Video games and pure imagination!

I have never really gotten super into video games. I like playing them, and since a kid I have always had one system or another to play, but I just don't get sucked into the world of gaming like other people seem to. Video games are the type of thing I can spend an hour tops on, and then feel the need to do something else. One thing that makes games more entertaining to me is creating my own stories, characters and scenarios within the games themselves to make them seem more interesting.

I remember playing the game Porsche Challenge on the PlayStation. I remember a race starting and my opponent being some random man in a suit, and just thinking how is this supposed to make me want to play the game? It's just some dude in a suit! What was the point of this? To make the game a little more exciting I, without really thinking about it, started creating up my own personalities for my opponents, and using my imagination to come up with situations for why I was racing them. For example, the man in a suit was actually a lawyer named Charles, the same lawyer who put my (innocent) father behind bars. He is a liar and a cheat. But get this...there is actually a loophole in the legal system where if I defeated Charles in a Porsche race, my father would be released from prison and Charles would be forced to take his place, and I would win $1 million dollars. He had fucked my family over and I HAD to beat him! I put forward the challenge, and Charles was so confident in his driving ability that he accepted. In the end I did beat Charles in the race and saved the day!

In the next round I needed to race a non-descript young, blonde girl. Obviously this character was just put in there to give the young males playing the game a stiffy, but I saw through their deceit. In my mind she was a successful drug dealer named Charity. A few months prior to the race Charity had sold my brother bad cocaine and left him to die in a toilet cubicle at some happening inner city nightspot. But get this... if I defeat Charity in a Porsche race, my brother will be brought back to life. I needed to defeat Charity...I had to do it for my brother! It was a close race, but in the end I won and my brother was dumped into the Lazarus pit and came back to life.

The game was shit, but I made it fun.

In 2003 my sister won an XBox in some competition so we had one out our house. I never really played it all that much, but one game I did enjoy was NHL Hitz Pro. I had played a demo version of the game a handful of times and thought it was a lot of fun, so I purchased the game. I played it a couple of times, and then got sick of it.

I then had an idea.

I started a new season and selected a team. But then tragedy struck. On the way to the very first game of the season, my whole team died in a plane crash, except for one guy. The club could either fold, or pick a bunch of replacement players who would fill out the team and play the season. I then went into the part of the game where you could trade players. I got rid of all the players (except for the one guy who survived), and traded them for unskilled players from amateur teams. I then started the game on season mode!

The first few games were difficult and the team didn't win, but as the season progressed their skills increased and through some bonding that took place outside of the games (they all lived together in a gigantic share house and got up to heaps of comical hijinx when they weren't playing), they all learned that they just needed to believe in themselves...and most importantly have fun.

Mid-season the one player from the original line-up flipped out about the "new guys" and how they were nothing compared to his original team mates. He got real worked up and resigned from the team. At this point my boys got real down on themselves, feeling incredibly disillusioned. But they managed to pull together as a team and continued on.

Nobody expected it, including the guys themselves, but they made the play-offs. And against all odds they made it to the final. In the final right from the get go they were getting thrashed. At the end of the second quarter they were down 10-0. It was at that point that the one surviving member from the original team made his return. He apologised and let the guys know how much they all meant to him. They forgave him, there was a group hug. For the second half of the game I had a Huey Lewis & The News CD playing, and slowly but surely my guys got up and won the game. After the match the guys were all drinking beers by the bonfire, talking about their victory and all that they achieved. The one surviving member from the original team was alone nearby leaning against a tree looking into the distance where we see the ghosts of the original team standing there all translucent, looking on proudly.