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Pause for Thought
I found myself observing people on the Tube this evening as they distracted themselves with various gadgets. I no longer try and read the pulp novel of the month over the shoulders of other passengers anymore, they're all still reading Dan Brown.
One passenger was playing a PSP, tilting it this way and that as he attempted to corner the perfect corner. Another passenger was using stylus on screen to drag solitaire cards to and fro.
And suddenly I remembered myself holding a SNES controller, sliding my thumb from the X button to the B button, holding down the right shoulder button and executing a pixel-perfect braking-corner manoeuvre in F-Zero what must have been more than ten years ago.
A little later I remembered an impressive bit of shield/engines/laser management that segued nicely into an all-out rocket attack on a cruiser in Freespace 2, the joystick responding perfectly to a split-s in a tricky dogfight situation.
And most recently a case of hands instinctively sliding across the keyboard into the old familiar WASD and number pad configuation required to pilot the Apache gunship across the streets of San Andreas, over the rows of palm trees, under the freeway bridges, letting loose volley after volley of firey missile death and chain gun slaughter.
The best games make you forget that you're trapped using a fairly inefficient input device to acheive spectacular things.
May.29.2007