A Bad Game Won’t Kill You

In primitive times we had to be careful. Lions, Bears, Dinosaurs, and Rose Lappin all wanted to kill us with their fiery claws and talons, and they didn’t need a killing license to do it. If you slept in the wrong cave you would die from a spider or snake. Today, we can all walk around in relative peace, but it seems like the fear from those times still remains inside us. The lion is now the Wii, threatening your idle-handed living room comfort. The bear is a casual non-gamer, arrogantly having fun with inferior technology. Dinosaurs are fanboys of a game or system you don’t own, and they must all be killed. Rose Lappin is still alive.

If you read Twitter or gaming forums you’ll see people complaining every day about a song they don’t like or having a cry over their favourite Olympian getting a silver medal. I don’t see this because I follow cool people, but it’s an obvious occurrence that occasionally flashes through with a retweet. You could say it’s no big deal, but when it happens to you: it’s everything. Figuring out what game to buy is a serious problem. You might only enjoy a game slightly as opposed to a sure thing like Call of Duty that you’ve invested hundreds of hours in. For some reason more of the same is where our money is going, not because it’s exciting, but because it’s safe. You’re expecting more fun, but that drains some of the life out of it. This is why the same shit games keep selling, because people are too stupid to realise that buying a bad game won’t kill you. It’s not a risk. Videogames aren’t safe or comforting, they’re EXCITING and FUN!

What’s the worst that could happen? You might waste $50 on a game that you only spend a few hours with. You might be curled up in a ball, wondering what the fuck happened to Square-Enix as you collect the tears dripping from your cheeks. That’s a fair concern, there’s no reason to buy a bad game if you can get a good one. The problem is we see bad games as “threats” and usually dismiss them entirely. I don’t think anyone has a problem with Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom, but it was never really given a chance because it was buried by “safe” games. By the time the adventurers among us had trekked out into the wilderness and confirmed it was a good game to the tribe, the game was already $5 and the company had gone under. A lot of people are offended by Dragon Quest X right now – it could be a great game, but it’s online and on Wii and it’s not like Dragon Quest VIII so we better get our spears ready just in case.

Take off your clothes and bust the fuck out of that comfort zone; it’s not where games belong – save that feeling for eating and sleeping. Buy a game you’ve never heard of. When you’re still standing at the end of the day you can appreciate life in a new way.