It's the right season to talk about scary things, right?
So this week, my Beloved ended up in the hospital ER, and needless to say it was a difficult time. Second scariest time of my life thus far. Once we were home, safe, and returning to 'normal,' the brain and nerves didn't exactly get the message to calm down. One of the many wind-downs I've adopted over the years to cope with stress is, naturally, video games.
Certainly there are nostalgic games that many of us occasionally return to in order to relax and feel better. Despite growing up on mainly C64 and the NES, my teens were mostly spent with the SNES, and that's the 'comfort' game system to which I most often return.
Though its no longer annual (it once was), I still periodically go through Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Contra III, Castlevania IV, TMNT IV: Turtles in Time, Axelay, Starfox, Gradius III, Super Mario World, and F-Zero. These and about a dozen others are comfort blankets, warm milk, a soothing Calgon for my mood.
Calgon? What, you don't remember this?
Anyway. I still return to those old favorites from time to time, though the pool has since expanded. In college it grew by way of Tempest 2000/X3, Unreal Tournament, and Soul Calibur. Once meeting and dating my beloved, de-stressing via gaming became an occasional co-op affair. Until then I was unaware it was possible to zone out and decompress so well with someone else; previously the purposeful isolationism was assumed to be a necessary part of the therapy, but somehow sharing the experience with an understanding partner helped in a fresh, new way.
My Beloved's 'comfort' game system is the Dreamcast, with a similar large library of perennials include the Dead or Alive series, Crazy Taxi, House of the Dead II, the You Don't Know Jack series, and the Fable series. (Note most of these can be two player.)
Incidentally, the first night I asked her out on a date (for the next night) and she said yes, for obvious reasons I could not sleep. I crashed on the couch and tried to speedrun through the NES Legend of Zelda. Funneling my nervous energy and tunneling my runaway thought train, my dexterity finally gave out around the seventh dungeon at around 4 a.m. I could finally sleep, and sleep I did, at least until a good friend of mine woke me up because he needed his bathtub, which I happened to be using in my unconscious state.
Fast forward several years later, and I'm sitting next to the same wonderful woman, this time in the hospital as she recovered from giving birth to our newborn. Three times over, each with complications. Three extended hospital stays, each with various stages of no sleep and nervous results. No Super Nintendo or Dreamcast here, a DS and the first two Etrian Odyssey games accompany me through long nights and restless days. Turn-based action means no problem for her IV tapped hand to hold one of mine. The slow, grindy pace fills the odd time lapses. The strategy, loadout customization and map creation give my ravenous mind some bones on which to gnaw. We leave several days later, exhausted, with another member of the family in tow and many, many hours logged on our portables.
For modern consoles, often the steady flow and rhythm of a balanced FPS like Unreal Tournament or Halo fits the mood. Other times the intensity and draining concentration of a polished shmup such as Gate of Thunder or Mars Matrix fits the bill. Any genre that requires fast reflexes can be useful for burning up excess nervous energy. But for me, nothing gives an automatic reflex of comfort like picking up that SNES controller. My friends, family, and of course my Faith pull me through difficult, even scary times. But it is a great blessing to have video games to help.
