Why Game? 1 - TextFiles.com

still haunt my life, but that’s because we live
in a world of teenagers, or at least that’s my
sensation. I’m almost 27 (at least, I’ll be 27 by
the day of publication), and I am bored by silly
issues like who loves whom.
But there’s one happy emergency exit to
such trivial matters, which can be used at will. It
features several good sides and almost no bad
sides, but that too, is debatable. It has been the
necessary discipline and meditation technique
required to get rid of stupid and childish issues
of bored people. Love is not enough, sometimes.
I need to think in a more regimented way most
of the time - this doesn’t mean that I go around
like Spock, talking about the ways of logic and
denying that I get moved a bit by lovely sun-
sets.
I’m a logician. Well, I’m a semanticist who’s
studying linguistics and cognitive sciences.
Eventually I’ll finish my Ph.D., but that’s not the
point. Because of my studies, I could resolve the
trivial matters of love in the most rational (and
least painful) way. What I have now is a more
powerful method, so to speak. But, again, that’s
not the point.
1994.
If you read my previous article on the
Darius series, you know by now that I’m a Taito
fanboy. This is an official declaration. But well,
we’re speaking of Taito - do I need to make a
list of their masterpieces? I’m not entirely sure
it is late October - it’s more a fuzzy sensation of
the incoming autumn of 1994. I’m a teenager
with a lot of frustration, and a single excellent
method for discharging this frustration: video-
games. It’s fall and I’m just waiting for a stupid
and trivial matter of love to end.
Not mine, I have to admit. Actually, I am
a bit cold and logic-driven. I tend not to care
about petty people, even if they have nice
boobs, or a nice smile, or whatever sexual ele-
ment most would find attractive. Hormones or
not, I had to grow up quickly, and I have never
developed the ability to stand childish attitudes.
Sometimes you can’t punch people on the face
to make them understand that you’re not inter-
ested in their petty personality. You have to be
a bit more rational, and try to solve the problem
in a better way than futile flirting.
Especially when you don’t want to flirt.
This generates stress and frustration, which
can be easily discharged by intense activities,
physical or intellectual. Arcade games, before
the Bemani revolution, involved mainly the lat-
ter type. I enter my uncle’s arcade and my uncle
tells me that there’s a new shooting game, and
that I will surely like it. The first approach, as
I’ve said, isn’t all that exhilarating. I’m mostly
under whelmed by the minimalist design of the
intro.
But that’s before I put my first coin in the
cab. When this happens, the screen fades to
black and a simple text message appears. The
usual “Press start button.”
But something else happens.
On Standby.
One simple musical loop that opens an
entire world of memories and thoughts every
single time I listen to it. The simple loop of the
starting screen on standby. A hypnotic se-
Raystorm and Its Legacy 115