The Top Five Comfort Games?
October 8, 2006 4:10 AM | Simon Carless
Over at The New Gamer, they have a fun list of the 'Top 5 Comfort Games', for which the inestimable G.Turner notes: "Like food, games can provide comfort in a time of need - be it a need for something familiar or just a quick pick-me-up after a particularly distressing day. Here's a list of my current favorite stick-to-your-ribs games."
The top tip? "Burnout 3 allows me to experience a perfect storm of visual and aural noise. It's not just the engrossing Road Rage mode, which pits opponents against each other in a shunt-vs-shunt auto-porn fest, but the custom soundtrack which rivets me. I grind fenders to the tune of Jim Thirlwell (I prefer driving to his classic 'Pussywhipped' remix of Front 242's 'Religion', Asche ('Riding On The Atomic I.C.E.' is always a lark), Haujobb (nothing's better than the 'High Frequency' remix of 'Dream Aid') and even Sleater-Kinney ('Entertain' is surprisingly fun to crash to) and more."
Also noted: "Call me crazy, but I actually prefer playing this with the Dreamcast controller instead of the maracas. Of course, that might be because we've never been able to get our maracas to work properly, but hey, I feel I can better reach "the zone" and be a more precise maraca champion without them." Also, there's a new Drunksaling column on TNG, huzzah.
Categories: PC
4 Comments
Why even bother playing Samba De Amigo without the maracas, might as well just listen to the music on its own..
And it just seems like 5 games he likes a lot.
Red_venom | October 8, 2006 5:08 AM
I totally agree on the qualities of Burnout 3 and Zookeeper when it comes to just spacing out and doing something that not really requires a lot of brain power.
There was this other game I used to play quite a lot when I was a kid. I believe it was on the C64 and you were this guy walking around corridors (Pacman-style), shooting in every direction at approaching monsters. There was this beautifully coloured pixel shower emanating from each enemy you hit. I never felt there was much of a point to the game, but it was nice just shooting these pixels and being rewarded with candy-coloured monster spray until you eventually got overrun by the increasing number of foes. Anyone know which game i'm talking about?
Thomas | October 8, 2006 7:22 AM
Comfort Games? Quite a concept, that...
gnome | October 8, 2006 10:15 AM
I've been in a comfort-seeking state a lot lately so I feel oddly qualified to respond to this. I could either post it at Slashdot, competing with 441 other comments and probably get voted down into invisibility by the jerks who mod "Overrated" to get around the metamod system, post it at the site itself (but they want a new registration and bah to that) or I could post it here. My own comfort games:
- Freecell: It has the advantage of ubiquity: if one's depressed at a school computer lab it's almost sure to be there.
- Rampart: Hard enough to be interesting, but not so hard that I can't win it once in a while.
- Robotron 2084: It's just great to blast stuff.
- Nethack: Only because I've played it long enough that I can often survive the perilous early stages. Once I get a character to the level where he's probably going to win, however, it becomes oddly less comforting.
- Celluar automata simulations like Life32 or Mirek's Cellebration. Not traditional games, but interesting if you're of that mind.
Lately there's also been Lego Star Wars 2, just for the goofy factor. Staring at Lego Darth Vader stroll around his plastic world can make a surprising amount of tension evaporate.
John H. | October 8, 2006 10:44 PM