Tuesday, March 02, 2004
The New Face of Internet Gaming
The other day as I was getting my muffler replaced a guy told me about a site where he plays games online as he works. It's called addictinggames.com and it does, indeed, have a load of games that you wonder why, when you've finished with them, how you could have possibly spent as much time playing them as you did.
One of the games--the one in particular that he tipped me off to--involves flinging a space penguin into his ship with a sort of slingshot-catapult thing, taking into account the gravitational pull of the heavenly bodies, of course. It's really a fantastic little game, and the number of points you can rack up on a single good shot is truly gratifying.
I thought I did pretty good, nailing 250,000+ points on my first game--until I saw the winner board, and noticed that there were four people who had tied for first place on the high score list at a whopping 2,147,483,647 points. Guess I have some room for improvement.
I've noticed this every time I've played an online game. I'm an accomplished gamer, but since games have been going online, and I've been playing against other people, I realize that in most of the games I play--even the ones where normally I beat my friends on a consistent basis--I'm a mewling schoolboy compared to the maniacal magistrates who hold court over the proceedings. Who are these people, anyway? I know how long I would have to play to get 2 billion points on Spaced Penguin--is that how long these folks played to get their scores?
It's even worse on Xbox Live, where I regularly compete against players who have hundreds and hundreds of hours of game time. And as much as I enjoy a good, rousing game on Xbox Live, it'd be pretty tough to convince me that it's worth that much of my time. Though, not unlike Spaced Penguin, a game of Rainbow Six does eat up time at a magnificent pace.
So you'd think, if I'm going to go online to play a game where I'd get my butt kicked, it'd be a lot more efficient to just swing on by and play a game where I shoot a penguin out of a slingshot, rather than bullets out of a G3A3. At the end of the day, we can sit around and muse about the true differences between the two--no slingshot is really that big, while the guns are pretty lifelike; there's no blood if you miss the ship with your penguin; and there are fifteen other players who are also trying to shoot bullets out of their G3A3s, M-16s, TAR-21s, or whatevers.
But the biggest difference of all? About $50 bucks, I'd say. And for some reason it hurts a lot less to get my butt kicked by some other guy shooting a penguin.
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