What Games Cure a Hangover?

You wake up, ready to start the new day. As soon as you raise out of bed you get smashed on head with a hammer, followed by a rat eating the inside of your stomach and finally you’ve realise this whole time you’ve been on teacup ride that just doesn’t stop spinning. Welcome to my Friday mornings. I honestly don’t know why I do this to myself every week, it always seems fun on the Wednesday. When will I ever learn. The same problem arises everytime, should I stay in bed and sleep that hangover off or actually get up and risk doing something. On the days I don’t decide to be lazy I’m left with the decision on what to do to get rid of this hangover, other than the usual remedies of water, paracetamol and bacon, it’s a waiting game. And what’s a better time waster than a good video game. This idea occured to me the other morning. What is the best game to play to cure a Hangover?

First Person Shooters and fast paced Action games are the games you might want to avoid first. All the explosions, motion blur, loud noises, the genres in general doesn’t really help you, you’re most likely to throw up before your tenth kill. I once was stupid enough to try and get a game of Halo started only to have to pause every 30 seconds while my head was both mentally and physically trying to catch up. Not only did all blurs when changing direction bring up my stomach but all the bright colours shining straight into your eyes started to make the bloody sitation worse, which quickly affected my reaction speed and thus got killed pretty quickly. I don’t know why I chose to play Halo, I don’t play the game much to begin with, let alone play it in my condition at the time, I blame the alcohol in my system for that stupid mistake. Right, test 1 failed.

While on the topic of reaction times, test 2 rhythm games might be out of the question, at least if you play on an Expert difficulty, again from experience my A game which is normally rather shit, was even shitter, it literally took me until the moment I failed that I realised I was pressing red and not green, few million light years way from those 5 stars, and don’t get me started on the drums and singing may bring back the memories of the reason I got drunk in the first place, karaoke. Test 2 failed.

Test 3, the RPG. This actually might be fine especially turn based combat, it gives you all the time in the world to react and you get to experience a nice little cliché story. Final Fantasy is the obvious example here. Action RPG’s are a maybe, if your not a pussy you should be able to stomach it. That’s J-RPG’s but what about the western counterpart. Fallout 3 may be a good choice, the Capital Wasteland might actually look like the inside of liver, but nothing in the game is too intense along with 3 dogs banging tunes which has a calming effect on my mind. The same goes for Oblivion with the only exception that instead of looking like my liver it’s nice British countrysides which is surprisingy calming, becoming immersed in a game actually gets your mind off the shitty feeling and that damn headache. MMO’s like World of Warcraft are argubly one of the most addictive games there are, people spend thousands of hours grinding so having a hangover shouldn’t make a difference, few hours of collecting sheep skin and BAM all gone and you social life loses 1 more point. Test 3 success.

Test 4, Facebook, that’s right Facebook, you know all the game applications (this includes the iPhone) Bejewelled, Tetris, Chain Reaction, all the old addictive games I used to play every lunchtime at Sixth Form. (Random fact, I somehow got the whole year into playing Tetris again, dunno how that happened) These games don’t require much effort but yet I can’t get my eyes off it. Roller Coaster Kingdom, a shit theme park management game but yet I would spend hours just feeding my employees watching my money raise higher and higher. That’s all I did, once every 15 minutes feed my little pretties that’s all you need to do, though doing so little doesn’t make a good distraction to the splitting headache, so that take out Metal Gear Solid. Test 4 success.

I’ve probably missed lots of others but I’m ironically hangover at this very moment, I have been for the past 2 days, perfect testing conditions. So there we have it, your very vague hangover cure, but all this is pointless because my hangover cure is watching House, playing Solitaire and eating Domino’s.