It's Driving Me Psycho

Honestly I expected to enjoy this video game binge quite a bit, because normally I love gaming. Then again, I said that about books and TV shows as well, and by now I find it hard to look them in their proverbial eyes. I definitely binge on video games a whole lot (particularly when I’m supposed to be doing homework), but they’re almost always on either my PS2 or my roommate’s PS3. I haven’t binge-played games on my computer in a really long time, mostly because I have trouble bingeing on repetitive games like Age of Empires (the only game I really have for PC) because they lack a storyline. The games I play on consoles are usually thrilling action games like Mass Effect or Dragon Age—games that have really good storylines and action but very few puzzles or strategic aspects.

Bingeing on Psychonauts was pretty hard to do for four hours, mostly because I had to get used to all the different buttons on my computer since I usually just have to deal with four to eight buttons on a PlayStation controller and a couple of joysticks. Psychonauts also has a lot of strategy, and definitely a lot of running around without really knowing where you’re going or how to find what you need to find, which sometimes bores me. It's kind of on par with Legend of Zelda in the sense that it takes forever to figure out how to beat a certain boss or where to go next. I also keep having trouble getting my fingers to press the right buttons without taking my eyes away from the screen, which means then I miss what's happening, and by the time I look up again, sometimes I'm dead. There was one part I spent at least half an hour trying to get past because I couldn't make my character move the way I needed him to, either because I kept forgetting what each button meant or because the camera angle, which is controlled by the mouse, wasn't right.