Welcome back to the continuation of our Video Game Staples and How Much We Want Them in our day to day lives. Last week we had fun pointing out the awesomeness and foibles of Save Points, HUDs, and Extra Lives. This week we point out just a few others that again require some real world applications.
Stat Pages
The key to life is knowing all the little things, like BM’s to date…
Man would I love this one, mostly because I’m weird and would love to know all sorts of odd stats that I may have. What a stat page in video games is, well its kinda in the name, its just a baseline of different statistical accomplishments. Now this can vary from game to game from things like accuracy to how far you’ve traveled by foot and how many times you’ve jumped.
The real draw for me would be like I said earlier, just looking at plain weird statistics, like say how many Simpsons episodes have I watched all together and hey while I’m looking up that stat, which episode have I seen the most?
Now there are plenty of silly stats out there that I could look at, but by the same token there are plenty of useful ones too. How much money have I spent on junk food in my lifetime could be a real eye opener or perhaps how many times have I not had enough water in a day?
There are many stats that could be quite useful in allowing us to reflect on things in our lives and as such grow from them.
Quick Travel
Hell yes! Screw airport security
This one here is really just damn useful. Essentially what quick travel is in video games is the immediate transportation from where you are to one check pointed location like a town, city or player camp that you have already been to. Sometimes there is a passing of time in the players world, sometimes there isn’t.
I think it’s pretty clear as to why this one extends itself to day to day life quite well. I mean think about it, how awesome would it be to immediately travel to the local coffee shop in the morning, or poof, no more long commute to work.
I mean I’d be stoked with either way of Quick Travel; the immediate certainly has the time saving perk of getting more time in a day, which is obviously the superior of the two. But heck just having the time pass for me while traveling to my in-laws instead of the five hour trip would be freaking amazing.
The only two real negatives I see, is one, that you’d get so used to having quick travel, it would become incredibly tedious to travel to new locations. I mean imagine that first 15 hour flight to somewhere after using Quick Travel for a couple of years. Yuck, just freaking yuck,
The second issue I see, as easy as it is for you to get from A to B, the same applies for people you may not want to see, they could very much have the same ability. So that annoying cousin, well it only takes him just one conscious thought to be right on your door step, and think of how much more efficient Jehovah Witnesses would become. Bum bum bum…
Health Potions/Power-Ups
Red and Delicious
These ones again seem like a no-brainier to me. A health potion in video games immediately heals all or a portion of your health, doesn’t matter what the injury, fall three stories and bam health potion makes it all the better.
Power-Ups take you from your normal current state and give you some form of temporary boost in power. Sometimes the power-up is something silly like you get Raccoon Suit that lets you fly, sometimes its something simpler like a small speed or strength increase.
What part of anyone’s life would these things not be unreasonably valuable. Break a toe? Well we got a health potion for that. Contract some unpleasant disease? Whats that, a health potion you say? Seems to me there isn’t much of a drawback there. As to the Power-Ups, again seem pretty straight forward to the awesomeness of that one, who doesn’t need a little invincibility from time to time?
The only contrary point I can put to this whole thing is that many would argue both of these exist in many many cases, we’ve got modern medicine that does heal most things, not everything of course and not immediately, but still.
In the power-up department we have all sorts of performance enhancing “power-ups” in our day to day life, steroids make you stronger, cocaine can certainly make you faster and more alert, heck even coffee is a low end power-up in many cases. I think we mostly just need the power-ups without the horrible and obvious negatives like testicle shrinkage.
Honorable Mention: Chocobo’s
KWEH?
Again this one isn’t so much a staple of video games as a whole, certainly a staple of a series, but not the whole show by any means. Chocobo’s, yeah Chocobo’s… You can ride em, they can fly, they are pretty solid at finding treasure, they often have Moogle buddies and seriously WARK!
Nuff freaking said…
