Yesterday when having a look around Scunthorpe I’d started to indulge my latest interest, an interest I’ve accrued at the age of twenty nine, and gone into a video game shop. I only own two games for my Nintendo DS, the brain age training one that told me I was seventy four, and Mario Carts, which I have been playing a great deal and am completely addicted to. You race other competitors in your little card around strange and magical worlds. It’s ace.
Anyway, I’d been into this shop in Scunthorpe yesterday (I am conscious of getting into computer games and so did so with a degree of trepidation) and saw one Nintendo DS title that looked interesting. It was called Contact and I couldn’t say what interested me about it, aside from the screenshots on the back looked interesting, and the blurb said it was a very unique game, the like of which has never been made. Well it was likely to say something positive, I grant you, but even my cynicism was replaced by curiosity.
So this morning I walked around Grimsby having made up my find to find this game, buy it, and become so addicted to it that it would take over my entire life. And in the mean time, it would provide me with some entertainment on the train journey back to Liverpool. I take my Nintendo on trains now, making sure to wear headphones so that I am not the most annoying fellow passengers in the world, only the most juvenile and wrong.
But as I scoured the centre of Grimsby for this game, I became increasingly frustrated that it was nowhere to be found. Indeed, it was the only game that all four shops I searched didn’t have. Perhaps this should have been an omen, perhaps if this game was any good then not only would every shop stock it, it would be at the top of every chart? This seemed to make sense, but the fact that the game was conspicuous by it’s absence gave it an air of mystery, and the fact it wasn’t readily available only made me want it more. I was frustrated and stood in the Grimsby rain annoyed that I couldn’t track down my quarry.
Minutes later, having resigned myself to not being able to have a copy of this strange game to play on the way home and have take over my life, I was sat on Platform 2 at Grimsby station sipping a cup of tea as the rain bounced heavily off the roof. People around were looking miserable. I am northern.
On the westward train, I browsed through a copy of Stuff magazine looking at gadgets. The train was headed for Manchester from where I could quickly and easily get home, but much before that, only a short distance down the track, it would call back at Scunthorpe, where I’d originally seen this elusive and strange game in the first nerd computer game shop I’d been to. Should I really break my journey and get off at Scunthorpe? Did I really even see this game or, seeing as it isn’t available elsewhere, was it a figment of my imagination or a dream?
Half an hour later I was walking through Scunthorpe. I am an idiot with too much time on his hands. I found the shop but dreaded that when I went in the shopkeeper would say (‘shopkeeper’, do we have shopkeepers anymore? I mean sales assistant) “Contact? I’ve never heard of that game. And we’ve never stocked it.�
But the game was there, in all it’s mysterious glory. I took it to the counter and asked the shopkeeper, sales assistant, whatever, “Do you know anything about this game? Is it any good?�
He looked at the box as if it was as new to him as it had been for me yesterday. He looked genuinely puzzled and said that he’d never seen it before in his life. What this should have said to me is ‘this game is so unfamiliar to people that not even people that work in computer game shops and know everything about computer games have heard of it. Therefore it must be the worst game of all time.’ But no. I struck upon the idea this was the only copy of this game in the World, and had been put there by mysterious forces, for only me to find. A little bit like the book in The Never Ending Story. It would open up a magical world to whomever had the nerve and interest to buy it, even though they’d read no reviews, or had any evidence it was worth buying. That is surely why it is called ‘Contact’? And so I bought it.
Mysterious forces my arse. Contact is a shit game and I shouldn’t have bothered. You’re this kid, and this professor on a space ship abducts you and you travel about trying to get stuff to mend his ship whilst getting your arse kicked. All the time the professor just sits in his room with his dog, telling you what to do or jabbering on. It’s the worst game I’ve ever played and I hate it. I am a fool and a twit for buying it. I’ll exchange it for something else here in Liverpool… leaving my copy free to go back onto the shelves for another idiot to come across and think it might have strange powers and be good even though no one has ever heard of it.
The fool.
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