Injuries to my thumbs

One of the most disturbing things, I find, is when I take a look at the ‘time played’ on Burnout III, and it tells me I’ve played for 123 hours, 48 minutes and 53 seconds. And then I wonder why I have wasted my time running vans off of ramps into busy intersections, trying to cause enough damage to get the points I need to be able to do the same thing but with a fire engine.
Most playstation etc games are just as useless. Actually, the best playstation games that I’ve played are the older ones with early 21st century graphics, the ones with really strange quests and voice overs that sometimes don’t have anything to do with what is going on. We have a great supply of these, seeing as most of the games we own are second hand from a friend. They are actually hilarious, ok.
A particularly good example is the first three Harry Potter playstation games. One of the problems Harry can get himself into in the second game is that he may run into a ‘hallucination mushroom’. After finding out the great joy it brought him to pick up some of the ominously named ‘cauldron cakes’ and was always carrying around some bottles of some sort of mood-altering liquid, we started to suspect a drug problem.
We had the first game in the computer version. How fun it was when our computer was so old that it would take over an hour for the video of Dumbledore welcoming Harry to Hogwarts to finish. The graphics in this one were particularly impressive. Things like Professor Flitwick gliding off a table, and Mrs Norris jumping very slowly from bookcase to bookcase in the library were some of the more interesting features.
Some of the extra quests you can go on are also particularly amusing, such as when Neville gets stuck behind a tapestry and for some reason the way to save him is to run to the greenhouses, and also the ‘foot race’ against an unknown student which I don’t think is actually possible to lose.
The fourth one is slightly better, and we have it on loan from my sister’s friend, due back ‘when they finish year 12’. This results in the occasional joke of ‘We’d better finish playing this, because we only have 3 years until we have to give it back!’ Such wit.
Another game which is the Lord of the Rings. In one of them there is a little part at the beginning when you choose which character you want to be. If you choose the little fat dwarf with what looks like a very solid beard and begin the game, you see Legalas run ahead of you, stand on the edge of a cliff and just fall off into a ravine. Seconds later he is back by your side shooting arrows into the faces of orcs.
We had the good fortune also to be given a loan of guitar hero for a few weeks. Any awesomeness usually associated with this game was diminished a bit because we didn’t actually have one of those really realistic miniature guitars, and so we had to play it using the normal playstation controllers. So we could pretend we were rocking out, but anyone watching could tell that we were just stupid. A note to anyone playing guitar hero 3, by the way, have a look at the audience at some point. Their dancing style is really one to be envied.
Yes. That’s right. Time Waster 2000 or what?