Virtual Insanity!

Ghosts & Goblins was perhaps as unforgiving and cruel as games could get yet we kept playing them over and over again...

There’s something wrong when you’ve written up seven posts and this is the only one that wasn’t scrapped since it was the least frustrating to write. To anyone who checks this site for any other reason outside of typing “kelloggs” into an image search engine, you’ll have to wait a little longer for a proper blog update as I currently don’t have the will or mentality to write a competent piece. To cut a incredibly long story blissfully short, the week gone by has been one I’d like to forget as anything that could have gone wrong, went wrong.

My attempts to clear my mind and reorganize my thoughts has also been another source of frustration for me. Everything I’ve done for enjoyment has become laborious, so much so that even my beloved games aren’t having the impact they once had, enjoyable challenges instead becoming a catalyst for discovering how many swears I can fit into a five second gap between dying and restarting. The kind of frustration that actually makes you want to fling your controller into the wall because you feel it didn’t recognize that I wanted to move my character .01cm further to the right to avoid the enemy like I wanted him to. Instead, he was killed/captured/decapitated/beaten by the evil monster/zombie/dragon/shadow creature/gingerbread man who’s sole reason of existence is to stop me from completing the bloody game and heap further misery upon me.

...whereas on the other hand, games like Twilight Princess shouldn't be frustrating due to their forgiving game mechanics.

Under no circumstances should I find this in any way frustrating! I mean I’ve played games since the days of Rick Dangerous, Bionic Commando and Ghosts & Goblins on the Atari ST which were all massively unforgiving and punished you if you so much as thought about putting a foot wrong. This was also a time where saving games was a rarity and you had only three easily lost lives to complete the game which made it more a test of skill and patience rather than something fun. Yet I enjoyed those games no matter how frustrating it got so the fact that I’m getting so easily annoyed with something that only takes ten seconds to reload and reach the point I died bothers me greatly.

Clearly not an exciting image of Eon but it's a game definitely worth spending your time playing just for its mellow tone.

At the moment, the only game that I’m able to play and not completely burst a vein is the flash game, Eon, with its pixelated graphics and easygoing style and tone, it’s a puzzler that has the unique combination of being both challenging and relaxing. However, I’m still finding myself getting frustrated when I can’t complete any of the puzzles, a feat I once thought impossible when I played it two weeks ago but perhaps there’s some things that require more than just simple escapism to solve or forget about.

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