There is a culture and a beauty to good cheating.

Cheat codes were originally there so that programmers could test their games without going insane, but kids soon became obsessed with finding every code, not least because you bloody needed to cheat in order to finish some of those old “classics”.

In the 80’s, programmers seemed to regard games as a punishment they could visit upon the rest of the world for denying them the touch of a woman. Some games were literally impossible (Ghosts N Goblins, you stand condemned); others were merely dick-severingly difficult. So the cheat code was not just a luxury: it was a virtual necessity.

Jet Set Willy. When a game starts you off with 12 lives, it’s a fairly solid hint that you are about to get a ramming.

Soon, canny publicists realised that there was an  emerging “cult of cheating” which could be encouraged and exploited. Game magazines rushed to publish the latest cheats, let slip by the developers with an astonishingly capricious regularity. And all over the world, games that took years to create were being nonchalantly broken by dishonest little crap-kickers who didn’t even know they were ruining the spirit of sportsmanship.

Those were the days.

How I became a bad person

I used to own a Commodore Amiga, one of the most hilarious sumps of dishonesty ever created.

Every kid lusted after them, but the buggers were £300, an absolute fortune in 1988. There was seemingly no hope of getting one. But kids are clever. “It’s for my homework”, was the endlessly repeated line. “It can print stuff out, dad! It can do the maths that you are mentally incapable of doing, thereby sparing you the shame of failure as a father!” In the end, the parents caved into our relentless pleas. They knew in their hearts that they were being bullshitted, but they chose to believe otherwise because it was the path of least resistance. They were so very tired.

Not only was the Amiga’s butt bigger than your mother’s; the power pack was almost as ponderous as my dick.

This was the way I got my Amiga. I got it through lying. Through cheating. With this in mind, it was inevitable that I would cheat at the very games I bullshitted so hard to obtain, and the Amiga made it stupidly easy to do so. You could buy an external cartridge called the Action Replay which slotted into the side of your computer, allowing you to hack into the code of any program and change whatever variable you wanted. God knows how, but the cartridge even zeroed in on the code responsible for things like lives and ammo.

Suddenly, every game became an exercise in pointlessness as you sailed right through to the end in a soft, gay cloud of invulnerability. This should have killed all enjoyment, but oddly, it didn’t. When I think back to old classics like Turrican and Battle Squadron, I remember fondly how difficult they were, and how great I felt when I finally beat them. I conveniently forget that I beat them approximately 11 minutes after first loading them, because I gave myself infinite lives and used Action Replay to skip right to the end.

My whole life, basically, is a lie.

Winners don’t use drugs. They use dismal-looking 80’s peripherals.

And if I can fool myself so successfully about games, what else have I fabricated? Did my grandparents really move to Weston-Super-Mare? And why wouldn’t I let anyone disturb the two piles of dirt in the backyard? No one cares anymore but me, of course, so I shouldn’t beat myself up about whom I might or might not have murdered.

DOOOOOOOOOOOOM

With the golden age of PC games, cheating faced a new challenge. Games were no longer impossibly grim struggles retched out by programmers who never got breast-fed; they were now stories with some semblance of narrative, where you were expected to reach the end. Suddenly vanilla cheating began to lose its allure. There were some wonderful exceptions, however. Take Doom: it took the unprecedented step of giving you the ability to save anywhere, making cheats irrelevant unless you were cripplingly spasticated or a parent. So cheating assumed a new purpose: that of screwing with the game itself.

By far the most enjoyable cheat of this kind was a catchy little fellow called idspispopd, which turned clipping off, allowing you to walk right through walls as if ain’t nuthin. This, needless to say, was shit-awesome. Millions of kids had their first taste of existentialism when they thought “hey, I wonder what’s behind this wall” and discovered the brain-buggering paradox of an Absolute Nothingness that stretched on forever in all directions.

Turn 90 degrees right! Walk ten paces! Blow Mind!

There should have been idspispopd-related help groups. If only we had known, the world wouldn’t now be full of terrified hipsters wearing aviator shades to disguise their thousand-yard stares. Let that be a lesson to the next generation: it is not appropriate to confront the futility of existence while fucking about on Level Three.

The age of the meta-cheat

Amazingly, some game programmers became so cocky that they designed areas you could only access through cheating.

In Ultima 7, you can visit a pirate town called Buccaneer’s Den, which houses a dark and completely ridiculous secret. There’s a sealed room which you must cheat yourself into. Within this room is a dead alligator. Reward enough, you might think, but stick your arm inside the alligator, and what do you find but an entire grandfather clock! Evidently, Captain Hook not only had an evil sense of irony, but also various old heirlooms that were just cluttering up the house. They should have turned this into a regular feature, I feel. I’d pay good money for a game that gives you Achievements for finding all 45 mice with candles in their anuses.

QUICK! SEARCH THE FOX’S SPHINCTER FOR ASHTRAYS!

The cheat and the game… Become One.

In a flash of genius, 1999’s AvP turned the cheat into something you could actually earn, rewarding you for completing the game by giving you the opportunity to break it. Each time you hit a certain performance target, you unlocked a new cheat mode, although “cheat” should be taken loosely here, since some of them actually turned the game into a sadistic, vomit-spewing nightmare. But the crowning refinement of the cheating oeuvre? The games so creative that they make you feel as if you’re cheating, without even needing to do so. Take Jedi Knight. Without the Force Powers, it’s a straight first-person shooter, with guns, bad people and ludicrously unjustified levels of carnage. A solid 75-percenter, in other words. But add the Force, and suddenly you have all these fun ways to bend the rules of the genre.

Thinking quickly, Kyle activates Force Mincing and gays his way towards the opponent.

Here’s an example. You’re ambling down a corridor, lost in your thoughts, when suddenly you see a Rodian coming towards you with a big laser, and you think “ahh shit, I still owe that guy twenty! If only I could become…invisible…”

With a shimmer, you disappear. The Rodian walks up to where you were standing, sniffs the air with his nauseating proboscis, and mutters “hmm; could have sworn I saw Steve.” But Steve is long gone, Zoobydoob, and he used your money to buy low-grade porn.

Tim Cameron is a writer for www.TheSillyAddiction.com. He is aware that you’re already reading his site, thus making a blurb unnecessary, but he is including it anyway because it makes him feel like a big shot.

The other day, I was having a discussion with my woman about photography, and she made the point that we are fast becoming a non-photogenic generation.

I agreed with her instantly, of course, but later (during some mental downtime) I actually thought about what she was saying, and realised that she made a surprisingly interesting point. When my parents were kids, they used to play in the street, laughing, japing and dazzling passers-by with their implausibly rosy cheeks. It was a world without paedophiles. By the time I reached Japing Age, though, the rot had already set in. Kids were spending all their evenings on Spectrums and C64s, scowling at anyone with the temerity to open the curtains or disturb the filth accumulating in great drifts in the corners of their bedrooms. And as they grew up, their insular lifestyles grew with them. That’s why our photo albums now consist of weddings and holidays and not much else. We’ve lost something; something that no amount of exploding things can make up for.

Remember the Kodak Carousel scene in Mad Men? If you haven’t seen it, it’s a profoundly moving piece of drama. Ad-man Don Draper plays a photographic slideshow of his life to a stunned audience, who watch him building a treehouse with his kids, falling in love, holding his newborn baby; all the beautiful, lost moments of his life. But imagine how it would have played out if Don Draper had been a member of the Sun-Fearing generation. If he had been me, in fact.

A little different, I’ll wager.

For the purposes of this article, let’s assume that someone has been lurking in my bedroom for the past twenty years, taking photos of me during my most intimate moments. Sort of like a sex-offender version of Edward Cullen. But that’s another article in itself.

Let’s begin.

DUCK: Here they come, gentlemen. Don, it’s your show now.  Just… if I can offer one word of advice, please don’t do that thing you always do. You know the thing I’m talking about.

DON: Don’t worry, Duck. This one’s in the bag.

The KODAK MEN are shown into the conference room.

DON: Welcome, gentlemen. Please take a seat.

The KODAK MEN sit down alongside the MAD MEN. One of the KODAK MEN takes out a slide wheel and places it on the table.

KODAK MAN 1: We appreciate that you’ll have a hard time selling this. We’re aware that the Wheel is seen as old technology now. Extremely old technology, since for the creaky premise of this comedy article, we’re currently in 2009.

DUCK: That shouldn’t be a problem for Don. He’s not just an all-round swell guy: he’s also a creative genius.

DON: Thank you, Duck.

DUCK: I’ll put that one on the tab.

Everyone laughs. Don turns back to the KODAK MEN.

DON: Back when I was just a junior ad man, I spent a lot of time on the Counterstrike forums. It was the perfect place to learn about the darker side of people; what really makes them tick. I made a lot of good friends there, but there was one particular man who became a mentor to me, and whose guidance I heed to this day. His name was Commodore Fuckburger. He taught me that people are never happy with what they’ve got. They always want what they had.

The KODAK MEN listen, interested.

“Don_ZeDong,” he once said to me, “just look at Counterstrike. A few years ago, it got upgraded: new graphics, new gameplay. People should have been grateful, but they weren’t. For some reason, they hankered after the old Counterstrike, bitching on endlessly about how this new version was just for faggots and gays. It wasn’t, of course. It was actually pretty sweet. They did change the names of all the guns though, which was a totally homo thing to do.”

DON: What Fuckburger was saying here was that gamers weren’t really hankering after the old game. No, they missed the memory – the nostalgia – of those vanished days of their lives. It’s something you ache for. Something you can never get back. Sweetheart?

ASSISTANT LADY starts the projector. The room is darkened.

DON: In Greek, nostalgia literally means “the pain of returning home.” And that’s exactly what you feel when you look at my personal photographs. Pain.

The Wheel clicks, and the first slide displays a teenager, beswamped with acne. It is 1996. On the screen stands Lara Croft in her most primitive incarnation. Her buttocks are like two mouldy cardboard boxes. Her mouth clings desperately to her face, like a butterfly to a windswept cliff. There is very little to arouse here, yet the boy’s brow clenches as he masturbates with grim determination. He will make it, no matter how long and arduous the journey.

DON: It’s not called the Wheel. It’s called the Circle Of Sadness. It transports us back to a time where we succeeded in escaping; where each evening was a journey to a far-away place, full of magic and endless possibility. When we were kids, our playgrounds weren’t parks or streets: they were balconies suspended in space.

Click

Submarines hugging the floor of the Mariana trench.

Click

Quaint Italian towns, haunted by the disembodied voice of Pavarotti.

Click

DON: But it wasn’t really the games themselves that brought us there; it was our own imaginations. The games were just the stepping stones. And that’s why you can never truly go back, no matter how hard you may try. Because you’ve changed now, and those places in your dreams have evaporated, leaving only cold, hard adulthood behind.

The next slide shows Don, aged 32, wearing nothing but a tattered pair of Aliens boxer shorts, sloganed “Butt Huggers”. His stubbled, tear-streaked face is bathed in the light of Aliens Versus Predator. His belly droops low, but not low enough to obscure the moth-holes in his underpants. Through one of them, his penis peeks out.

DON: Sometimes, when you look at these pictures… you wish you could go back to the very beginning, and warn yourself. Stop now, while you can.

Don is six years old, in his grandparents’ living room. He stares, wide-eyed, at the white dot bouncing from left to right and back again. His sister will quickly grow bored with the game, but Don will stay in the room all night, playing Pong until his eyes hurt and his t-shirt becomes crusted with dribble.

DON: But you can’t. You never know where the future will lead. And perhaps it’s better that way.

A huge crowd. Don, naked, is fourteenth-from-left. He is one of the Squatters; there are an equal number of people lying supine on the ground. It is the biggest teabagging session ever attempted in a computer game. All around the world, teenagers are hi-fiving themselves and shaking uncontrollably as the Mountain Dew courses through their veins. Don reclines, a look of blissful calm upon his face. This is the finest moment of his entire life.

The slides end, and the lights go up.

KODAK MAN 1: There were… There were an awful lot of shots of your dick in there, Mr. Draper.

KODAK MAN 2: Pretty much every shot, in fact.

KODAK MAN 1: You’re actually touching your dick right now.

DON: Yes I am. And that’s the point. The Circle Of Sadness conveys a very profound message, and because of my time on the Counterstrike forums, I know exactly what that message is, and how it should be expressed.

Duck groans quietly.

KODAK MAN 2: And what exactly is your message, Mr Draper?

DON leans forward.

DON: Would you like me to lay it on the table for you gentlemen?

KODAK MAN 1: Please do.

There is a sad, wet thump.

Don looks expectantly at the KODAK MEN.

DON: That’s my message, gentlemen. Take it or leave it.

The KODAK MEN exchange glances, then get up and leave without saying a word.

DUCK: Good luck at your next… ahhh, fuck it.

The man is me. And the game is Aliens Versus Predator. And the living room is my mum’s living room.

I mostly game at night. Mostly.

I have loved Aliens since I was old enough to watch it, which was at age eight. Luckily, I had already been desensitised to violence because my sister forced me to watch Nightmare On Elm Street the previous year, so I was not traumatised by the penis-shaped chestmonsters and disturbingly strong female role models. However, I ended up fetishising the film. Every lunchtime I recruited my friends to play Aliens playground games that all bore quite an incredible resemblance to Tick, though I swore at the time that the two were unrelated. I obsessed over every Aliens computer game I could find, including an old classic on the C64, which shat me up even more than the film did, thanks to the moment about halfway through when all the lights go off and all you can do is wander around screaming and then die.

And it looks just as impressive now!

You young whippersnappers have it easy

Games before Doom were hardcore. You weren’t even expected to complete them; the intention was to have you gibbering in impotent fury as your character expired on level 2 for the three-hundred-and-forty-sixth time, and most games achieved this goal with crotch-punching levels of success. When AvP was released in 1999, it recaptured the incredible stress of those old games by denying you the ability to save your games mid-level, not exactly a calming measure when the game was as hard as a cement block covered in tetanus-tipped diamonds.

Admittedly, the game would have been scarier if any of the aliens could move.

The genius of AvP lay in the random nature of the alien encounters. Although the levels were the same every time, the enemies were in a different place each time you played. Additionally, they would respawn at random intervals, meaning that if you just stood still, eventually you would be found and killed. There was never a safe moment, as I memorably learned when I attempted to roll a jazz cigarette and ended up flinging the contents all over the living room floor while a facehugger viciously raped my nose.

Let there not be light

Darkness pervaded the world of AvP. Very few games have played with the absence light so memorably. As a marine you could throw flares to light your way, but these invariably made the shadows more menacing; alternatively you could switch to infra-red, but you were blinded as soon as you fired your gun. Things got even more awesome with the Predator’s vision: one mode allowed you to see aliens, and another humans, but never both at the same time, which was a perfect recipe for Pant Poop Casserole. This was a far more subtle and plausible mechanic than Doom III’s cheap “torch or gun, but not both” trick, and AvP was released five years before this supposedly classic title. It’s a shame that programmers so often fail to learn from the lessons of their forbears due to being a big pile of tards.

In the “Gayliens” mod, the humans glow yellow when they are sexually aroused.

The biggest mindbugger was playing as the Alien itself. Not only did you move like a greased bastard, you also had the ability to walk on walls and ceilings. This could be hideously disorientating, but there was no finer feeling than crouching on the ceiling while a hapless victim walked obliviously beneath, then dropping to the floor behind him and getting blown to pieces by the twatting sentry gun you didn’t even know was there. Did I mention this game was hard?

Brevity is the soul of not making a godawful storyline

The first two Alien films treated the subject matter with a degree of respect, thanks to the well-written scripts. AvP does the same by not having a script. This was a wise move, since the storylines of most games are about as mature as a bitch-fight in a crèche. In AvP, the only speech comes from videos on the TV screens your character walks past, and they’re largely functional, serving only to explain the nature of the level and your ultimate objective. The actors are reasonably skilled and don’t look too ashamed of their choices in life. Not until the Special Edition that is, when the programmers (oh, those cards) replaced the professional actors with themselves. Results were mixed. In the same way that sewage is mixed before being pumped onto Crosby beach. I tried to find these videos to show you, but they have quite rightfully been erased from history.

I was a worrying young man

I played AvP until I knew every cubic centimetre of every level, and then I played it some more, until certain corridors and bulkheads were more familiar to me than my own family. I played it long past the point of fear, not an easy thing when every playthrough was different; eventually I was acing the game while holding the mouse with my toes and typing with my penis. At this point, I lost interest. As did my friends, who no longer wanted to use my computer for some reason.

When I gave away all my games, there was one CD I just had to hold onto. I don’t even plan on playing the game again, but I was just so damn fond of it for so many years that I couldn’t bear to let the game go. I am aware of how flamingly retarded this sentiment is, but on the other hand I AM SMARTGUNNING YOUR FACE I AM SMARTGUNNING YOUR FACE.

My parents were art teachers and were not rich; thinking back, they must have spent a fortune on that computer. I’m sure I was incredibly grateful, but I expressed that gratitude by disappearing into my bedroom for weeks at a time and sulking when I had to come out in order to eat and poop. I may even have occasionally combined the two in order to save time.

Some of my favourite memories were of dad playing games with me, which he did frequently at the beginning. There was a flight sim called F18 Interceptor that we played religiously, although my lust for game abuse caused me to spend most of my time attempting to sink the Golden Gate Bridge instead of shooting down enemy fighters. I never understood why the USSR felt the need to focus their aerial fury on San Francisco anyway; nowadays, with my greater knowledge of political history, I understand the threat that liberal West Coast homosexuals posed to Gorbachev’s regime.

We all know who the real enemy is here, don’t we… BRIDGE.

When I stopped being a knobstopper and played the game properly, it was a joy to have dad sit beside me and offer advice, or fly the plane while I manned the controls. He was better than me at the start, but I soon overtook him because I did little other than play games, whereas he had other stuff to do, such as art and joints.

There was always the aroma of hash smoke hanging round his study, mingling with the tang of turpentine and the dark notes of the oil paints. It was a great place to sit and play a game for six hours straight. In the evenings I disappeared into Falcon or Elite while dad sat in his tattered old chair, roll-up in hand, contemplating this one painting that he’d worked on for ten years and never finished. I didn’t understand how odd that was at the time, but now it makes me deeply sad. His career had not advanced in the way he’d hoped for, and after a while, his creativity died. For the last years of his life, he just kept mashing away at this one impossible painting, transferring all his frustration to it. I hate to think about it now.

This picture arouses parts of me that should be reserved only for women and cars.

After he and mum split up, I only saw him one weekend in two. On many of those weekends, I disappeared off to his study and played Pirates, shunning all enticements of TV and talk. Sometimes, when I was getting ready to go home on Sunday evening, he’d give me a wistful smile and say “haven’t seen much of you this weekend”. I wish I’d felt guiltier about that.

I also wish I wasn’t so fucking great at games, because maybe then he’d have carried on playing them with me, instead of quitting to go and do something he wouldn’t get repeatedly whupped at. The truth is unavoidable: my amazing gaming prowess is the entire reason why I didn’t have a good relationship with my father. It was my blessing – and my curse. I rue the day I first felt the joystick in my hand and knew that I was powerful.

Me at age ten, pimping my bitches.

Anyone who has tortured a Sim until he expired in a pile of his own shame will understand what I mean. In this post, I’m going to tell you about my favourite acts of gaming rebellion over the years. I would like to hear yours.

My litany of retardation began when I got my first real computer. I was eight years old, and it was an Atari 65XE. Always the underdog, Atari employed the amusing tactic of adding an extra increment onto their computer’s name so that buyers would shun its rival the Commodore 64, thinking “nah, I’m not buying that balls; Atari’s computer is one better“. Turns out the C64 pooped on the 65XE with both arses tied behind its back, but that didn’t stop me from falling in love with it.

Back in those creaky days, games came on tapes, and loading each one was an exercise in mental torture. They took a minimum of four minutes to load; no small length of time when your brain hadn’t yet melted from years of alcohol and solvent abuse. The cruellest punishment was reaching the end of that eternity only to find that there had been a smegging loading error, and you would have to start again. This happened with depressing regularity, and is the reason why so many of today’s adults have serious rage issues. I suspect it also triggered my taste for game abuse, as a kind of twisted revenge upon the Fickle Tape God, creator of a thousand sulks.

Right Up The Asteroid

The first game I played on the 65XE was called Star Raiders. It was the precursor to Elite, with graphics that looked like someone had eaten the contents of a shredder and then puked all over the TV. I quickly grasped the point of the game, which was to completely ignore the marauding aliens and instead attempt to kill myself in as many dumb ways as possible. A magical light sparkled in my eyes as I crashed my ship straight into an asteroid again and again, leaving the galaxy marvellously, blissfully unsaved. For some bizarre reason, the asteroids had human faces, which gave me a real sense of achievement when I totalled them in a blaze of idiocy. My posthumous rank was invariably “Garbage scow captain”, which seemed pretty rad to me. I was a Captain.

Apparently you’re looking at an enemy ship here. I wouldn’t know.

Pictures Of Matchstick Men (shitting themselves)

Later, I became infatuated with a game called Panther. This was a great title, though punshingly difficult. In your whizzy ship, you had to tear-ass across a war-ravaged land, shooting down enemy ships and stopping to pick up doomed civilians. One of my favourite pastimes was rescuing all the evacuees except one, then taking off with an evil laugh. A second later, I would land again and wait until the poor guy had almost caught up, and then fly off once more. I liked to imagine the little white stick figure pooping his pixellated pants in confused terror, with hope and desperation fighting for dominance of his tiny mind. I always picked him up in the end, of course; I’m not a total monster.

The evacuee is seen top centre, waving like a girl.

What A “Carrier” On!

Certainly not the kind of monster who would completely ruin his own aircraft carrier, as I did time and time again in Carrier Command for the Commodore Amiga. This was a real-time strategy game in which your aim was to take off, circle round and then pepper each part of your battleship with cannon fire until it was entirely out of operation but not actually sinking. This was a difficult and subtle challenge, and I applaud the designers for balancing the game so well. Sometimes it would end prematurely because the actual enemy had conquered the entire world in the meantime, but I always counted this as a win.

In the “strategy” game, the objective was to sink the carrier while simultaneously crashing it into an island.

Indy 500 And The Quest For Retardedness

My rebellion reached the peak of refinement with Indy 500 for the PC. The first time I played it, I sat on the starting grid listening to the synthetic farty whine of the racing cars revving up around me, and suddenly I felt a tremendous thirst for victory. Nothing, nothing would stand in my way. The moment the flag descended, I gunned my car into a power-slide and set off the wrong way around the track, howling with primeval joy. “YOU’RE GOING THE WRONG WAY” yelled the game, and it felt like a majestic call to arms. I don’t know what I enjoyed the most: playing chicken with the approaching cars, or deliberately ramming one at the worst possible moment and seeing how big I could make the resulting pile-up. The wheels would always fly off the cars at fantastic angles, and my crowning achievement was causing such an Armageddon of mangled horror that one wheel (it may even have been from my own car) hurtled vertically upwards like a rubbery rocket and vanished into the sky.

A typical race. I am the car in the middle.

The joy fades

For years, I chased that retarded dragon. When I bought Oblivion, I took up dog punching, but discovered quickly that there are only so many ways to punch a dog before boredom sets in. Throwing dead bears off cliffs was also pretty fun for a while, yet it lacked a certain je ne sais quoi. After I gave up games, I was forced to seek more healthy outlets for my wrong desires, but I realise now that no amount of killing hobos or deliberately putting too much vinegar in my salad dressings can recapture that old joy of ballsing a game up in the most creative way possible.

A bear comes to rest after a long and satisfying plummet.

Even when I played a game properly, I resented being herded down one particular route, because it denied me the option of saying “oh bugger this for a game of bastards” and doing something that the designers never intended. This stuff is important. Sometimes, it can make you confront terrifying truths. One time in Oblivion I removed the invisible barriers preventing me from leaving the habitable zones, and I vividly recall the existential terror of running, running until all the trees and animals had gone, and it was just me, butt naked, moving forever across a barren landscape with nothing ahead but infinity. This, I remarked to myself, is life in a fucking nutshell.

Half an hour later, I fell off the edge of the earth. That’s not a sentence I get to say very often, which is why I cherish the memory of the day I broke Oblivion.

I am having fun playing Diablo II.

My girlfriend lies on our bed, unfulfilled, while I stab frenetically at the left mouse button and mutter to myself about how Wyand Voidbringer is possibly the most selfish prick on the planet, seeing as I’ve murdered him two hundred times and he has so far failed to cough a charm out of his dying sphincter. Later, my girlfriend and I will do The Nasty Dance, but I won’t be thinking of her. I’ll be thinking of my level 87 barbarian. At the moment of climax, I will blurt out “I LOVE YOU, SH’GGGNXRKX!” and will quickly roll over so that I don’t have to witness my girlfriend’s stifled sobs.

Had this happened to me, I would not actually have been surprised.

And that’s it. Throw in a bunch of other human players, and you can spend entire months of your life killing things and looting their corpses over and over again, searching for that one rabid hedgehog who is for some reason storing a unique battleaxe in his stomach. Not every hedgehog is equal, however, and the complexity of the game lies in working out the places where you’re most likely to get a certain drop. And then going there and killing the same hedgehog, over and over again, for the rest of your crumbling life.

It’s the gambler’s obsession. Diablo players are only one step removed from those flaccid, corpulent ladies who pump coins into Las Vegas slot machines until they quietly expire and are disposed of by the staff.

The blue items are magical. The green belong to a set, and the brown… oh god, the BROWN… sorry, I appear to have made a mess

Yes, Diablo can turn the most generous soul into a greedy, conniving fuckbucket who would mug his mother if she stumbled over a sweet drop. After a few weeks, people become less important than words written in brown text. A couple of years ago, I actually managed to convince my Finnish girlfriend to play this game with me, and our happy relationship morphed into nothing but Diablo sessions separated by some tedious conversation and the occasional bout of payment cunnilingus. I would mutter cryptic phrases about “twatty sandcrawlers” in my sleep, and if I was shaken awake, I would reflexively sit bolt upright and scream “NOT YET! I’VE GOT TO ASK DROGNAN ABOUT THE STRANGE DARKNESS!”, and then burst into tears.

It had to end. But how?

In retrospect, the solution was a blinding flash of genius. Get dumped. Afterwards, my schedule was far too busy for Diablo. In between the sobbing sessions and the angry, reproachful masturbation, there was barely time to prepare my thrice-daily packet of mushroom Super Noodles, never mind spend six hours a night hunting for a magic ring which would only get stolen by some cunt in Germany anyway.

Misery, you are my faithful friend.

It’s better than Scunthorpe

Playing Oblivion always used to feel like going on holiday. This is a gaming concept I have never managed to adequately explain to my mother. You’ve played Oblivion, right? Remember your first footsteps through the misty forest as you made your way to Chorrol? Remember the creaking and whispering of the trees, and your first sight of a deer skittering through the undergrowth? It’s that kind of immersive beauty that makes a game special; it allows you to exist in the game, not just play your way through it. I was entranced. Much of the time, I just wandered around picking Viper’s Bugloss and sighing effeminately to myself.

Ironically, Oblivion does its best to undermine its own atmosphere with its dynamic levelling system. The more you level, the tougher the local fauna become, until you can’t sashay gaily through the forest without being pursued by nineteen homicidal minotaurs covered in tigers that have been set on fire. This is why Oblivion HAS to be modded in order to be played as it should. The best of the bunch was Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul, which rigidly set the levels of most areas and monsters, meaning that there were some places I didn’t dare visit until I was manifestly able to fuck shit up. This necessitated entire evenings spent increasing my strength by punching crabs. Holy Christ, did I punch some crabs. But it was worth it, because it allowed me to carry more than 100% extra wildflowers at any given time.

Dirty, dirty, dirty

This is someone else’s dream character. I can’t show mine, because I

KILLED HER OH GOD I’VE KILLED HER

I upgraded my PC twice to play Oblivion on the highest settings. I took days off work so that I could level up, and ate nothing that couldn’t be microwaved in less than six minutes. Stagg Chilli was a particular favourite, though the resultant protein content of my urine often made me shiver in fear. As I grew more socially withdrawn, I took solace in the clammy arms of in-game perversion, upgrading my three female characters with a slew of face and body replacements, until they had become expressionless pneumatic supermodels with dead, beautiful eyes. Oh yes: for the lonely man, Oblivion was a festering sink of depravity. Remember that necrophilic elf apothecary in Skingrad? Phwooooar, eh? Phwooooooooooar.

What I was doing was sick and wrong. I see that now.

So, last month I got rid of the whole lot. Goodbye Jauffre, with your shiny head and disturbing monotones. Goodbye Shadowmere, my faithful horse; I’m sorry I repeatedly knocked you unconscious and stored items inside your body. And farewell to my bevy of buxom beauties; those three playable ladies who, thanks to my guiding hand, embodied all of the most noble female qualities: huge breasts, frequent nakedness, and gratifying silence.

I don’t deserve to have real sex with a lady.