Thanks to the wonders of Missouri weather, I recently caught a cold after becoming drenched during last week’s monsoon of a Friday.
I had it all: the coughs, the sneezes, the general feeling of “I hate my life, so let me sleep.” So, while everyone was cheering on the team at Faurot Field, I was in my dorm room, wrapped in a blanket and cuddling with a box of tissues.
What’s the only benefit to being quarantined in a residence hall? Two words: comfort games.
Comfort games, at least in my eyes, are games that are fun distractions but don’t require much effort on the part of the disease-stricken college student. When I’m not feeling my best, I don’t want to be weighed down with a complex story or the stresses of being gunned down by enemy forces. I want a game that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
Chief among the comfort games I play when I’m feeling under the weather is “Just Cause 2,” an open-world action game for both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. What at first looks like “Grand Theft Auto” on a Pacific island, “Just Cause 2” becomes something much more free-spirited. I’ve played this game for hours, and I’ve barely touched the story missions. Honestly, I can’t even remember the main character’s name, but that doesn’t matter when I am coughing up a lung. This game is all about zipping around the island, blowing stuff up, jumping a motorcycle across an overpass and free falling from the tops of skyscrapers.
The best way to enjoy the game is to adopt a “no rhyme or reason” attitude toward having fun. Never before has ignoring the actual missions proved to be the more enjoyable option when playing a game, but that is the case with “Just Cause 2.” I can cause destruction on my own terms, and that’s why I find it the perfect comfort game. The game doesn’t ask me to invest my brain in a convoluted story about a corrupt government; it just asks me to look at a missile silo and say, “I want to blow that up.”
Now, console games don’t always get my mind off harboring diseases. Sometimes, I just want to lie in bed, which is when I reach for my iPhone and am thankful for apps. Like I said earlier, comfort games aren’t mentally taxing and neither are most games on the App Store. A quick bout of “Angry Birds” while wrapped in a warm blanket is just what my imaginary doctor would have prescribed. And instead of the old adage of “an apple a day,” a few rounds in “Fruit Ninja” should provide me enough vitamins to shoo away a cold.
However, during this particular bout against my cold, I found my fingers tapping along to a standby app that has stuck around on my phone no matter how many times I’ve synced it: I could go on and on about “Draw Something” and “Cut the Rope,” but the real meat of my iPhone app collection would have to be a game called “Cover Orange.” Not just because it is packed with vitamin-C, “Cover Orange” uses a simple concept that doesn’t require too much brainpower.
In each level, the player is tasked with protecting oranges from oncoming acid rain by creating cover by dropping obstacles from the sky. The levels are simple but numerous and always seem fair. Plus, every time an orange is saved, they hold up a banner that says “thank you,” which makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something other than sitting in a bed. In other words, the game seems almost made for sick days.
Video games that take themselves seriously are easy to come across. More often than not, games want to take me down a planned storyline and deliver some good old punches of plot, which I am perfectly content with during my normally scheduled life. But, when life handed me that lemon of Missouri weather, the first thing I did was curl up in a blanket and head for a nice bowl of steaming comfort games.
