Games

Games can be fun and games can be educational. Sometimes though, games can be hugely frustrating, time-consuming and can fill you full of murderous rage.

Candy Crush is one you’ll probably have heard of. You were probably playing it right before you read this and you’ll go back to it once you’ve finished reading. If not before.

For those who don’t know, Candy Crush is like heroin. You’ll move those little sweets around on the screen of your phone without a care in the world, but it’s slowly embedding itself in your brain and taking control of your life.

I was stuck on one level for weeks and at one point, in order to increase the number of lives I could use in a 24-hour period, I started to alter the clock on my phone. If you put the clock forward by a day, you get new lives. It’s that simple. So simple that on the 1^st of September, my phone believed it was the 23^rd of November.

A man on a train once saw me playing the game and advised me to “delete it now, while you still can”. He is possibly the wisest man I ever met, although I bet he’s back playing it again.

There’s no way to quit it easily. You can’t fashion a patch out of sweets or start eating e-candy to get your fix. I went cold turkey. I deleted the bloody thing from my phone and never looked back.

Last week I was sadly lured back into the world of pointless mobile phone games. This time it was numbers game, 2048.

2048 is a game involving moving numbered tiles on a 4x4 board and doubling matching numbers until you get to – you guessed it – 2048.

That’ll be a piece of piss, I foolishly thought. I’ve always had a good head for maths, so how hard could it be?

The answer is: VERY FUCKING HARD INDEED!

After a couple of hours of getting nowhere, I decided I needed some tips. There are pages and pages of such information online and I found a simple strategy that I tried to follow.

“Keep your highest number in the top left corner and don’t move it at any cost,” it advised.

Sounds simple enough.

IT’S FUCKING NOT THOUGH!

I tried and I tried, but I kept having to move the highest-numbered tile from its place and wasn’t able to put it back.

Four hours I spent on Friday trying to complete the game, and at some point during the evening I managed it. Hooray!

I should have felt a sense of achievement at that point, shouldn’t I? Well I didn’t. I wanted to do it again and couldn’t get it right. It was frustrating me more than anything else in the world ever has. Possibly.

That night I dreamed of numbers, all of them powers of 2. I knew I had to delete the game when I got up the following morning.

I didn’t do it though. So much time wasted with what is basically bullshit.

Maybe I could get off 2048 if there was a decent distraction. Can anyone recommend a new game?