Hello my name is Tony I am addicted the dumbest simplest video games ever.
That felt good.
My computer game addiction started at a young healthy age when we played number munchers in elementary school.
I loved and hated that game because I was so bad at math it was too much of a challenge but that frog thing that ate the numbers was worth it. Oregon trail was really my vice in those days.
I used to buy as many bullets I could and skimp on the wagon wheels and food and I would just hunt buffalo the whole time, it wasn't until I saw someone dodging rocks in the river that I found out there was actually a point to the game other than to hunt.
At home when we updated to our new windows 95 computer I was crazy addicted to this game called Ski Free.
My sister and I would sit at the computer and make this guy go off jumps and dodge trees and then eventually the abominable snowman would attack and eat the skier, and then we would repeat.
After a while we outgrew that game and got turned onto Cosmo, Commander Keen, and Lemmings.
While my friends were busy figuring out where the 1-ups were in Mario 3 I played on my computer, forever banned from a childhood Nintendo.
So for whatever bad influence my parents thought a little plumber jumping around would cause, my big brother Dan turned me onto Doom II and Wolfenstien.
With the internet at school we were able to find cheats and shoot/explode/maul aliens and Nazis until big red pixels poured over the ground.
It wasn't until we got Sim City 2000 that I found out I had a problem, I would turn off the disasters and turn the speed up and eat dinner, after I would have tons of money and would build Arco's all around town and highways and terraform the land destroy churches and power-plants just to see what would happen, then I would turn the disasters back on and riots would burn the city down or aliens would attack and I was forced to repair and start over, awesome. I'm sure I can easily attribute at least a week of my waking life playing this game.
In middle school I was finally allowed a PlayStation, as long my grades stayed up. Sure enough they did. Which aside from the Tony Hawk series bore no addictions.
High school brought my graphing calculator games, which were AWESOME! I rarely actually graphed things on it but god did I play games on it.
It was probably a result from never playing Tetris on a Game Boy as a kid.
One day at basketball practice someone said, have you ever played Snood? Its awesome!
Many of you know how much of my life snood took up, but I'm sure few of you know just how much snood I used to play. I think easily I could say I have played Snood for at least two or three weeks my waking life. I took a nice break from it after high school but eventually got myself a laptop and equipped it with snood in college and it got me through countless hours of boring lectures while taking notes. Since I could listen to the instructor and play at the same time.
But in between there I stumbled across the addicting game of all games, I'm still too scared to play the newest version of it, for fear of getting sucked back into it. I spent so much of my time playing my first senior year of college I earned a certificate. The game:
Line Rider. Probably the most fun any one person could have by just drawing lines on a computer screen. The object of the game was easy, your character is a little sledder and you draw lines and he sleds on them, if he goes too fast and hits a bump he falls off. You could make loops, jumps, half pipes, and even little decorations if you were really good. Sometimes it was just as fun to see what you could make the little sledder do after he fell off. There are some pretty awesome youtube videos with some people's amazing feats with line rider. My certificate of suck was awarded by Miz Fuller, because I was playing that instead of working my homework for the millionth time.
My latest addiction, and the inspiration of this post:
FarmVille.
What a god damned waste of time. Seriously, there is nothing to this game yet I sat down nightly for 7 months harvesting my digital crops and celebrating mediocrity. I still can't pinpoint what really kept me hooked. In the end after I built my Villa and got a groovy barn and a house on a hill I decided there was nothing left and gave it up. It might have been that it was something fun to do on Saturday and Sunday mornings while I waited for Laura to get up but, that still doesn't explain my during the week play time. What upset me the most while playing it was there is no challenge to the game, none! The hardest part of the game was to make sure you harvested your crops on time, which is nuts because after you plant them the game says you need to harvest these between a few hours and several days from now! Thats it! After that the hardest part is avoiding Zynga's attempts at getting you to spend real money on the game. I'm happy to say I'm done and I'm not looking back.
Its hard to say what the future has for me. I know I'm looking forward to Diablo 3's release and beyond that its just going to be something I stumble across. I do have a decent amount of will power, I have thus far managed to avoid all contact with apparently one of the most addicting games of all time, World of Warcraft.
Wish me luck, I'm slowly conquering my addiction...for now.
