Gaming Karma

A while back I took some of your welcomed Ready Up reading time to vent my frustrations at the ability of a game to glitch on you, particularly my hard earned, time consuming, ‘oh-god-please-don’t-make-me-do-this-again’ Gears of War save. Since then I have actually started to go back through my campaign trials and hopefully some time before 2012 I might actually get my achievement for completing the game on Insane. So what point does this have I hear you cry? Well, in the words of some famous person that’s probably old enough to be Bruce Forsyth’s doddery great Grandfather ‘what goes around comes around’, and boy did I just get mine…

Picture the scene: a Monday night, not normally the best thing in the world but I, the other half and a close friend all had a few days off work so you know – bonus! After a rather slap up meal of home made lasagne (even if I do say so myself) and a few hours of Horde play on Gears of War 2 we were getting closer to a highly anticipated moment. In celebration of the release of Halo 3 ODST,  Enfield Gamestation (yes those boys again!) were doing another midnight opening to sell undoubtedly vast amounts of copies.

Now as a female gamer, and I’m sure some of my fellow RU girlie’s will agree, sometimes the best thing about being a gamer lady is often having gamer men to borrow games from. Cheap yes, but none the less very handy! I often find myself buying my own copies of games I can no longer live without about 6 months after everyone else and when the prices are much cheaper; also very convenient when trying to fund my makeup collection! So, here the three of us were, killing locust enjoyably on a school night and after a few weeks of getting quite an obsession for doing so I had a real hankering to play GOW2 during the week and not just when shacked up at the weekend with my boyfriends copy.

11.47pm and time to hop in the car down to ‘The Town’ for the next Halo installment. Surprisingly there were actually quite a lot of people waiting to do the same, in fact I think our words were somewhere along the lines of ‘Holy…’! In my defense what came next was a mixture of several things. Carling beer being the first – not owning a driving license gave me the opportunity to have 1 of the 2 beers that it takes to get me a bit sozzled; secondly desperation – I wanted my own copy damn it. Thirdly – I thought it would be funny, probably because of reason number one and the fact that I am a rather quirky, cockney nut-job.

The act? Surrounded by a good 30 + men, all of whom were dedicated to a game series enough to go into the centre of the local shopping area, at midnight, and buy the next installment of said franchise, I walked up to the pre-owned section, grabbed the first copy of Gears of War 2 I could find and joined the queue with a cocky smile on my face. As if that wasn’t enough, when I reached the cash desk and was asked if I wanted a copy of Halo 3 ODST I replied ‘Nah, just to be different… Gears is better anyway…’.

The words send a little shiver of regret in my mind now, followed by a haunted echo much like the end of Labyrinth where Sarah destroys the castle, except the cashier didn’t look like David Bowie in tights and I don’t have a friend called Hoggle, as much as I’d like to, who wouldn’t? The main reason being that after returning home, and a few days of busy work schedules, photography classes and wanting to play Civilization Revolution for a bit, on putting my cheeky little number into my Xbox 360 I received a nice message of ‘Disc is unreadable’

Ex- squeeze me? Baking Powder? Uh WHY!? And then it hit me. Gaming Karma. Like a fall from an ugly gamer tree that hit me with every branch on the way down. Like a much younger, less doddery man once said ‘You got served!’ – a three course dinner in ‘that’s what you get when you diss the Halo-verse’. Mock the mighty and you will learn… with the aide of a lovely hairline crack through the centre of a game that your just dying to play. Those of you in the North London area at the time of this going to press may spot me on an overhead train in a frantic sprint to exchange my game before my time to return it expires. Let this be a lesson to ye all, and learn from my mistakes. Never underestimate the power of gaming karma, it just might hit you where it hurts!

Here endeth the lesson