wipeout

By anders pearson 17 Nov 2002

prasanth is doing his rotations for med school this year. that basically means that every month and a half, he gets sent to a different hospital/clinic to get some first hand experience with a different branch of medicine. for the next month and a half, he’s at a clinic way out in Queens doing pediatric medicine. luckily, unlike residency, which he’ll have to do next year, rotations generally are pretty low stress and leave you with free time after your shifts. so he’s got his weekends free.

this weekend, he came over to my place and brought his ps2, which we then hooked up to the projector. we bought some beer, gathered up the delivery menus and proceeded to spend the entire weekend playing Wipeout Fusion.

i’m not much of a video game player. when i was a kid, my parents wouldn’t buy me a nintendo so i never developed that innate hand/eye coordination thing that other kids my age with consoles did. that meant that whenever i did go over to a friend’s house to play video games, i was at a serious disadvantage and would get my butt squarely kicked. since video games are much less fun when you consistenly lose, i basically have never gotten very excited about them since.

every once in a while though, i find them quite therapeutic and a nice little mental vacation. when i was doing my engineering coursework at columbia, i’d occasionally make it back up to maine for breaks. since i still had most of my friends at bates, i’d often find myself crashing at jP’s apartment with nothing to do while people were in class. jP plays video games like he breathes, so there were always plenty around his place. a few days spent plopped down on the floor of jP’s apartment with a 40 playing hour after hour of drunken Wipeout XL or Unreal Tournament and my mind was a blank slate, ready to return to the grueling engineering classes.

i still don’t plan on ever actually buying any kind of gaming system, because it would probably destroy me, but every once in a while it’s good fun.