I first saw Space Invaders in an Osco drug in Mundelein, Illinois in the late 70s. It’s fair enough to say that it changed my life.
I had piles of Atari 2600 games, and I was the first kid in the neighborhood to have a ColecoVision. I had a subscription to Joystick magazine, and when the nearby Pinball Palace didn’t satisfy my love for video games, an arcade across town with more games did. I jumped on most home consoles when they came out; I spent late nights and early mornings playing games in arcades while others were shutting down bars. I was a video game junkie.
Somewhere along the way, that faded away…
The Choice
I stopped playing video games after the initial version of the X-Box came out. By that time, as much as I like games, I was done. It wasn’t that I came to a point that I no longer liked games — I just looked at the free time I had and thought about how I was spending it. The choice was simple: I could play games in my free time or…I could write, podcast, blog, and do other things.
It’s a personal choice. I don’t care how people spend their free time, but for me, other things won out over games…
Goat Simulator
Earlier this month, Goat Simulator came out.
It wasn’t just the first video game I bought in almost a decade…I pre-ordered it!
The Friday I got access, I played for a couple hours. Over that weekend, my wife and I had a couple beers and played the hell out of the stupidity that is a goat running around town while destroying things
.
When we got the goat into orbit, we figured it was time to stop.
Achievement Unlocked
There are about 25% more achievements to be unlocked in our Goat Simulator game, but…I will never unlock them on my system. The remaining achievements are “video game” achievements — by that, I mean the kinds of things where one has to jump perfectly to reach certain points to jump again and again to hopefully land just right in order to unlock an achievement.
For me, that’s where video games lose me. If I’m going the spend hours fixated on something, why spend that time jumping a goat on trampolines and dirty mattresses just so I can say, “I was in the storage container on the crane!” (Especially when I can see others do it on YouTube.)
If I’m going to spend that much time on my computer, I’d rather knock out another chapter of a novel or edit another podcast — that’s a better achievement for me…
