I was looking in a shop window earlier today and it made me think about looking in shop windows. I’m not about to launch into the first bars of The High Street’s Dying (and Isn’t It Sad?), but I thought I might riff for a few horribly muso moments on Hey! What Happened to Waiting? I’ll have my back turned to the audience throughout, obv.
I don’t want to get nostalgic about waiting, because I always hated it. I did used to do an awful lot of it, though, and maybe some of it wasn’t so bad. Staring in shop windows to see if X had arrived or to think about when I could afford X was alright, and looking through Mean Machines to see the first pictures of Castle of Illusion, and then staring at the pages until they pretty much wore out was pretty good, too. Waiting is rubbish, but in its alchemy somewhere you end up with anticipation, which is quite lovely. It’s like the ambergris you find in the guts of sperm whales: I don’t want to know where you got it from, cheers, but I will take as much as you have in stock.
I love the fact that we don’t have to wait as much these days: the games I care about are frequently announced the day they arrive on the App Store, say, or if I do have to wait, there’s something else that’s new and that can tide me over very nicely. That said, when something comes along that you really have to just get down wait for, Kajun style, it’s nice to see those particular old synapses firing once more.
Long story short, Super Hexagon, a game I knew about for ages, but which took its own sweet time to appear on iTunes – and then got yanked away again and is now finally back. I’m not going to tell you about it, because it’s well worth 69p, and if you’re an Androider, here’s Hexagon on Flash.
I am going to spend the entire weekend playing Super Hexagon, though, and I may not even talk to my wife and friends when they ask me questions. I’ve earned it, after all. I’ve waited.
