4Game

yesterday, i finished the fourth season of The Expanse and immediately felt a huge space-shaped hole in my life. the books are still in the mail and the Mass Effect trilogy remaster is still months away, so i began looking for something to scratch this light-years wide itch. Elite Dangerous was on sale on the playstation store for like nine dollars, and every review i read told me this game wasn't the most forgiving towards casual players, and i am the very definition of a casual player.

and god, i am so grateful i ignored my doubts and went for it anyway.

sure, most of those first few hours after the tutorials were spent burning up in stars i tried scooping fuel from like a drunken spacefaring icarus, or getting disoriented inside an airlock and subsequently blasted to pieces by station security, or watching the timer tick down while i ineptly try to line up my ship with the landing pad before giving up and shamefully switching the auto dock on

but man, those moments where it hits just right, and all of a sudden you're weaving in and out of the planetary rings of a gas giant, jettisoning your cargo to dissuade the pirates on your tail, hoping your fsd recharges in time because dammit, you just got this adder …

i've never ever felt anything like that in a video game.

(also, how freaking cool is the term 'frame shift drive' and how freaking cool is it that Verity says it like 'friendship drive')

can't wait to finish my perfect jazz playlist so i can pretend i'm Spike Spiegel trying to intercept a shipment of red eye. can't wait to trick my ride out into a smuggling ship and whisk refugees away from war zones. can't wait to get a rig big enough to space truck my way along the outer rim playing Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" at the edge of the freaking galaxy. can't wait to see those c-beams glitter in the dark.

i just … wow.

this game, man. this fucking game.