Of alcohol and analog

Photoshop lacked a "Drunken Blur" filter

Since the conception of video games, humanity has longed to nurture two vices at once through the application of drink gaming. Drink gaming, the act of playing games while proceeding to get royally smashed, is an activity steeped in tradition going back to when the very first Pong arcade unit was installed in a bar. Groups of punters would gather to offer up useful advice to the player, usually along the lines of “Up! No, down! Down! Up!” and “Cor, you’re getting KILLED on this one, boy”.

Luckily, many years later, consoles became prevalent and no-one has to experience the local publican’s brains trust ever again. In this post, I’d simply like to wax lyrical about the games that we’ve probably all enjoyed (I know I certainly have!) playing through the bottom of a vodka bottle.  Pour yourself a drink in preparation.

There's an even smaller microdot in the 'T' that specifies "Unless You Really Need A Kebab" too

Before we move inside the lounge room, I’ll mention the one last bastion of in-pub gaming. It stands alone where others, even Big Buck Hunter, have failed and been replaced by cigarette machines and jukeboxes. I’m referring to the epitome of outside the house gaming, and that my friends is a little game we like to call Drink Drive Daytona.

Now while your brain throws up the helpful reference of the Daytona theme music (it’s OK, everyone’s brain does it), as any primary school graduate will tell you: “If you drink and drive you’re a bloody idiot”. But those ads simply dock that stern maxim of it’s true addendum, which is: “Unless it’s Drink Drive Daytona“. Seriously, it’s in a microdot inside the “A” of TAC. Look it up.  Actually, forget it, don’t look that up, I haven’t had the chance to sabotage the Wiki article yet.

To play, you’ll need to organise the following things:

• Find one friend or more.
• Find a bar that happens to own the Daytona arcade units.
• Buy a drink, typically in a pint size or larger for ease of play.

There were no survivors

Have all the necessary elements? Alright, start the game resting your drink precariously on the unit’s dashboard. Select the “Automatic” gearbox if you want to have any hope of completing a lap. There is only one rule of Drink Drive Daytona: if your car is driving on a straight stretch of the track, you have to be drinking, and you can’t stop drinking until you need to get your hands back on the wheel to make a turn. You’ll notice that this is where the afore mentioned pint will come in handy.

There’s no way of winning Drink Drive Daytona, it’s a reward in itself, but anyone who stops drinking on a straight will be forced to buy the next round. If your drink runs out, it’s up from your chair mid-race to refill from the bar. I’ve spent many a night waiting out closing time at a friend’s bar playing Drink Drive Daytona, and it never fails to entertain. And if, by the end of an evening, you haven’t completely stopped drinking because the straights have started looking like curves, well, you probably haven’t been playing properly.

But let’s face it, getting drunk at bars can be costly, especially if you have to pump a coin in every time you want to start the next round of drinking. It’s this commonly accepted knowledge that has driven many gamers to declare console house parties.

The console party originates from the grandfather of ALL multiplayer gaming, the LAN party. Chucking back your choice of poison while engaging in a friendly battle of wits with your friends (“Suck it! I just MASHED you! Whooo!”) set a long running precendent for the combining of booze and games. LAN parties can be thanked for many things: the popularisation of file sharing, the booming industry in serial cables and cool Zerg rush related scars (chicks dig ‘em!). But it’s greatest creation was also drinking related, and that is the combining of Red Bull and vodka. Red Bull and vodka is the hereditary child of the far less popular CougarJolt (Jolt Cola and Cougar), and was also one of the first gamer inspired alcoholic mixers to make it into the mainstream, before being knocked off it’s perch by the much more “xtreme” Jager-Bomb.  Nevertheless, it is responsible for putting the “party” in many a LAN party.

Err, yeah, I'm still not exactly sure how scratching decks with Pinocchio ties in either

Suitable then that the drunken game of choice in my very first sharehouse was the party title Shrek Super Party. I’ll never quite remember how I came to own the game on Xbox (I might have even been drunk when I picked it up!) but after realising it’s potential for horrendous liver damage, the house never looked back. The game is played out like a board game where the object is to collect an allocated amount of “bug juice” to become the winner.

You do this by playing multiplayer mini-games, the winner of which would be able to trade other players for bigger and juicier bugs. What the hell, if anything, this had to do with the Shrek franchise other than the branding is perhaps beyond everybody, but it wasn’t the point. The real point was that this game was simple, could have four players, and was as great a chance as any to yell, scream, complain and argue drunkenly in a living room setting.  Games were typically button mashing frenzies, or hyper-speed challenges that came down to luck and a fair amount of brute-forcing.  Because of this, things could become quite spirited between players, especially if the penalty shot rule was in effect. I mean shot in the 30ml sense, of course, which could probably also allow you to imagine how spirited a player could get.

I forgot to mention: drunken me loves puns, in case you’re yet to notice.

Blue ape, corner pocket

In the same vein there was also Super Monkey Ball Deluxe, whose bizarre shifting bowling lanes mini-game would keep many a drunk entertained for hours on end. Tired of monkey bowling? How about monkey pool? No? Monkey soccer? Monkey golf? Sure enough, if you could pre-fix the sport with the word “monkey”, Super Monkey Ball Deluxe probably had it.  It also could cause no end on in-fighting while trying to decide who got stuck playing as the less  manoeuvrable monkey GonGon.

Sometimes of course, you didn’t have four people equally set on removing years off their life expectancy, and in those cases you could always fall back on good old reliable Tiger Woods PGA Golf 2006. Ready to get your mind blown? Tiger ’06 was just your everyday golf game, but it came with a twist. We all know Tiger Woods is a magician with a 5 iron, but did you know he’s also the supreme overlord of TIME AND SPACE? That’s right, back the fuck up because it’s time for some time travelling golf action! It’s best not to wonder exactly why the hell you happen to be golfing through time, but one thing is for certain, customising your golfer to look like a zombie and drinking your way through an eighteen hole skins match. Zombie golf (or “El Links De Los Muertos”) was a highly popular inebriated time waster.  It was also the birthplace of my trend of creating Iron Chefs as custom characters.  If there’s anything cooler than seeing Iron Chef French Hiroyuki Sakai knocking a monster drive down a fairway, well, by all means let me know … you filthy liar.

It's the combination that can't lose!

Finally, for me, there is the ultimate in tipsy teamwork, lush licks and drunken drumming.  That’s right, it’s Harmonix’s Rock Band, the game that takes the laryngitis of SingStar and the crippling arthritis of Guitar Hero and combines them into sloshed gold.  There truly is nothing more entertaining than finding three friends, drunk enough to want to knock out “Dead Or Alive”, and yet still sober enough to think they have the co-ordination to pull it off.  Did you know that drunken games of Rock Band create more noise complaints per capita than spousal abuse?  It’s true, look it up.

Actually, don’t look it up, I haven’t had time to sabotage that Wiki article yet either.  I’m a busy man, people.

Either way, if there’s anything cooler than seeing Iron Chef Japanese Rokusaburo Michiba being front man and stage diving into a crowd while singing “Highway Star”, well, by all means let me know … you exceptionally filthy liar.

Of course, these are by no means the only games that are hilarious fun while smashed, tanked, liquored up, maggoted, wasted and plastered, they’re just my favourites.  Given my usually focused interest in drinking and gaming, I’d love to hear everyone else’s suggestions for great games to play while off the rails.  Drop a comment!