Question Wednesday #2: Therapy Games

[moon_hotel]

Sorry I missed last week, it completely slipped my mind! I'm setting myself reminders to keep up on QWednesdays though. 

This week's icebreaker is kind of a your-mileage-may-vary question, but here goes: do you have any "therapy games?" That is, are there any games/genres that you like to curl up with when you're feeling down, or help you burn off stress? And, as always, what are you playing right now?

Comments

[washy]

What I most appreciate when I am in that mindset ("what can I do that can take all of me out and just play a game") is something I can really sink my teeth into and think about, just as quickly as I can drop it, which for me is... Old game. Specifically, arcade-style experiences (scoring, aim for shorthand completion), like in Famicom platformers with structured 1-2-3 levels, or like memorization/pattern elements that you can find in NAMCO and SEGA's arcade experiences in the 80s and low 90s.

I'm endlessly forgiving for old games like that and can always pretty easily get into a mindset like "what are they going for here..." Like, I've played Spelunker! And enjoy it! And not just the PS3 remake which is super good, I actually can put up with the original. I missed that whole era since I grew up with PC games (i.e. King's Quest) until the Playstation came out, and even then I had no patience for this kind of thing as a kid. My boyfriend and I have picked up all kinds of random obscure Famicom ROM platformers like Armadillo and spent time just observing and picking out things we like in the graphics and sound effect department, and try really hard to give the difficult ones like Adventure Island a loooong fair chance as a challenge.

What really set me off on this was Mappy, by Namco! I fell in love with it somehow. It has a really idiosyncratic control style (I love when things weren't standardized yet!) and has a lot less repetition and more variance than like, Pac-Man. I feel extremely good playing it and trying to beat my high scores... which... aren't very good.

It's weird. I feel like what I'm saying is an enormous, huge breadth of genres and games, but to me it's a really narrow focus because of what I specifically hone in on with these titles. Maybe it's kind of silly, but the lack of standardization & streamlining back then, this unpredictability going in, is what actually soothes me? There are familiar titles I like to come back to, but I think my ideal therapy game is blind picking up an old Famicom action game (usually based on nothing but box art) and then just figuring out what it is!!

[moon_hotel]

Ohhh this is a really good reply, I'm really happy to learn about this! I think I get what you mean, especially about older games when control schemes weren't standardized. You have to really work to learn how to control the character in games like Mappy or especially Pac-Land (which kinda freaked me out at first because it heavily resembled a 'normal' platformer but controlled so differently from what I was used to). It can be really engrossing to just explore a game like that and try to connect it in your head to what came afterwards.