Comfort Gaming – What’s Your Medicine?

The world of gaming, particularly at this time of year, is pretty relentless. Constant news, previews, reviews, video logs, podcasts, week to week, month to month, and if you try to take it all in, well, you can’t really. What it boils down to, ultimately, is having the game on your TV screen, controller in your hands, enjoying it.

But just how much do we enjoy these constant new releases, one after the other, compared to titles from yesteryear? How many are just cool, or even excellent, but don’t sit forever in the heart?  I’m sure that many of you, like myself, have a ‘comfort’ game to go back to now and again, for example, if feeling under the weather. The one game where you forget about the outside world or maybe the illness you have, even if just for a few moments.

For myself, if I am suffering from a cold, or just feeling a bit down, I tend to abandon any current games I am playing through; quite often I’ll not even switch on the Xbox at all. Instead I revert back to a game that would sit on my all-time favourite list: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to The Past.

Unfortunately I no longer have a working SNES anymore and when I was struck with a bout of heavy cold recently, I needed my getaway game. Fortunately, I have the Nintendo Wii, and its lovely Virtual Console. For little over a fiver, one of the best games of all time was mine to play through once again.

Although I have no proof, I’m pretty sure there are others who do the same, along with watching their favourite movie, reading a favourite book, etc. Video gaming, certainly in my life, is a firmly placed entertainment medium. Just like movies and books, video gaming has many classics to choose from, to critically acclaimed masterpieces that many may never have even explored. These should always be available as much as possible, for as long as possible.

You wouldn’t have Mario Galaxy without the classics that preceded it. These are the kinds of games that help us forget we’re down, fed up, maybe a bit poorly. Some of them are games that gave us all the interest in gaming we have today. With services provided by Nintendo with the Virtual Console, Sony with the PSN Store, and Microsoft with XBLA we will continue to be remedied with classic greatness.

Do you have a favourite/classic game to revert back to, in that time of ‘need’? Or to you tend to stick with the current gaming excellence out there?

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