TechSmart 121, October 2013 TechSmart 123, December 2013 | Page 50

TECH FRIED

Not being into

games
MAY make most
self-respecting

geeks think

less of you, but
it does have its perks,

writes Deep Fried Man.

I

have a terrible confession to make, and an especially terrible confession to make in TechSmart – I
am not a gamer. I haven’t always been the total disgrace to geekdom that I am today, once being
so into games that I found the line between the real world and the virtual one beginning to blur. I became addicted to a game called Carmageddon at roughly the same time as I got my driver’s license.

License to kill
For those who’ve never heard of Carmaggedon, it’s essentially a racing game, the twist being that you
are not only able to run over the many pedestrians walking around, but encouraged. Interestingly, the
game was initially populated with human beings but censors forced the developers to change them
to zombies, because for some reason mowing down hoards of innocent passer-bys indiscriminately
was seen as a controversial idea back in 1999.

Gaming does a lot of things for you, but making you seem
attractive in the eyes of the fairer sex is not one of them.
I played so much Carmageddon that when I eventually did find my way out into the sunlight and
into my first ever car, I had to constantly restrain myself from swerving off the road so that I could
take out a granny or two and pick up a few points. Thank goodness I wasn