Gamer+Girl: Quest for Adventure Games
One of the deep, dark not-actually-very-secret secrets about me is that I’m actually pretty bad at video games. It’s true! I’m particularly terrible at platformers – I’ve been trying to get past this evil owl thing in Super Princess Peach for months – and I’m only a little bit better at first-person shooters. I spend an awful lot of time spinning in place and smacking into walls while trying vainly to figure out where the camera is and how to move forward. I’m also the only person I know who gets panicky and anxious while playing Elebits (which also makes me motion-sick if I play for more than fifteen minutes. Sad, I know).
I love playing video games, but it’s not exactly a relaxing pastime, for me. My skillz are sadly deficient for most kinds of games, and the ones that I can handle on my own with a minimum of stress aren’t usually the sort that one can enjoy for more than a half hour or so at a time. Puzzle games and pinball are made of win, but not necessarily an hour of win, you know?
Sometimes, when I’m trapped in a corner while bad guys shoot at me, or have been knocked off the same stupid little teeny ledge for the hundredth time in a row, I reflect back on a genre of games from my youth at which I didn’t totally suck: graphic adventure games
