One More Go

I’ve always fancied my chances of making it as a fighter pilot. I barely understand what keeps a plane in the air, or why there are quite so many buttons in the cockpit, but nonetheless, I’ve always thought I would be a natural at flying a jet. I guess I’ll never actually find out, you can’t just hop in a plane and run some sort of obstacle course to find out. The reason I’ve always thought I might stand a chance though, video games. [I’ve been go-karting recently, which is probably the closest i will ever come to being in a fighter jet, and now realise just how daft a thought process this was -Ed.]

I play a lot of video games, way more than a 30 year old bloke who doesn’t work in the video game industry should. Its been that way since the Christmas morning there was a Nintendo 64 and a copy of Goldeneye waiting for me beneath the tree. My life forever changed. If only my parents could see the number of hours I would pour into all sort of games over the next 20 or so years, they may have thought better of it. Ever since that morning I have played all manner of video games, on all manner of devices, but there is one certain type of game that scratches a part of my brain the others just can’t reach.

I’m talking about the games that are over as quickly as they began, and restarted even quicker. Where there are no levels to grind, and no experience points to collect. Where the premise is simple, but the execution complex. Where the controls are tight, and the music pulls you through run after run. WipEout. Hotline Miami. Super Hexagon. These are the games that grip me far longer than maybe they have any right to.

They are all devilishly fast. Clearing a level in Hotline Miami, or racing a perfect lap in WipEpout is a feeling like few others. While playing these games nothing else exists, no distractions, not even the need to blink. They command your complete attention, and when you hand it over, you are rewarded in folds.

The best of all these games, Super Hexagon. It’s the cheapest on the list, available on your phone, there are no tutorials, and no expositions dumps You could have downloaded it, and played several runs in the time it’s taken to read this paragraph.

It might actually be my favourite game of all time. It’s certainly in the running. When you see it for the first time it looks impossible. It moves so quickly, the backdrop is loud and distracting, the cursor is tiny. Its brilliance though is that once you’ve crashed out once or twice you begin to fall into its rhythm. You begin recognizing the patterns of each course, your reactions honed in on which direction the board is spinning, and which direction you need to swing the cursor to survive to the next layer. Then you’ll get it wrong, and it’s game over. Without missing a beat, you’ll be going again. The pulsating soundtrack dragging you along with it, spinning this way and that.

The controls couldn’t be more simple, you either move clockwise or anti-clockwise. You press left or you press right. I have unashamedly played Super Hexagon for hundreds of hours. On trains. On night shifts. On lunch breaks. I will likely play for hundreds of hours more.

It’s impossible to know whether my reactions could ever have been good enough to fly a jet or ride a skeleton luge, and maybe that’s fine. So I’ll settle for video games, where the worst that can happen when they go wrong is that I take one more go, and promise myself this is the last one.