Over my gaming career, I’ve worn a lot of hats. I’ve vicariously led armies in campaigns across real and fictional lands, rolled marbles through a series of mazes, wrestled for the world title, shot lots of zombies in the face with heavy artillery, demolished buildings, been mayor of a city, gone fishing, explored dungeons, and dozens of other things. And across all of those games I’ve realized that not all activities translate well to video-game forms.
For instance, I managed to find a copy of the King James Bible for the original Game Boy, and because if its novelty, I was compelled to buy it. And, aside from some really terrible games, the only thing to do with it is to read the Bible… on a 2 inch screen that can show about 40 words at a time, and according to this page, there are 783,137 words in the whole thing. Which means you’re going to go crosseyed trying to work your way through the thing. Though, thankfully, you’ll probably run out of batteries first.
Or we could consider something like video slot machines. With the mechanical arm taken out of the picture, and the tumblers reduced to video game representations, we’re left with just pressing the ‘insert coin’ button and then the ‘spin wheels’ button over and over and over and over.
Yee. Haw.
Of course it goes the other way, too. I mean, could you imagine a non-video game version of something like Tetris Attack?
Because I sure can’t.