As all my readers know, or would know if I had any readers , I play video games. But I've never really regarded myself as anything more than an average player, and certainly not particularly 'hardcore'. So the following incident bears relating, especially since I've never won anything like this in my adult life before.
Down the road from where I live there's an IT mall, and Hewlett Packard were having a promotion which involved a competition. They had a three-screen display set up, and a mini-racing car chassis with motion chassis; a good driving simulator, in other words. Now, bearing in mind that I don't drive, and haven't really played any driving games for a year or so now (never got my steering wheel set up in the current flat, sad to say), I didn't really give myself a hope, but it looked like fun.
Actually, I wasn't even really planning to have a go. I encouraged my stepson to go and try it out, and he enjoyed it, but I was rather hungry and the main thing on my mind was getting to the food court upstairs. But my wife persuaded me to jump in and try it, and to my surprise I was only a second or so off the best lap time. If you set the fastest lap, I should add, you won 50% off the price of a colour laser printer, something I'd kind of wanted for a while but thought of as too expensive to really justify it.
Seeing my prowess, my spouse suggested we return the next day. Which, after completing all our chores, we duly did. But when we got there, we found the best time was four seconds quicker than yesterdays. So I had to improve by over five seconds now. You had two laps to set the fastest time, and at the end of lap 1 I was only slightly slower. Then, throwing caution to the winds and staying off the brakes altogether, I shaved half a second off the fastest time on my final lap.
Only cliche will do here; you could have knocked me down with a feather. My wife was delighted and my stepson well impressed at my gaming prowess. And of course I had to buy the printer after that, so I guess HP got the better of the deal in the end after all. Still, I'll be dining out on that one for a long time. I am clearly far more hardcore than I thought!
