Last week I wrote an article about the pain I was experiencing from playing so many baseball games. I figured I'd get a bunch of grief for whining about having to play games too many hours a day, but much to my surprise, you were quite understanding. I also wanted to hear your stories about what games caused you the most pain and what measures you took to keep playing. I received quite a few responses. Most of them were about Guitar Hero, which I can't believe I forgot to list because I'm pretty sure my thumb actually caught on fire from strumming so much. Without further ado, here are some of the stories of the games that brought GameSpot readers pain:

Jerkofski wants to rock and roll all night (and party everyday)
When the first Guitar Hero came out I immediately fell in love with it. I'm actually a bit of a younger gamer at the ripe age of 15 so I haven't hit what I consider my quick hands prime. I played the first game for an hour every day till I finally got to the last set songs on expert. I decided to go all out, so I made sure an icepack was in the freezer (at this point I had already learned that the game made your hands hurts after a while) and decided to pull an all-nighter with a friend. I started playing at around 5 pm I. I stopped at 3 am. At this point my hand was a bright red and had gone almost numb. I went to bed and woke up around 9am turned on my PS2 and played for another 3 hours. When I finally beat it I had blisters on the tips of my fingers on both hands and my left hand had lost all feeling. I then proceeded to do the same thing 8 months later with Guitar Hero 2. The only difference is I've gone through this process at least 3 times on Guitar Hero 2 due to corrupt files.

Mu5uko Mario Parties like it's 1999
The original Mario Party was by far the worst pain-inducing video game. There were a set of mini games where you would have to rotate the stick as fast as you could so naturally everyone put their palm on it and spun it around. Now palm skin isn't that tough to begin with so when scraped against awkwardly shaped bits of plastic it was inevitable that blisters would ensue. What did I do? I wore a glove on my right hand when I played Mario Party... kind of like in a nerdy Michael Jackson way.

Anvil_Pinata would make a great burglar
My worst case of this by far was playing a boxing mini game in the original Ape Escape. After about 20 rounds of that I had effectively removed my thumb prints!

CodingGenius takes a lickin' but keeps on tickin'
Most Recent Gaming Problem: My fingers didn't bother me in Guitar Hero, my thumb did. The fingers on my left hand, the fret hand, were fine, but my thumb went numb. For 5 days. I ended up taping a facecloth to the palm of my hand. The guitar rested near my thumb, and I kept playing for a while, but since I have small hands, I couldn't reach the fret buttons properly anymore. So, I stopped playing and after 3 days the feeling came back. Now I only play it for about an hour at a time, and haven't had problems since.

F15srcool says crack is the answer
When I play video games for 2+ hours and don't do anything besides work the controller ("anything" meaning crack my knuckles, use a mouse, flip pages in a book, etc.) My fingers get "stuck". That's right, I have to wring them out vigorously, crack them, and some times they'll still be stuck! Not nearly as extreme as everybody else's, but still weird.

Death_burnout is all thumbs
Well I'm no stranger to pain and video games. My back kills me so much no matter what chair I'm in. But I guess this is not so much of a pain as much as a deformity, but one thing I have developed is a lump on both thumbs, which is freaky. I think I got those from too much Tony Hawk.

Edubuccaneer can't forget the name of his pain
I suffered through this hell as well, but with a different name: Banjo Tooie, and its infernal rap-tapping stages. It pains me to remember!

NeoJedi had Nintendo thumb before it was even Nintendo thumb
Eah, the Nintendo Thumb. I've had that. I remember back in the '80s when I used to play Decathlon on the Atari 2600 with my friends. You'd go through all of the events, moving the joystick left and right and pressing that red button. Then, just when your arm was starting to hurt a bit, they throw in the 1500 yard dash, where you moved the stick left and right as fast as you could to make your guy run. We were almost in tears when the race finished. Great training for the arms.

MrBetterThenYou is actually TougherThanYou
Many moons ago I smashed my left thumb in a door and my nail came loose but did not fall off. Playing like that was hell; it really hurt on games like Strider and TMNT. My solution was to use the knuckle of my left thumb to keep on playing. When I woke up and saw a newly formed blister on my knuckle the next day I decided to just give up and used my regular digits to keep on playing. It was next to impossible and I just ended up playing more thumb friendly games like Final Fantasy until the healing began.

Crithon has mastered zen and the art of Street Fighter
I think I got out of all my video game injuries during the NES. I would get massive blisters from Ninja Turtles 2 from pressing the two together to pull off the one hit kill attack. But it was after Street Fighter 2 at the arcades and the SNES, where I learned to focus and learn from patience to fight. I owe a lot to Street Fighter to master the Zen of video games.


As always, thanks to everyone who took the time to respond via comment or email. I'm sorry they couldn't all make it here, but I did read them. This week is going to be/already is crazy because of GDC, but barring any unforeseen issues, you'll all be "Getting To Know" Brian Ekberg a little better this Friday.