What’s Your Gaming Guilty Pleasure?

I’ve been playing through a bunch of my older PlayStation Network games lately, trying to remember why I bought some of them. From GripShift to Blast Factor, I went through every last game enjoying some (and not enjoying others) until I came to one rather special game.

I adored it, but at the same time felt that little ounce of shame. Which game, and why this peculiar feeling?

The game in question was a little-known (and probably little-played) racer called Toy Home. Having no relation to the upcoming 3D social networking application, TH did pretty much what it said on the tin. You play as a toy car and scoot around various rooms of an appropriately-giant-looking house, tootling round checkpoints and collecting inexplicably-existing golden coins. As far as collect-’em-ups go it’s standard fare, but at the same time it’s completely rubbish.

The gameplay is repetitive at best, with the only variations in the entire game being one of two vehicles and three or four locations to scoot through. Save for that, it’s all collecting tokens and passing through checkpoints to annoyingly peppy music. Unfortunately, it gets even worse.

…you need to use SIXAXIS to steer.

You can’t use the analog stick so steering can be imprecise, and when you combine this with the need for the reactions of a housefly (that’s 1/50th of a second, so, y’know…pretty nippy) when it comes to lining up jumps, there’s a lot of frustration and hurled controllers.

It feels horrendously cheap for a PSN game, considering the fact that it cost a fiver, and an unskippable 800MB download gives you nothing but locked cars and modes, to be opened up with a £2.99 purchase of a 100kB unlock. It seems so pointless, so unfortunately novel, that nobody would ever play it. And nobody does.

Well, except for me. Hit up page two for a four minute clip of Toy Home and ponder at the state of my sanity.