Started playing GTA 5 for the first time in my life

I think I am one of the only regular gamers on earth that can say this but I have honestly NEVER played a single minute of Grand Theft Auto 5. I've never even seen a minute of it played outside of little snippets that someone else would have in a story of theirs. I know nothing about it other than the fact that everyone else seems to love it.

There are a couple of reasons for this though.

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Gaming has almost always been a big part of my life but for real life reasons I walked away from gaming entirely in the early 2010's. I had a house that I lived in that was broken into and the main items that were stolen was my PS3, my PSP, and my gaming laptop. This was a big hit to me and I didn't play anything for a while after that. Later in yet another house that I lived into it was also broken into and my PS4 and my gaming desktop were stolen. I ended up making household security a major part of my life after these two incidents that happened about 2 years apart.

I also kind of saw it as an omen to not play videogames for a while and this stuck with me until near the end of the 2010's when I moved into a house and started to focus on health a lot more than I had in the past. I figured out that playing video games can actually be a health benefit if you are staying home to play video games instead of going out to the bars with your friends. This, combined with diet and exercise resulted in me getting back to being not fat.

It is strange to think about videogames actually helping someone to get in shape, but for me, it did the trick. It also reminded me that I really like videogames and I stuck with it but at that time GTA5 was kind of old news and it was still full price. I wasn't going to pay $50 for it so I just never did. But recently, the game became free on PS-Plus so well, there's no time like the present!

A lot of you who have been posting videos of playing it have inspired me to find out what all the hoopla is before the much-anticipated released of GTA6 is upon us.

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For those of you that have played the game, which I am presuming is most of you, the image above brings back memories, as will this one.

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Those are stills from the very first mission in the game entitled "North Yankton Bank Robbery." This mission kind of surprised me because it was pretty intense and it was unlike a lot of different tutorials that I had ever seen. This one doesn't hold your hand at all and doesn't really tell you what the buttons do. I got stuck for a while on the parts where you have to kill the security guard by switching characters and also how you have to "seek cover" when blowing the back door. The guy in my crew kept telling me to get to cover and was getting increasingly angry at me but I don't friggin know what button makes me seek cover. I still don't know actually. I hit every button until something happened and then immediately forgot it.

Despite not giving you any clear hand-holding information the mission is I presume, intentionally easy, and I made it through on my first time, even though it did take a while.

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The second mission with Franklin and Lamar is similarly difficult IMO. I failed this mission many times and was thankful on about the 3rd failure that it didn't make me start it all the way from the beginning. Let's just say that the car I chose was in far worse shape than my partner's was by the time we made it to the dealership. I flipped that sonofagun many many times trying to keep up with my partner and then figured out that being a leadfoot is not the way to get through this. Later I found out that driving too conservatively is also not going to work out.

I wasn't going to quit though, because it was entertaining and they did a very good job with this.

Just those two missions and then returning to I think Franklin was his name's house, I laid down to bed and that was all the gaming I had in me that night.

I can only kind of guess that this game doesn't tell you the controls so well because of the fact that it is not wanting to make it too easy for you or perhaps, they were banking on the fact that most of the playerbase was either going to be people who had played the other games or were going to be dedicated enough to look things up if they got stuck. I regret to inform that I am neither one of those things and if I do get stuck I am happy that GTA is well-known for not sticking you to any particular mission and if you want to kill some time you can just run around and bang hookers and steal cars or something.

I honestly know nothing about this game and wasn't really a huge fan of any of the ones that came before it. Given the immense popularity of these Rockstar classics, I feel as though I am in the minority with this opinion.

I do like what I have seen thus far though and I think I will stick with it. This is compounded by the fact that the last two games I have loaded up and played have basically pissed me off with how awful they are. At least with GTA5 I know that there is award-winning content in there so I'll probably stick with this one for a while.