Short Form:

Just One More Go

I’m sorry. This post should have gone up yesterday, but I played Minecraft for three hours instead.

No specific event sprang to mind while thinking of this week’s Weekly Nuke topic, but a cause did. I’ve found that one of the reasons I can lose an hour or two at a time with a game is due to quick restarts.

I first noticed it while playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 when I completed it without knowing how to manual. I figured it out roughly an hour after finishing the game. Do you realise how hard that game is when you don’t know how to manual? Anyway, I became a master at grinding and spamming flip tricks to increase my multiplier, and spending hours at a time playing it without noticing the time flying by.

It’s so easy to restart in that game; it became second nature. Because of the perfection needed (partially due to my own stupidity) to complete an objective, any mistake was swiftly met with pause, down, X to restart. Because the restart was so quick, it was less frustrating starting again. I find that if I’m failing a lot in a game with long load times I’ll just give up and come back to it later.

I’ve already explained my love of Geometry Wars in a previous Weekly Nuke. I lost another couple of hours while playing it over the past weekend because of the battledrome. Going from dying to restarting takes roughly one second, which turned a quick go at beating a friend’s score into an hour long session I had to drag myself away from.

Another battledrome game, Super Crate Box, had the same effect on me. So did Super Meat Boy, and anything else with a quick restart for that matter. While I may not lose an entire day or weekend to these kind of games, they do eat up a lot of time. I keep thinking I’ll just have a quick go, but there’s no such thing. I fall for it every time. You can’t just have one game of Geometry Wars, it just isn’t possible.