Commanded and Conquered: I think I'm in an abusive relationship with a 26-year-old video game

I really have to stop playing the old games so much, but I do keep winning. 

For a large part of the early 21st century, I was 10 years behind on my video games. It would take a decade before the games I played became cheap enough, or the computers I owned were grunty enough, and I would be clocking up GTA IV while everyone else was on V.

The situation has become inevitably worse, and I'm still plying GTA IV while everybody else in the world is frothing for VI, and I'm still playing the Command and Conquer games that came out 20 years ago.

I lost track of contemporary games when they all went online, and I have no interest in playing with other people, I just want to tackle a game without the randomness of the human factor. So I'm still playing the games that came out just after the turn of the century, and they have all the complexity I desire. I don't care if the graphics aren't as high def as the more modern versions, I was never into games for the visuals.

I always liked the Command and Conquer games, they appealed to my sense of tactics and strategy. I don't even know if they still make them, but it doesn't matter if they do, because I'm still happy with Red Alert 2 Yuri Revenge.

My main issue is that I get stuck on particularly hard levels of particular games, and just want to play them over and over until I master them. I can't stop, even when it gets majorly infuriating, or my back aches from sitting down for too long. 

I broke the habit last time by losing the disc I had of the first decade of C+C games, somewhere in the pile of old Uncut music CD compilations. But then I rediscovered that disc recently, and holy shit, it still works on our aging PC. Kinda.

I could play one of those addictive levels just fine (it's the last stage of the Chinese campaign on Generals, which is still fucking hard to win, even with a strategy I'm still working on), but my favourite level of C+C to ever play is the skirmish on on Red Alert 2 where you're facing off against seven other brutal enemies, all out to get you.

And while I can play that level, it does keep crashing on me, and I have to shut down the whole thing and start again.

It's a well-known software problem, something to do with the graphics falling over when confronted by the might of Windows 10, and I tried all the patches and none of them work.

But I still play it, it takes a lot longer because I have to manually save it every 30 seconds, and it keeps crashing. Sometimes it lasts for 10 minutes before crapping out, sometimes it crashes out in less than a minute, but I do keep winning.

I do win! And I wanna keep on winning, so I keep playing it and learn to live with the random shutdowns during crucial stages, and then it fucks me over in new ways, like just showing a black screen if any kind of notification comes through, and I still keep playing and I do keep winning, even when it feels like it's abusing me for fun. 

I do keep winning.