5punk

I've not done one of these posts for a while, so in the usual slightly off the wall way here's a fred for pigeon holing a bunch of games you have played into an obscure and irrelevant category, for no other reason than it might distract you from work for about 10 minutes. Which can only be good.

Encapsulating the generally very old games that remain on our disks year after year, this week we shall be looking at the Life Ruiners: those games that are so utterly, soul destroyingly addictive that you are compelled to cancel your social engagements, call in sick, close the curtains, stock up on stimulants and convince your family that you are, in fact, dead so they'll leave you the fuck alone to carry on playing. Which games have broken you? What pixelated monstrosity has given you RSI and bizarre dreams?

Here's my nominations:

Civilization * (All of them). Not technically me, but my brother. He's never played any other game but Civ, but he plays a game every night without fail. Last time he 'gave up', he had to destroy his computer and send the game DVD to Japan.

World of Crack. Goes without saying. Sucked many of us in until we realised we'd been chewing this particular bit of gum for so long that your teeth look like a 90 year old granny's nether regions.

TTD and it's current incarnation OpenTTD. Mnngggggghhh.

Minecrack. MUST. BUILD. TOWER. HIGHER!

Minecrack indeed. It's simple and therefore addictive. I hope the final version will have multiplayer options so that we can build our own castle and defend it from skeletons at night.
I've never given in to world of warcraft because current MMONG's simply don't hold my attention very long. There is something very off-putting about having to attack a character for 10 minutes straight to get him down.

I recently hid the WoW listing on my Xfire profile, the shame of it. I have no interest in getting sucked in again and I don't want to show off that I once did.

Championship/Football Manager.

I have been playing this, in all its iterations, since the Amiga days. I own every single one, and the addiction doesn't look like ending any time soon.

Over the years I've had a few games suck me in so that I find myself realising how late it is and wondering where the time went.

Populous is the first I remember. I was seeing little men for weeks.

Civilisation in all its iterations have had me compelled to play for great lengths of time at various stages.

Sim City had me hooked for ages before I started to wonder what it was all leading towards. Which was nothing, so I stopped.

UFO/X-Com have that compelling 'just one more turn' thing going on (common theme I suspect), that I return to every now and then. Luckily it's so hard that it never grips me for too long any more.

Eve had me sinking more hours than I had available, so I stopped playing.

World of Warcraft had a similar effect, except I could choose the hours I wanted to play. I'm still subscribed but haven't played properly in months. This will probably change once Cat Jism comes out.

Minecraft is, as Mr Johnson said, very simple and terribly addictive. The indev version is very good and it's not even in beta. I check the dev's blog regularly and he works hard, often having several new features a week. Multiplayer survival mode is planned as an integral part of the game, and it seems many players are expecting a lot of PKing so are already planning their hidden bunkers.

Championship Manager has taken some of my time, but my inherent sports-spazziness makes me very bad at it. However, during training I had to regularly pry my roommates off my computer because of it.

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amblin wrote:Hmm, I wonder if they'd work on Windows Mobile 6.5...

Doubtful given winmob is utter poo. They need to do some serious changes and give it a 7 overhaul.*




*Thus reinforcing the universal truth that 7 is the best number.



Editz - forgot the question!

Dungeon keeper 1 and 2.

fallout series.

Baldurs gate series.

Rage of colon when that came out, I managed the hours I have in about one month, with the one week of 150 hours played.

The winner for me is halo series, specifically halo 2. I put around 10,000 hours into it. And it was a few hours here and there that was actually entire weeks of student life swallowed whole.