Gaming Glory: Carmageddon 3
Your carma will catch up with you one day...
I used to love running over people with my car. In this game only, of course. I’d never do that in real life (at least not anymore; bodies leave unsightly dents on your hood). I mean, I really loved it. So it was inevitable that Carmageddon 3 would become one of my favorite racing games.
Strangely enough, though, I never really played the actual game. I just ran over people. In that regard, I would definitely consider the Carmageddon series to be a predecessor to the Grand Theft Auto series, in that you could enter the game world and just drive around, not following the set rules—just splatting people flat with your car. I’m saying this all, of course, based on the third of the series; the others might have been different. But if they were, then the others sucked.
Now, keep in mind that I’ve lived in the D.C. area all my life. I learned to drive here. I suffer traffuck here on a daily basis. I am, by my own admission, a very aggressive driver. Never dangerously so; I don’t weave sporadically through traffic, cutting people off in ways that could cause a major accident. I consider that type of driving to be offensive anyway. Driving should not be a frantic fumbling. It should be fluid undulation of faster and slower, back and forth, in and out…seamless weaving timed to an almost sensuous rhythm.
Wait. Where was I? Oh, yeah. I’m not dangerous aggressive. I do, however, find myself succumbing to much wailing and gnashing of teeth when I’m trapped on the Beltway in whatever daily cluster fuck back-up happens to be occurring during my commute. This kind of frustration must be properly channeled. Channeled on the road is very dangerous. Channeled through a steering wheel joystick and a game where you earn points for running over pedestrians? That’s just bloody fun. Literally. I can’t tell you anything more about this game beyond the fact that I spent a lot of time running over pedestrians.
You can even run over farm animals in this game. I remember exploding sheep (or was that a screen saver I used to have?).
And all of it was set to a throbbing electronica soundtrack that included such classics as “Diet Coke Overdose,” “Night Time Madmen,” and my personal favorite, “Hands Up.” I recently burned the entire Carmageddon 3 soundtrack to my iPod, but this last song is probably one that I should avoid listening to while driving. I think the last thing that people on the Beltway want is me roaring up behind them in my car, blasting a song that has the repeated line of “Hands up! Hands up! Who wants to die?”
All this sounds so very demented, doesn’t it? I haven’t played Carmageddon 3 in a long time. It’s been at least since I switched to Windows XP and the company that sold my steering wheel joystick refused to create a patch for that operating system. Bastards. Maybe I should fire it up again and see if it still captivates me like it once did…or has Vice City ruined me forever to these simpler pixelated pleasures?
And on that note, I kick off this new feature, sort of like Flashback Friday…but not really. Gaming Glory will be an every now and then reminiscing on my part about those horribly violent, horribly addicting video games that I played for far more time than could ever be considered healthy. It’s like the fun just never starts here at the lair. 
