the time my console gaming was more solitary than social.
I’d actually dismissed Minecraft for years since its release as its 8-bit styled graphics seemed a backward step for a modern console. I was asked to help a teenage out with their gaming addiction. They were addicted Minecraft specifically. My logic was to understand the game and get into their mindset so that I’m not blindly preaching at them. I bought a copy myself and, perhaps ironically, became addicted myself. There’s an article in itself – I am dubious as to gaming addiction. I know for myself when I’ve had periods of long hours gaming in the night its been the times in my life I have been down and unable to share my feelings with others. Quite simply, for some young men in particular, gaming serves as an escape.
Minecraft was simply brilliant. My Brimingham friend couldn’t understand why I was making so much fuss about the game but with a little persuasion he acquired a copy and, in turn, got hooked. We loved Minecraft. He claims it had transformed his life by unleashing a creative mindset. You can enjoy Minecraft in ‘survival’ mode as a relatively typical game but it’s when it comes to the creative building or the problem-solving redstone circuits, that it’s true power is realised. There’s even a (valid) educational version of Minecraft where you can use block style coding. Minecraft would be number two on my ‘desert island games’ list. It was, and still is, awesome.
The game has a small learning curve but it takes a couple of hours before something clicks and you realise just how incredible the game is. I suppose that may depend though on how creative you are. I haven’t played Minecraft properly for a couple of years now but I still have a world of creations on a server ready to jump back into.
We got copies of GTA V for the 360 and that was another game we both hammered online together and separately. I doubt anybody will need an introduction to GTA V. I was happy with my Xbox 360 for a decade – mostly because I acquired a catalogue of games faster than I’d play them so I saw little point in upgrading. Although the Xbox One had better graphics, it all seemed to be the same gameplay mechanics in essence though – and its mainly the mechanics I love about gaming. I think the changes in gameplay mechanics from the 90s to the late 2000s were massive but the iterations nowadays seem so much smaller.