Ever really liked doing something but were extremely bad at it?
I’m not talking about having a passing interest in, say, cooking and having one unfortunate incident with creating oven charcoal, or martial arts and quitting after realizing the only thing you’re attacking is the mat with your face.
I’m talking about really enjoying something on a consistent basis and yet being somehow awful at it. I realize that for some of you, a hobby like this might have some…unfortunate consequences for the people around you (I’m looking at you, college friend who wanted to learn the saxophone but ended up making enough noise that your instrument mysteriously “disappeared” at the end of the semester). But for me, my terrible acumen is only harmful to myself, most of the time.
I’m as stealthy as a dinosaur when it comes to games that require stealth. My rating would literally be “Tyrannosaurus Rex” on the scale of animal comparisons to how well I lurk and sneak past enemies in stealth games.
The Metal Gear series of games is among my favorites of all time, and I’ve been playing it since I was a wee lad with little to no friends to play with on a summer day except for my trusty Nintendo. I loved it from the minute I landed with my 8-bit green fatigues and discovered the Cigarettes Snake was shipped with were bad for me.
But I was terrible at it.
Somehow I wasn’t able to understand that there was a game out there that didn’t require you to press the shoot button til everything was dead. It might not have helped that I was raised on a steady diet of Contra or Life Force, which required you to annihilate your thumbs on your buttons to destroy everything. This resulted in a lot of poor decisions trying to learn how to stay out of sight and when not to make noise.
I “feel” like this is the perfect time to shoot my gun!
200 bullets and vehicles in the way…there’s no way I lose if I shoot them.
I don’t think it sees me. Does this game have a jump button?
As I stumbled through the game somehow being still relied upon as the hero that could save the world from nuclear warfare, I realized that I’d become thankful for boss fights – not because beating them was satisfying or that it was something different, but because you weren’t able to hide during them. Fighting a giant ass bipedal walking tank with the ability to launch nukes? No problem. Trying to spend 30 agonizing minutes getting past 1 security camera, an attack dog, and two soldiers who somehow had the inability to see 50 feet in front of them like Mr. Magoo? Kill me now, I’m sweatin’ bullets.
You’d think as I got older and wiser, that I’d get better at being sneaky and ninja-like. Sadly, this was not to be the case.
Frequently, perfect hiding spots like this:
…would turn into something like this:
Part of this might be because I probably have an impatient, twitchy button finger. My friends will attest to this, but I feel like if I’m sitting still for longer than 30 seconds trying to figure out what to do, that I might somehow lose the game – not because of the fact that we made a mistake or something, but that I might actually die of boredom and be unable to control my character to win the game.
Guys, isn’t this more exciting than sneaking past them to steal the documents? Guys? Guys…?
Thankfully, things have gotten a bit easier for me – in part because the game series has taken mercy on dinosaur stompers like me and implemented ways to take out enemies without having to sneak past them. The silencer-equipped sniper rifle became my best friend, and in the most extreme of situations, I could just resort to blatant, yet gentlemanly fisticuffs to dispatch my enemies:
Totally fair.
Still, despite all of my stealth failings, I’ve remained a happy fan of the genre. Why? Because for every 20th time out of the other 19 that I was unable to sneak past my enemies, it was supremely satisfying to actually do it. I felt like a true master of my environment, a shadow undetected and deadly, silent and agile.
For the rest, well…you know how I handled it:
