The Winner’s Book Of Video Games Presents: HINTS, TIPS, BYLAWS and LIKE THAT for ALL VIDEO GAMES

Once again I must delve into an ancient tome from the year 1982 and bring you HINTS… TIPS… TRICKS! Courtest of early eighties game maven Craig Kubey!

DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU! READ MORE!

Unlike the subject of my earlier ranting this is not a pattern designed to take all fun out of the game. These are eight handy rules to re-energise all video game play, circa 1982. Keep these by-laws on your mind at all times while playing an old game and victory will be yours! (Note: Actual content of Winner’s Book Of Video Games summarised for ease of blogging.)

BYLAW 1: BE COOL.

Try and avoid becoming stressed. “Tell yourself that you are better than those spaceships and missiles and that even if they luck out and destroy your ship or base you have more available. Pretend you are Isaac Hayes or Burt Reynolds.” Go on! Pretend!

BYLAW 2: DEFENSE! DEFENSE!

When playing a video game, it’s best if you don’t die. “The key is to survive. It wouldn’t be a bad idea during your first games to hum the Bee Gees song ‘Staying Alive’…” Presumably in the voice of Isaac Hayes. Or Burt Reynolds. There is nothing more important than surviving – even getting points is less important than staying alive during a game. Although that is the only thing more important than getting points, lovely lovely points.

BYLAW 3: FIRE FURIOUSLY BUT NOT FOOLISHLY.

“There are many advantages to firing rapidly…” Don’t fire, like, one shot every ten seconds or whatever. Just keep that fire button held down all the time or bang away at it like a demented monkey. Constantly. Although don’t do that if your ammo is limited, like in Missile Command or other games that have not yet been invented. Then, you only bang away like a demented monkey when it might kill something.

BYLAW 4: PIG OUT WHEN THE SLOP IS HANDY.

This one is complicated. Often, a machine will allow players to score a lot of points in a short time. For example, there is a non-invading ship in Space Invaders that flies across the screen. Or in The Punisher, for the PS2, there’s a bit where you’re on the roof of an exploding prison and a bunch of prisoners try to escape and you can blow them up with a rocket launcher with no risk to yourself. Or in Pac-Man, occasionally a bit of fruit finds its way into the centre of the screen. And if you eat it, it scores higher than an ordinary pill.

When faced with these opportunities to score points, it’s important that a player actually tries to score those points if he can, as opposed to doing nothing, or walking slowly away from the machine, or allowing the contents of his rectum to escape and drip down his leg, while smiling a bemused smile.

So, in summary: Try to keep calm, try to keep from being killed, kill other things on the screen as often as possible, and score points when they are available.

Already, these four bylaws will have changed your video gameplay beyond measure.

But what if I were to tell you that there were four MORE bylaws… even MORE powerful? What then?

I think if that were the case, you would come back for the second part of this feature later! Now pretend to be Isaac Hayes for a while so I can get some lunch.