You need to kill hundreds of enemies to win a silver-level Mass Effect 3 multiplayer match. Heck, even with multiple players, it takes serious teamwork to make sure everybody survives. So, it's already impressive that Alain Poitras won out in the Silver and Bronze level runs in the video above.
But when you consider the fact that Poitras has been quadriplegic for years, his achievements are even more impressive. Poitras plays on PC, using a touchscreen mouse and a stick held in his mouth to type on the keys of his laptop. He's shared videos of his runs with fellow ME3 players on the official BioWare forums and wound up impressing BioWare senior designer Manveer Heir with his skills:
I would like to tell you that the butler did it, but he did not.
Alfie White, the zombie-killing butler, was going to save rotted London. He shot zombies, whacked some of them to death with a cricket bat and got awfully close to finding a possible zombie cure.
But he failed. And then he became a zombie, as did thirty five other working class heroes turned shambling stiffs.
I played a housewife, a cop, and an assortment of other survivors, one at a time in ZombiU, the dark, challenging and startling first-person shooter released on day one for Nintendo's new Wii U. Each lived briefly. Each died gruesomely. Each got me closer to making it through a game that is scarier than Resident Evil, more boldly designed than any other Wii U launch game and an altogether terrific adventure that earned my recommendation despite a couple of game-resetting bugs.
I felt bad about Alfie White, by the way. I thought I'd clear the game as him. After Alfie there was Robert Moore, the plumber. He died and became a zombie too. After Robert was Mia Marshall, game designer, who awoke in ZombiU with a gasp, as do all of the hopeless heroes you play. Mia didn't fail. The game failed her. I hit a glitch and restarted so I could proceed. This time I awoke as Annabelle Kelly, taxi driver.
ZombiU is a desperate struggle from the start, glitches or not. It's survival horror that is both tough to survive and actually scary. The survival comes from the imbalance. You're weak, poorly-equipped and outnumbered by the undead. Whether you're on the run or in the hunt, you're in the dark, creeping through sewers and warehouses, across fields and down to the basement of a children's school where things went badly. Play it fast and you'll die. Play it slowly and you'll manage to just barely hang on. And then you'll die anyway and you'll be mad at yourself, at the zombies or, if the game glitches, the developers.
ZombiU
Developer: Ubisoft Montpellier/Ubisoft Bucharest
Platforms: Wii U
Release Date (US): November 18
Type of game: Zombie-killing first-person shooting with permadeath and barely a hope to survive.
What I played: Completed the single-player adventure in 15:56:57, achieving the bad ending with my 45th sorry survivor. Longest survivor lifespan was 100 minutes. That guy dying really hurt. Dabbled briefly in the game's local, asymmetric multiplayer.
My Two Favorite Things
- Not dying.
- Using the GamePad to sniff out friends' lies, manage my inventory and briefly make me feel like I was a colonial marine in Aliens, albeit it a very weak one.
My Two Least-Favorite Things
- Bugs that forced me to restart.
- A lack of character animation making the game's undead stiffs even stiffer.
Made-to-Order Back-of-Box Quotes
- "At last, a great new Resident Evil."
-Stephen Totilo, Kotaku.com - "Play it online. Otherwise, you're doing it wrong."
-Stephen Totilo, Kotaku.com - "I know Ubisoft is a French company, but can't they mask their desire to annihilate redcoats a little better next year? "
-Stephen Totilo, Kotaku.com
When I awoke as Annabelle the taxi-driver, I was only slightly less screwed than I was when I'd started playing as any of the poor fools I'd controlled before her. Some of the weapon upgrades—capacity and firepower upgrades, for example—that you find in the game's version of London carry over into your next lives. Fast-travel spots that network one end of town to another remain available. That's about it. As Annabelle, as with any other new survivor, I awoke with just a pistol, six bullets, an invincible cricket bat and a flashlight. Gone were any of the improvements to my weapons proficiency, earned through use of said weapons in the previous life. I could scavenge more weapons and maybe some food from the dark tunnels below London's streets, maybe rush back to the crashed cars outside Buckingham Palace, pick off some zombies and find some more provisions there. I scraped some things together, stuffed them in Kelly's backpack and then… crap... I got her killed.
When your character dies and they become a zombie they still wear their backpack and carry all the guns, ammo and recovery items you had found when you were them. In your next life, priority #1 is to chase them down, knock their undead head off, rifle through their backpack and grab the good stuff. If you fail, if you die before you get to them—or maybe if you are killed while rummaging through that backpack—then everything in it is scattered back into the game. The progress you clawed to achieve slips from your grasp. You fall back down.
The guy I played after Annabelle Kelly did get the backpack. Then he got swarmed by zombies. I'd packed a landmine in her bag and I had the guy take it out. I had him put it on the floor somewhere in the sewers near a tube station. The zombies rushed in too quickly. They blew it up. He blew up.
At least he didn't become a zombie.
In my next life, as Erin Smith, lecturer, I found his pack anyway. Erin was my next hope.
If all ZombiU had going for it was this playable cycle of life, death and undeath then it would be an interesting new horror game worth playing. That idea alone is simple and pure. It's pulled from roguelikes and the likes of Demon's Souls. It makes this horror game scarier than the Resident Evils or whatever else is called survival horror these days. ZombiU may try to scare you with changes in its soundtrack or a programmed rush of zombies, but most of the terror comes about naturally. It emerges from the decisions you've made in this squalid setting: the decision to run recklessly around a corner, to spend three bullets trying to kill this zombie and suddenly having none to defeat those other two, the decision to holster a crossbow and leave a healthpack in the backpack which you can only access if you kneel, open it up and—oh god—the zombies are right over there and they are closing the distance...Here comes death. Again.
The Wii U adds a six-inch screen to the twin-stick controller, which allows ZombiU to match standard first-person shooter controls but also one-up them. The GamePad turns out not just to be a new game controller. It's a survival item.
The GamePad controller's screen matches that of the "Prepper pad", a device given to each ZombiU survivor by the mysterious Prepper. They—and by physical extension, you—have a screen in your hand with which to improve your ideal. The pad shows the map of the general area, but only if a special box in the vicinity has been scanned by the pad. It shows enemy zombies' locations, but only if the pad has pinged them with its zombie radar. The pad shows mission goals, the text of discovered documents, the ID of your survivor and even some survival tips. All of this is expected. The pad is, in these ways, a glorified iPhone. How lovely that the Prepper keeps making one-way calls to you through it. His strangely sinister advice emerges from the GamePad's speakers in your hands even as the rest of the game's audio comes from your TV.
The GamePad also becomes a scope for ranged weapons, allowing you to see a zoomed view of your target through its screen-turned-lens. It doubles as your backpack, forcing you to look down and drag-and-drop its contents even while zombies may be approaching your character on the TV.
Best of all, it's a scanner. Hold it up in real life and your character holds it up in the game world. In the fiction, it emits a black light. In the cradle of the player's hands, it shows an illuminated view that makes the game's dark environments easier to see. More importantly, it displays all of the locations where items might be hidden. Angling the GamePad to face them or using the GamePad's right stick to similar effect lets the player scan each potential hiding spot and get information about what is or isn't there. This makes scavenging easier, and it opens the game up to new systems for finding clues, reading secret messages scrawled on walls and solving puzzles. It also reveals the truth about messages left in the game world by other players of this online-connected adventure. As in Demon's Souls, players can leave messages of warning or encouragement on the walls and floors of ZombiU. They're relegated to a system of perhaps-too-obscure symbols instead of Demon's Souls constrained vocabulary, but what's interesting is how you can tell if you can trust them. On your TV, you can't tell. Scan them, and, on the GamePad, you can see if the message has earned other players' votes of distrust. Or you can vote the message down yourself.
In all of its uses, the GamePad becomes the star of ZombiU. It is the most useful tool and the element of the game that most successfully draws the player in. It keeps you alive and so, in a roundabout way, makes ZombiU a better argument for the Gamepad than any other launch Wii U game. It's hard to imagine surviving in the game without it. It might well make playing a shooter without it feel like deprivation.
The game world opens up slowly. You can poke through it or go on a series of missions that will bring you to potential long-term salvation. The Prepper exhorts you to fight your way through London. His missions are simple. Get fuel for a generator. Track a weapons cache. Find this old outcast who might be able to help. The missions twist. The story takes its turns, and in the manner of a Metroid, returning to previously-explored environments will enable the player to discover new secrets.
The voice of the Prepper gives the orders but the survivors' voices set the mood. Your cricket bat proves invaluable, because you're always out of bullets and often resorting to whacking zombies. As you do, your survivor shouts or screams, sometimes laughs. It's all rather unfortunate and disturbing. No one is happy to be here except maybe you, the player, because this adventure is so captivating.
At times, the adventure turns ugly. The world in ZombiU is stiff. It appears to be a real and ruined city, but it functions, as do the environments of other older games, as a landscape of painted boulders that masquerade as something more real. Its furniture is seldom moveable. It sets your path. Out of its darkness, the game's London is both drab and disappointingly dense with repeated rooms. The zombies animate well when they rush toward you but no one has taught them to fall back. They don't so much as fall as they hop and skid backward like a statue shoved back across uneven ice. None of this matters much, since gameplay reigns supreme in ZombiU. What does matter are the glitches, two of which ended my game at the end of a supermarket quest barely 40 minutes into the adventure (one froze my Wii U; the other glitched the quest order and wouldn't let me proceed). A third glitch, which I hit near the end of the game, messed up the quest order again. In a game full of prematurely-halted lives this is thematically consistent but it's also a dreadful pain that makes a hard game needlessly more aggravating. I'd recommend that players save often, but that's the catch: often, you'll be in places in this game where you can't save.
The game's developers have recently started putting messages inside the game. They scrawl words on the floors and walls, welcoming players, inviting them to keep hunting. Their attention is welcome and hopefully their best maintenance personnel are on the case. A game this good shouldn't be scaring players away for the wrong reasons.
ZombiU invites comparisons to Demon's Souls, a game from which it has cribbed. It invites comparisons to Resident Evil, a series it does better modernizing than recent Resident Evils. But the best comparison for ZombiU might be the first, maligned Assassin's Creed. Like Assassin's Creed it brings us something fresh from Ubisoft. It updates old and recent ideas and turns them into something of its own. It avoids the crutches of many modern games and doesn't provide its pleasure through narrowed, canned moments. It instead presents a system of life and death. It screams that it is a game, that it is meant to be played and that the best experiences you'll have with it are from the stories you craft from the way you play. It will hopefully be the blueprint for an even better game, but it stands well on its own.
Assassin's Creed gave us gamers a fun new system in which to kill our enemies. ZombiU, at the other end of the alphabet, gives us a proper omega: a fun and frightening new system in which to desperately try to stay alive.
I should note that lecturer Erin Smith didn't make it.
She died and became a zombie, too. I can't remember if I tracked her down, but I can remember that in a desperate moment late in ZombiU I discovered a zombie from a friend's former life. You see, other Wii U players' zombified characters can also show up in your game, as yours can appear in theirs. I was, as is often the case, barely staying alive. I'd memorized enemy placement for this level, but the appearance of my friend's zombie was a surprise. I killed him and rifled through his pack. In it I found a bounty of health items and ammo.
Fortune favored me, and I played on.
About the multiplayer... you can play ZombiU as a competitive, local multiplayer game, one person doing first-person shooting in arena levels using the Wii Remote and Nunchuk, the other using the GamePad as "king" of zombies. The GamePad player sees the level from overhead and simply taps and dispatches enemies to stop the player as if they were playing a finger-driven real-time-strategy game. The FPS player tries to survive or capture flags before the zombies do. Both modes are good tech demo experiments that enable players of two different skill levels to play the same game in two different ways. I didn't play either mode enough to give it a proper assessment and can't recommend the game for its multiplayer. Its academic, though. The single-player is good enough to demand attention on its own.
The rise of mobile phone games has done wonders for the normally dark and seedy world of advergaming. With Oreo Twist, Lick, Dunk, PikPok has created an interactive advertisement I've actually wanted to play more than once.
The setup is pretty simple: Oreo cookies fly into the air. One swipe twists the tops off. The second swipe licks the cream and combines the parts into a bigger cookie. The third dunks it into a glass of milk. The player has 60 seconds to get the highest score possible. You know, for the leaderboards.
What's nifty about the game is that there are 20 varieties or Oreo to unlock, from Doublestuff to some of the more exotic brands. Each comes with a short description, giving fans of the brand some insight into the machinations of Nabisco's insane cookie craftsmen.
And hey, I just earned a free Amazon MP3 download for unlocking an achievement. That's pretty neat.
I just wish the game, itself an ad, wouldn't have ads at the bottom. It's like Adception up in here.
Oreo Twist, Lick, Dunk [iTunes]
I finally saw Wreck-It Ralph over the Thanksgiving break. It was heartwarming, delightful, charming. It nudged at some big-name titles in ways that made me giggle and nod in recognition. It covered the bases of a handful of video game tropes. It made jokes in the form of clever puns and cute character behavior.
But my favorite part about Wreck-It Ralph was an admission. An admission that, hey, sometimes what's unintentional in a video game is what's best about it.
Let me explain. If you don't know, Wreck-It Ralph brings the arcade environment to life. I don't mean that the film resuscitated the dying era of quarters used in exchange for playing games amongst fellow gamers in a public setting. I mean that video game characters come to literal life in the film, all connected to one another in this arcade world.
[Minor Wreck-It Ralph spoilers follow]
One such character is a little girl named Vanellope, living in a made-up racing video game called Sugar Rush. As a glitch in the system, she's been shunned from the rest of the game's community of characters, fated to live out her virtual days in some hidden cave she can glitch her way into. She's not allowed to race with everyone else—for fear of her pixlexia (as she calls it) having a negative impact on the game—even though racing is what she wants more than anything.
But being a glitch makes Vanellope a unique racer. She can jump and blip in and out of place, acting sort of like a power-up boost and in effect confusing everyone around her. Is that a heinous crime against the game's programming, though? Flat-out cheating? Or is that just a nifty, granted unintended feature when used properly?
Those unintended features sometimes make games even greater. Take Left 4 Dead 2, also known as one of the most addictive games I've ever played. Seriously, I've played every DLC, every mode, and every special event that game had to offer. And then I replayed it.
But one of my best discoveries in Left 4 Dead 2 is a particularly awesome glitch that completely lags out the game.
Why would you want to intentionally lag your game? Because Expert difficulty is damn hard. Or at least that's why a group of Xbox Live friends and I first decided to do it. Before it evolved into one of the most fun, community-created unofficial modes.
Here's what you do. Grab dual pistols, find a melee weapon. Swap between dual wielding the guns to quickly grabbing the melee weapon. Being crammed into a corner usually helps. Eventually you'll start to create a huge mass of duplicated pistols spawning hilariously out of your back.
When enough duplicates are made, your game will start to lag out. As a bonus, I liked to play the Mutation DLC that grants you unlimited chainsaw fuel (known as Chainsaw Massacre). Lagging the game out feels like you're skipping through the map, generally keeping to the main path and trying to avoid zombies, stopping only to slice your way through any that happen across your immediate path. The goal is to rush through each level straight to the safe room.
But what's fun about that? Besides cheat-winning your way through each map on Expert mode, you'd be surprised how much this glitch impacts the way you play the game. I mentioned that it's best to speed through to the end of each level, avoiding bumping into zombies as much as you can. You can essentially run at your normal pace, while the flesh-eating creepers struggle to catch up to you. Playing with unlimited chainsaws is optimal, because you can easily tear through zombies even at the Expert level.
But what about tanks? Oh man, let me tell you about the tanks. Tanks are sort of terrifying in Left 4 Dead. The music starts and you know you're in for some shit. You'd figure all lagged out, the tank wouldn't be nearly as terrifying. But you'd be wrong in thinking that.
If you've followed my advice and play using chainsaws, you'll have to get in super close to strike the Tank down with it. Which means you're at risk of getting Hulk-smashed and immediately knocked out. That Tank is a mean one on Expert. But you can't quite tell when he's about to get a hit in, because his lagged-out animations certainly won't be an accurate indicator. You get hit before you see yourself getting hit. So fighting a Tank becomes a game of guesswork, trying to identify when it's safe to go in for a slice before he can get a swing in. It goes: run in for a slice, run the fuck out, repeat. You're always just one fraction of a second away from getting hit, which, if that happens, you're likely to be left behind by your teammates. It's an unspoken rule that getting through Expert on a lagged-out, all chainsaws round of Left 4 Dead 2 necessitates that you don't linger around for fear of getting incapacitated by a nasty special infected. The adrenaline throughout fighting this lagged-out Tank is, as you might imagine, pumping vigorously.
A new, still incredibly fun way of playing Left 4 Dead 2 was born. And all because of one simple duplication glitch. That's the beauty of the unintended in video games: you can discover new ways of playing your favorite games. Whether that's a hidden corner, an unintended use for a grenade, or something that's a complete game-changer, it doesn't matter. Because it's fun to discover what you can and can't do in a virtual world that's effectively your playground.
Obviously some glitches are bad. They can ruin the experience. Old school Counter-Strike comes to mind, where players would bounce on each other's heads for an aerial view of the map where they were essentially untouchable. No one has fun with that (except maybe for the glitch-cheating player).
But sometimes glitches involve awesome discoveries. And that's exactly how Wreck-It Ralph portrays Vanellope in the film. She's misunderstood and mistreated. But when you finally understand what she can do within the bounds of reason, she's reasonably everyone's favorite character.
It sure is fun to cook on ChefVille's many appliances, especially now that we have a Mayonnaise Dispenser for sandwiches and a Cranberry Crate for Thanksgiving dishes. But there's still a noteworthy lack of access to ranch in our restaurants. Tons of dishes require Ranch Dressing, and yet it's one of the most ingredient-heavy items to craft, requiring Onions, Milk and Garlic. That all changes today with the launch of the Ranch Rack and its accompanying "Ranch Requests" quests in our eateries.
Rack 'n Dip
• Place and Build the Ranch Rack
• Tend Ranch Rack 7 Times
• Complete the Dip Station
The Dip Station was released last week, and you can find our complete guide to building it right here. As for the Ranch Rack, you'll first need to spend three energy to unwrap the item, and must then collect five Saucy Saucers and five Dipping Skewers to finish it off. The Saucy Saucers are earned by sending out individual requests to your neighbors, while the Dipping Skewers can be earned by posting a general request to your news feed. Remember to jump onto Zynga.com before posting these sorts of requests, as you can rely on strangers as well as friends and can earn these items quicker as a result.
After you've finished the Ranch Rack, you can collect from it once every 12 minutes. When you finish this first quest, you'll receive 15 coins, two Marinated Chickens and 10 XP.
Saucy Finger Food
• Tend Neighbors' Mom 'N Pop Shops 5 Times
• Cook Chicken Tenders 12 Times
• Ask friends for 7 Squeeze Bottles
The Squeeze Bottles can be earned by posting a general request to your news feed for help. Meanwhile, the Chicken Tenders are made on the Dip Station using three Flour, two Chicken and three Ranch Dressing each. At least by this point you have the Ranch Rack to earn Ranch Dressing for free, so you won't have to waste as many Onions as you would have normally to cook all 12. Plus, cooking the dish that many times earns you mastery stars along the way as well, which is always nice. There's one more quest to complete in this series, and we'll bring you a complete look at how to complete it as we learn more.
Play ChefVille on Zynga.com Now >
More ChefVille Coverage from Games.com
• Dip It Good Quests Guide
• Cranberry Connection Quests Guide
• Seaside Harbor Items Guide
Republished with permission from:
Brandy Shaul is an editor at Games.com
It's been just over a week since Nintendo ushered in the next-generation of home console hardware with the launch of the Wii U. In that time, the new device has sold 400,000 units.
CNET reports that the Wii U just edged out the Wii, which sold 300,000 units in the same time frame. When the Wii launched in November 2005 2006, the motion-control console sold through 600,000 units in its first eight days. By way of comparison, Microsoft's Xbox 360 console debuted on Nov. 21, 2005 and sold 326,000 units by the end of that month.
It's worth comparing those numbers to the sales notched by the iPhone 5 and iPad Mini, which belong to the class of devices seen as most threatening to the AAA console business where Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft thrive. In the first weekend of the new iPad lineup, Apple sold a combined 3 million units of the fourth-generation iPad and iPad Mini. Meanwhile, the company moved 5 million iPhone 5 handsets in that device's first weekend.
People like to hate on The Simpsons these days, but I still find Fox's iconic cartoon show enjoyable, if not always super timely. See: this clip of Homer discovering iPad games, from the episode that aired last night.
If you missed last night's, Hulu has new Simpsons eps on a regular basis. It should be up next week or so (unless you're a subscriber).
Until recently, I had never considered the idea that my gaming habit, which could charitably be described as heavy, could be harmful to my mental health. It wasn't just that I dismissed that idea; the idea had never popped into my head.
But as psychological professionals debate whether or not "gaming addiction" should be listed as a condition in the next update to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the psychological Bible)—and as I finally take my mental health seriously—I am reevaluating that idea. I'm reevaluating it, even though my psychiatrist and my therapist have never discussed gaming as an issue.
Unfortunately, there is not a whole lot of scientific data, in the form of psychological studies, to help me out in my journey of self-discovery. There are, however, a few researchers who are intent on studying the possible link between gaming and mental disorders like depression. I spoke with two of them to get a more personal perspective than I would have gotten from simply reading their work.
The first researcher is Dr. Douglas Gentile of Iowa State University. He and a handful of other researchers, performed a study a few years back that was published in the journal Pediatrics. It was called Pathological Video Game Use Among Youths: A Two-Year Longitudinal Study. (A longitudinal study looks at one group of subjects over time.) In this study, they looked at the gaming habits of schoolchildren in Singapore over the course of two years to try to determine if what they refer to as "pathological gaming" has an impact on the subjects' lives and mental health.
They found a definite correlation between heavy gaming and symptoms of depression.
"I was expecting to find that the depression led to gaming," Gentile told me. "But we found the opposite in that study. The depression seemed to follow the gaming. As kids became addicted—if you want to use that word—then their depression seemed to get worse. And, as they stopped being addicted, the depression seemed to lift."
Despite the evidence, Gentile didn't quite buy that.
"I don't really think [the depression] is following. I think it's truly comorbid. When a person gets one disorder, they often get more. If you've been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a year or two later you might end up with anxiety problems or social phobias. They all start interacting with each other and make each other worse. [The test subjects' gaming 'addiction' and mental health problems] are close enough in time that they're probably affecting each other. As you get more depressed you retreat more into games, which doesn't help, because it doesn't actually solve the problem. It doesn't help your depression, so your depression gets worse, so you play more games, so your depression gets worse, etc. It becomes a negative spiral."
The other researcher I talked do is one Daniel Loton, a PhD candidate at Victoria University in Australia. His study is also longitudinal, but over five months instead of two years. The other main difference is that the participants in this study are older, with an average age of 25.
Loton's study, which also looks into a link between gaming and mental health, has not yet been published, and, indeed, he has not even completed analysis of all the data in his surveys. So far, he has only fully analyzed how a gaming habit relates to a person's coping style. For the purposes of this discussion, that is perfect, because Gentile's study did not examine gaming as a coping mechanism.
Just so we're clear, Loton defines coping styles as "constantly-changing cognitive and behavioral effort to manage specific external and/or internal demands that are appraised as taxing or exceeding the resources of the person." More or less, that simply means how a person deals with profound stress in general.
There are three terms you need to know here: approach, distraction and withdrawal. Approach coping would be a person utilizing his or her support circle (family, friends, etc.) when dealing with problems, and, if he or she is suffering from a mental illness, seeing mental health professionals for treatment. Distraction coping is when a person attempts to, ahem, distract himself or herself from their problems for short periods of time. Withdrawal coping is essentially not coping at all; when you withdraw, you aren't even trying to help your situation because you've given up hope.
In Loton's study, he found that the link between a person's gaming habits and his or her mental health is bridged by that person's coping style. Loton asserts that whether or not a person's gaming habit can be considered unhealthy—whether or not he or she is pathological, as Gentile would say—correlates strongly with coping style. If a person tends to utilize approach coping, then his gaming habits probably won't negatively impact his life, even if he does what others might consider to be an excessive amount of gaming. If a person usually withdraws, on the other hand, then he is more likely to become a pathological gamer while also having what Loton calls poorer mental health outcomes.
When I lost my job in January, I struggled immensely. For the next few weeks, I would spend an hour or so a day looking for more work, while devoting the rest of my day to playing Star Wars: The Old Republic. It was absurd and definitely out of the ordinary for me, but I was depressed. That's how I dealt with it.
Given that anecdote falls well within the realm of the studies mentioned above, I shared it with both researchers, and I got very different responses. We'll start with Gentile.
"What you did is absolutely no different, even at this time when you were depressed, than you do when you're not depressed," Gentile told me. "It just was more extreme, because you were dealing with more extreme issues at that time. And even kids as young as 10 will say they do this. They'll play games or watch movies as a coping mechanism. But even kids know that it's not a very good coping mechanism. It's a distraction. It doesn't actually solve the problem. And so the problem stays there, ready for you once you're done.
Loton put a more positive spin on the situation, connecting my game-playing to my efforts to find work.
"Do you feel as though during that time, that those hours of video game playing is what actually allowed you to apply for the jobs? So if you didn't have something else that you enjoyed like that at the time, you would have been applying for less jobs?"
As I heard these responses, I didn't feel like either of them was wrong, even though they disagreed.
Any good psychological professional will tell you that long-term, clinical depression is far too complex to blame on any one thing. There are usually all sorts of environmental factors in addition to whatever imbalance a person might have in his or her head. Sure, you can sometimes look at a particular depressive episode and point at a cause, but it doesn't do it justice to ignore everything else that plays a part.
In order to discover just what part The Old Republic played in the episode I described above, we need to take a closer look at what was really going on inside my head. That is no easy task for most people, including myself, but I will do my best to share a holistic view of that situation with you.
When I lost my job, I was a dead man walking. I was not at a point in my mental health treatment that I could deal with something like that in any sort of positive way, and my friends, bless them, weren't properly equipped to carry me through something like that. It was only a matter of time until I tried to hurt myself.
SWTOR was my morphine. It did not fix me, but it delayed the inevitable and made me comfortable. It held my bad feelings down while I searched in vain for anything tangibly good in the world. The fact that something good did not come in the 16 days between the end of my employment and a night I tried to kill myself is not the game's fault.
For 16 days, I lived in a state of numbness, shocked at what had happened but not dead. Some part of me was sad, but my daily dose of SWTOR allowed me to forget that sadness most of the time. It didn't end up making me happy, and it didn't find me a job, and it didn't stop me from eventually going off the edge.
It also didn't send me over that edge. Without SWTOR, I would have found other, similarly ineffective ways of managing my situation, and I would have spent more time drinking, and the outcome would have been the same. It's likely, indeed, that without SWTOR my moment of truth would have come sooner. That game gave me more of a shot at life than anything else did. (And, as I've written before, in a roundabout way, it helped me.)
Games are not my problem. My problem is that I have a severe mood disorder and a boatload of emotional baggage. When we examine the cause of my myriad emotional issues, it would be unfair to say it was caused by that one thing that makes my life seem more bearable than it otherwise would be.
Were I another person, I would probably view those events differently. Indeed, everyone has different factors that contribute to their depression. We all react to those factors in our own ways. A broad psychological study looks for what people have in common and cannot account for each unique circumstance. The researchers I talked to may find ways to deliver some truths about what happens to us when we're depressed and playing games.
So what's the answer here? Well, I can't really give you one for anybody but myself. All I know is that in the case of this one person—me—gaming was a lifeline. Loton said as much. Eventually that lifeline broke, and that's because, as Gentile offered, playing games a lot was not the solution to my very large problems.
Ultimately, that means that gaming is not bad for me and my mental health, but maybe I could use a more productive coping mechanism. It's really that simple.
That analysis may not apply to you. You are different from me. You can learn, broadly, from my take on my situation. You and/or your therapist have the ability to know you better than I or any psychological study can. That, ultimately, is the lesson and the key to understanding whether, when life darkens and we suffer from depression, playing games is a help or a hindrance, a negative force or a relief.
Phil Owen is a freelance entertainment journalist whose work you might have seen at IGN, GameFront, Appolicious and many, many other places. You can follow him on Twitter at @philrowen.
From around the age of seven, I saw the world in 8bit color. The Nintendo Entertainment System was more than a revelation for my young eyes. It was a revolution.
Even now, I love the look of 8-bit, those stark and sometimes saturated blocky colors. I love it so much that I downloaded this 8-bit camera app to do things like take photos of my watch. On my desk. With different filters.
8bit: Camera is a barebones camera app, with a handful of said filters (four, actually). In that way, it reminds me of Instagram, which I love and need to spend more time on!
What I liked about this camera app were the small touches, such as the game blip when the shutter goes off. I do wish I could convert my old pics into 8-bit and hope the developer offers that in a future update! It's a newly released app, so fingers crossed that more features are forthcoming.
The resulting 8-bit-ized photos are on the small side (about 300 pixels across), so that is something you should be aware of.
I've seen a few 8-bit camera apps on the App Store—such as a Game Boy camera clone that came out last year. I do believe this is one of the only dedicated 8-bit camera apps that is in full color (it also has black and white, if that is your thing). If you cannot get out of an 8-bit haze or want to get back into one, 8bit: Camera might be worth checking out.
8bit:Camera - $.99 [iTunes]
The creators of Motley Blocks painstakingly crafted a series of 80 simple images using colored cubes, creating a collection of nifty 3D pixel art covering a variety of subjects. Then they blew them all up, and you have to put them back together. So much work, this mobile gaming.
Each level in Motley Blocks begins with a simple piece of cube art. That piece explodes, becoming a rotating cloud of pixel parts. See that image up top? That was bacon, once. By my hand it shall be bacon again.
Players have to trace lines connecting same-colored parts in order to put them back in their place. The more blocks of one color gathered at once, the greater the score. The trick is there's a set number of rotations, so if every block is not cleared by the time the spinning ends, you fail. I fail. We all fail.
You are not alone in this quest, however. There are five blocks with faces that act as power-ups to help you in your quest. See those little red guys in the image? They explode. That's incredibly helpful.
The coolest aspect of Motley Blocks isn't what the game creator Sarbakan made, but what the players are creating. With a built-in editor and the ability to share, play and rate custom levels, this is a game where the community content is quickly overtaking the packed-in stuff in terms of quality and quantity.
Thanks for providing us the framework, Sarbakan! We've got it from here.
Motley Blocks — $2.99 [iTunes]
Note: This Gaming App of the Day was originally slated for last week, but got shuffled about due to the Thanksgiving holiday. Hence, two Gaming Apps of the Day. Woot!