Gamer Quirks

Some time last month, while chatting with a friend of mine (I don’t remember who, but let’s call him Ted) about our favorite games, I mentioned that one of mine was Flashback. To this Ted naturally replied:

“Never heard of it.”

So I explained: Flashback was a PC game that was ported to consoles in ’92. It came out for the Genesis, Super Nintendo, and the Sega CD. And I rented each port about 9 times before we finally bought the Sega CD version, at which point I played nothing but that for a solid year. Of course, Ted was shocked and, assuming he’d missed something, asked what the game was like. I replied:

It was a Prince of Persia-esque side-scroller, only, your guy, Conrad, probably had less flexible controls; it was like trying to control an ent, only the ent’s limbs were on hinges and rails, so it could only move in very specific ways (no nudging, for example; you press left and Conrad takes a perfectly measured step left. You press the button to draw your gun and Conrad stops moving and draws it, always, unless you’re rolling or jumping). There were AI aliens that would kill you in two seconds if they weren’t too busy being complete idiots, getting stuck on very simple obstacles. But all things considered, even though the game worked on pretty solid (if invisible) rails, it still managed to be ridiculously hard and incredibly interesting; one of the stages had you walking around a city called New Washington, doing menial jobs (like delivering packages) to insanely intense ones (like fixing the city’s overloaded power generator before it exploded and killed you and everyone).

“Oh,” Ted replied, mostly because I didn’t tell him exactly what I just wrote. I probably said something like, “There were aliens and you controlled a guy but the controls were kind of retarded… And I loved it.”

I remember later that night, coming home and talking to my brother about it. Really, I’d played the crap out of Flashback, a game most people haven’t even heard of. I felt like such a weird choice for me… Like the black sheep of my gaming career, only it was hilarious to admit it. Yeah, a little embarrassing, but also incredibly nostalgic and oddly empowering; we all have our favorite games of all time and they’re all usually taken from the same handful, but this was something different–something I realized I didn’t have to share with anyone. A gaming experience that, even if it was off kilter and full of faults, was still mine.

My brother smirked and said, “Well,  *I* beat Dracula for the Sega CD… way too many times.”

And I said, “Oh my God, that’s right!”

It was like duplo Castlevania! Only completely unfair! I didn’t remember until my brother reminded me a moment later, but there was a 50% chance the game would crash when you finally reached Dracula!

And man, it was true! He did play the crap out of that game! Determined to beat him, I reminded him that I beat Overblood about 5 times when we rented it, not comparable at all to my weird Flashback obsession (I’m *still* waiting for them to put it on XBL), but yet another of what I started thinking of as “gamer quirks”.

Now, I’m a guy who loves video game culture; the effect of MMO’s on gaming society, the myths gaming society creates and maintains, the slang associated with different games, all of it interests me. So discovering my gamer quirks meant defining them–“An addiction to an unpopular game or a small element of its game play. Also, a particular, ingrained gaming habit.”– and defining them meant immediately asking all of my friends for theirs:

• Ken, a math professor in training living in Mineola, NY confesses his crime: “Remember that Cool Spot game for the Genesis way back when? Well there was a spinoff of that game for the Gameboy. Except while the Genesis game was a platformer, the Gameboy game was a complete ripoff of the board game Othello. Also, the CPU was a cheating bastard. I could never win a damn game. I got so into my quest to beat the CPU that I actually stole this game right out of my best friend’s bedroom and played it until it stopped working some years later, having never earned a single victory.”
• Liam, a loss prevention detective in Manhattan tells about his gamer quirk, and, no, it’s not an addiction to an unpopular game, but it is an addiction to one of its errors in programming and, hey, that counts: “I’d just beaten Link’s Awakening for the first time and my brother finally agreed to tell me how to exploit the map glitch. The glitch itself is fairly simple; whenever Link has reached the edge of the gameboy’s screen and the game was about to switch to the next screen you pressed the Select button to bring up the map. If you timed it right when you exited the map you’d be on the next screen but at the far side of where you should have been if you’d entered the screen normally.
  The possibilities with this glitch were numerous. You could use it to access parts of the game that shouldn’t be available to you; awesome and a load of fun, but it was only the tip of the iceberg.  For me, the full potential of the glitch could only be accessed in caves. Caves were fairly limited designs guiding you along a specific path. The beauty of the glitch was that you could warp onto the walls of the cave, where the designers never expected you to be. Because they never figured you’d get onto the walls the designers didn’t put barriers around the edges preventing you from trying to walk onto the next screen. They also didn’t put any terrain there. So what happens when the rules of the game allow you to walk into a room that doesn’t exist? You force the game to create a room for you to enter. Each room was new and unexplored. The same wall could yield different rooms if you leapt off from a different place. It was  like exploring an undiscovered country.
  “I spent hours and hours exploring weird glitched-out rooms that were composites of other terrain in the game mashed together in sometimes grotesque ways, opening chests to find items that didn’t exist and never showed up in the inventory or duplicates of already existing boss items. In fact, I spent more time exploiting this glitch than playing the game the way it’s makers intended.”
• Joshua Kenney, founder of Professional Misanthropy, explains, “I am a loot whore. I don’t mean that I run end bosses in World of Warcraft until my fingers fall off to get that complete Tier 4 armor set.  I would, ‘cause I do love the shinies, but I’m usually too busy grabbing every single piece of loot every monster I killed has ever dropped. So I guess I’m more a loot kleptomaniac. Perhaps the gamer part of my brain grew up during the Great Depression, because I can’t stand to see perfectly good loot fade away simply because it’s not “worth it” to pick it up and sell it to a vendor back in town. Loot is always worth it.
  “It’s a useful skill early on in these games, when you’re trying to build up a bankroll, but the farther in you get, and the more you find yourself carrying stacks and stacks of loot, the more folly it becomes.  Which is why I’m usually so poor in Diablo-esque loot fests: I spend all my time picking up leather scraps and orc snot, even when that shit is way below my level.”

Okay. So, be honest; do you have one of your own gamer quirk? If so, comment below, or post #MyGamerQuirk on twitter! I’m dying to hear more of these!