As I near the big Four-Oh, the ripe ancient age of 40 fucking years of age, I have become envenomed by the following aliments:
I am taken by a hunger to consume all naval adventure monographs and movers e.g. The Wager, AMC’s hit series The Terror, Dan “Patrick O’Brian” Brown’s Master and Commander series, and so forth.
My withered hands are forced to keycap in replaying Interplay’s 90’s-era bot-blasting ball-busting banger Descent, as well as its brethren Descent II, and Descent 3.
This thread is for talking about what form your midlife time crisis has taken, or WILL take.
Now I played the fuck out of Descent as a youngling but I never came close to beating it, nor Descent II, or Descent 3. At the time I distinctly remember thinking “this is impossible” and just never really made an honest attempt to beat any of them. The farthest I got was D3, where I neared the final level and somehow lost interest.
As a result, it has been in the back of my mind my entire life how “those games are impossible” which is certainly not the case at all. I feel like I need to beat them to get some strange form of Gamer Closure, so that I may enter this next grand chapter of my life free of doubt.
It turns out the Steam release of Descent is an incredibly shitty rip of the GoG release that launches through DOSBox, but the community rocks so there is a great mod that grants controller support, a windowed mode, higher resolution, and the ogg format of the game’s kickass soundtrack.
Blew through a few levels, then hit a genuine challenge on stage 4, which I’m really enjoying. This game is still fast and fun.
Real big fan of how the mod enables a feature they once wanted but had to reign in: The debris of the bots now remains, rather than despawning quickly, meaning that you just have chunks of bots floating zero-G in your various arenas. Love it.
I don’t know whether getting back into Final Fantasy XI necessarily counts as a midlife crisis. It’s probably some kind of mistake, but I feel like I should have more all-encompassing obsession—more compulsion—if this is really going to count as a crisis.
humhum, posting from the Netherworlds (lands?) itt:
Life after 40 (canned laughter-track preloaded) has been a mixed gaming bag, tbh:
main titles that stuck w/ me/played since then are
Armored Core 6
FF7R#1&2
Nier Automata
Outer Wilds
some more tri-Ace rpgs
and lots of 'em cars going fast games
did anything specific stick though?
yes indeed, there’s a difference that manifested itself somewhere between my 20 and 40:
am far more likely to try things/fiddle with systems to eek out that minor advantage/loophole that gets me through the door, whereas i wanted to go fast earlier. You could call it enjoying the crunchiness of Systems, in a way?
that and yeah, using Monaco as a benchmark for putting down laps in a top-flight-prototype (Caddy LMDh) like i did in GT3 with the Toyota GT-One (a.k.a TS020) more than 20 years ago.
You’d think with age, reflexes gone south and proximity to guardrails, you’d rather prefer wide and open tracks — nnnnope, fwr had lots of fun battling with my nephew until we had cracked into serious contender territory (and countless tubs). Fun times…
so if anything, it seems like age honed some preferences, whereas the tolerance levels for trial&error have been hardened/being more lenient now?
am far more likely to try things/fiddle with systems to eek out that minor advantage/loophole that gets me through the door, whereas i wanted to go fast earlier. You could call it enjoying the crunchiness of Systems, in a way?
I’m definitely finding myself eating every single part of the buffalo in these, my wizened years. I feel like playing in the space and finding some system or aspect that was not well-communicated (but there!) has happened enough times that I make it point to search for it.
In Descent, for example, I’ve never used the goddamn mines or the rear view, and you can actually use this if you fly through a room, drop a ton of them around, get the hornets riled, and book it out. A very fun little bit of business I never played with when I was a kid, and would just stick with the one thing that worked.
I mean, have you seen the shit I’m posting about lately? EGG Console games, Hydlide, and now Falcom shit. This is a Midlife Time Crisis if ever there was, and I’m good with it.
I feel like I am accelerating rapidly into old man status at an early age. I am becoming interested in ancient games and history books. I can feel my skin moulting and underneath is… my father!
I’ve got a thread of my own coming up which feels like more rapid descent into becoming obsessed with the minutia of my own memories.
you know how in many games (e.g. Doom, Goldeneye 007) you can hold forward + strafe and due to uncapped movement this actually makes you move faster than just walking forward? a bunch of games have this “oversight”. well, in Descent, the same is true, but you actually have two different forms of strafing and none of it is capped. therefore, the fastest movement (and required speedrunner tech) is “tri-coording”, using forward + both strafes at once to get faster movement speed. you’re looking at the whole game all cattywampus, it’s fucking incredible.
ive only ever played like an hour here and there of diablo 2/3 so maybe my midlife crisis will be rinsing looter action rpgs, maybe I’ll become a path of exile person
do also keep thinking about getting into ff11, a game i “rage quit” in 2003
tho i turned forty in august so best get a move on
My general midlife time crisis seems to be my evolution into being a Collector so maybe I’ll wind up picking an old console of yore and start collecting (but never, of course, playing) old games. I’m thinking handheld. Maybe PSP, or GBA? Both?
I don’t think I’ve hit my midlife time crisis quite yet but I can see it on the horizon and it looks a lot like it might be obsessing over a perfect MiSTer setup.
I dunno I seem to just be buying & playing games one at a time off a little list I keep as a text file almost exclusively populated by recommendations from around here same way I have for like 15 years. But it would make a lot of sense that the concept of a midlife crisis couldn’t penetrate my brain
in AC6, i really (Like, really) enjoy repeating the same mission over and over again to grind out some $$$ for a new part.
Mission of choice is defeating the TesterAC, and whenever i am coming back to AC6 after putting it aside for a while, i end up repeating it a few times just to get accustomed to the control scheme, get accustomed to the UI, movement etc.
so since it is 2025 and didn’t have played AC6 yet, history DID repeat itself again…TesterAC has had the floor wiped w/ him, poor sap.
I started getting the Japanese-language version of every game I play, starting with 13 Sentinels. I had learned the language in my twenties but let it rust away during my thirties.
At some point a switch flipped in my head and my feelings about the language went from “useless skill because I don’t plan anymore to live in Japan” to “unnecessary in a fun hobbyist way, and lets me reconnect with a youthful enthusiasm”
Aside from games, I’ve also been throwing myself into a lot more creative projects recently to try and use the energy I have before its lost to the next decades. Like an urgent reflex. Going out and doing more photography has unexpectedly brought me back to my art student days but devoid of the emotional unreadiness.
