As a full-time parent to a small person with an insatiable appetite for the novel, I am constantly trying to fill my days with as many new and interesting things as I can manage, new places, new people, new experiences, new ways of playing with the same toys. And I can’t help but feel like I’m failing at this whole parenting lark when we find ourselves reading the same old book and shoving the same few toys in our mouths over and over again.
So maybe it comes as no surprise that once the munchkin goes to bed1 and I have a little time to myself each evening, I find myself retreating over and over to the old reliable stalwarts. There’s been no novelty for me in my evening gaming lately, just the warm familiarity of tile games and the mildly infuriating familiarity of being absolutely pants at CounterStrike.
No really, apparently I’m just atrocious at CounterStrike.
I was never good at this game, at it requires both the hand-eye co-ordination and a sense of patience that I will never possess, but I’m currently suffering both from a sudden and unexplained decrease in my own abilities, and also an inexplicable improvement of everyone else in my skill level. Playing the game at the moment just feels like I’m suffering some kind of inexorable but otherwise indetectable mental decline.
Thankfully, being back in Australia means that I don’t have to suffer this indignity alone, and I’ve been very relieved to drag some of my old CS buddies from the before-times back into the game and relive the glory days. It’s been great fun to play together again, but it’s also been a great relief to find that it’s not just me and I don’t need to start looking into nursing homes just yet. Somewhere in the last few years everyone else playing the game in Australia/New Zealand just got damn good and left us in the dust. I’ve lost something like six or seven ranks in the year or so of infrequent play since I’ve come home, and at this point there’s not much further to fall.
In some ways this isn’t surprising, as few people are picking up a ten-year-old game, so those still playing have likely put a lot of hours in, but on the other hand it’s not a problem that I noticed when I was playing in the UK, so maybe it’s a weirdness of Valve’s ranking system being messed around in a smaller player pool or something.
Whatever the reason, I guess we’re just going to have to get used to being worse than everyone else, because the alternative would be picking up a new game to play together, and so far that’s project is not going that well.
But that’s a story for next week.
Roll on 7pm, I say. Sweet, sweet silence.