Cheryl on the Web

There’s been a gaming breakthrough in our household this week: I found a GameCube game that I like and that I voluntarily play when I have a chance! Pretty pathetic breakthrough perhaps, considering my husband’s profession, but I am the ultra-picky gamer.

As a kid, I had an Atari, and I enjoyed playing ping-pong and frog-run-across-the-traffic and king conga or something like that (names please!) for a while, but I have a really short attention span. Eventually Mom and Dad sold the Atari because we never played it. Fast-forward in time, and here I am 20 years later surrounded by modern appealing games, and things haven’t changed much. Only in addition to having a short attention span (read: the game cannot be too hard for me), I’ve discovered that I don’t like games that rush me. A game is to me an exploration so there should be no rush or time limit. I mean, when’s the last time you saw someone running through dense brush on an uncharted island, working against time to find the treasure chest? I thought not! No, the hero takes his/her time wandering around the island until he discovers the treasure.

Games that don’t rush me: Sudoku Master on the handheld Nintendo DS is the first one I discovered, I use it to put myself to sleep in bed when I’ve had a stressful day at work. Says enough about the game’s design right there I would think, I’m a developer and I could’ve designed a better interface. But hey, it serves its purpose. Then I discovered Mario vs Donkey Kong for the Nintendo DS and I really liked it for two reasons: one, you could earn more points by rushing but it wasn’t required, and two, it holds my attention because it continually builds on itself, introducing small new twists with each level.

But this week, I discovered another game that holds my attention - a game that, to me, is a “proper” game because it’s for the GameCube instead of a handheld - Paper Mario! (The game’s been around forever but I have to be in a very unique mood to try a new game, so it rarely happens.) I am a very dyslexic gamer. What I can whip up from a technical perspective using a computer somehow must detract from my sense of direction, orientation, and intuition when playing games (or in real life, I admit it). That’s one of the reasons I have so much trouble finding GameCube games I like - they are almost all 3D, while proportionately more of the Nintendo DS games are 2D. And my brain is 2D. Or sometimes it feels like it must be 1D. But I can actually play Paper Mario! And what’s more, I like playing it enough that I can play it for hours in a row. Breakthrough.