Every Monday the LeftStickRight team will take on a different topic surrounding news or interesting topics about games or the gaming industry and open it up for discussion. Our three editors will give their perspective and you are welcome to give your own. Agree? Disagree?

The topic this week is: What is your worst gaming related injury?

Ian Y’s Take

Okay, I’ve never had a spectacular gaming injury but an interesting one does come to mind.

In my youth, there was a good couple of weeks when I was obsessed with Mechwarrior 3 for the PC and for some reason my favourite thing to do was fly around using the rocket boosters. So I designed my own mech using the lightest frame, no armour, the biggest rocket boosters and no weapons save a pitiful flamethrower. And so I spent what must have been at least six hours straight soaring through the sky with a tin can with legs. Unfortunately though the button layout was a little awkward. In order to fly, I had to mash the shift key with my pinky finger constantly. By the end of the day, the joints in my hand throbbed painfully and to this day my pinky finger clicks and lock when I move it. (For those oestelogically inclined out there that’s the joint connecting my left 5th metacarpus to my left 5th proximal phalanx)

Ian H’s Take

It was hard not to go for the obvious Mario Party stigmata that almost everyone seemed to have experience in the halcyon days of old. Thinking back on those days, though, there was a much more obvious injury that I sustained that left most of my friends and family puzzled. It wasn’t even self-inflicted.

You might guess the extent when I mention the cause. When I was young I was enamored with the Super Scope, a light gun peripheral for the Super Nintendo that was more like a sniper rifle or RPG. There was a limited selection of games, but it was something that I scrimped and saved for and managed to pick up along with a good catalog of games on the cheap. My favourites for the system were Battleclash and the sequel Metal Combat: Falcon’s Revenge.

After hours and hours of time poured into the latter, my cousin and I were very close to finally completing the process of eliminating all our robot oppressors. Of course, upon finishing off the final battle with a low-health last second shot, we were both elated. So much so my cousin lifted his hands into the air quickly and exclaimed “We did it!” What he didn’t notice was his hand came up right into the Super Scope that was still pressed tightly against my eye socket, causing me considerable pain and a good black ring to show off my accomplishment.

I don’t remember the end of that game very well.

Tim’s Take

Never has any video game caused me more debilitating pain than an innocent-looking arcade machine whose name I can’t remember, but shall henceforth be referred to as the Squatshooter from Hell.

Several years ago I was at my first day of a four-day festival at Darien Lake Theme Park in Western New York. Per tradition, my friends and I hit the arcade for a between-coasters break. The light gun games were the ones we tended to gravitate toward and this particular year, near House of the Dead 3 and Ninja Assault, was a new machine. A single-player game, it shared the same sort of cover mechanics as Time Crisis except instead of stomping a pedal, sensors recognized your very movements and translated them to your in-game character.

As a fan of light gun titles, I couldn’t pass up giving this game a try; and got into it I did. It wasn’t long before I was quickly weaving and bending down away from flurries of virtual bullets like a master. The fun of it all actually distracted me from the fact I was making what must have looked like demonic yoga poses and\ for just how long I was holding them — all within the dastardly schemes of the Squatshooter from Hell, I’m sure.

Still possessing an adrenaline rush from the experience, I didn’t begin feeling the pain in my legs until 30 minutes later. With the pain, came the stiffening of muscles. And
then the hobbling; oh Lord, the hobbling. The Squatshooter from Hell had aged me into an old man in need of a walker. For the rest of the festival, I couldn’t even navigate the two steps of our camper without yelping.

Next year, the Squatshooter from Hell had vanished from the arcade, obviously slipping through the trans-dimensional ether to find a new place to inflict its suffering.