the electric interfunt

Parkour is a sport. Parkour, also known as ‘free running’, is a particularly demanding and perilous sport. Parkour is a sport that involves climbing up very tall things, running along very tall things and skilfully descending from really tall things. People who participate in parkour tend to be very good at it, and one can only assume started by climbing on top of a house brick before gradually working their way through increasingly taller objects in increments of one millimetre.

Overweight thirty-something men are not traditionally very good at sports like parkour. They are not traditionally very good at any sports. This particular demographic of our society tends to look for other more sedentary pursuits, such as sitting on their arse playing Xbox 360 games.

Mirror’s Edge is a parkour game for the Xbox 360. This is the sort of game that overweight thirty-something men can buy in order to immerse themselves in an experience as close to the actual exhilirating sensation of parkour as they are ever likely to get. There is however one very big problem with this. Mirror’s Edge requires said immobile, amorphous gamer to play using two thumbsticks and an array of shoulder button/trigger combo moves. This is very difficult. This causes our protagonist to fall to her death all the bastard time. In fact, your intrepid correspondent has come closer to hurling a not-inexpensive 360 controller at solid, unyielding walls out of sheer frustration than he has in almost twenty years. IT IS INFURIATING. For every brief moment of adrenaline-pumping action as Faith leaps across rooftops making each parkour move flow seamlessly into the next, there is at least one hour of repeatedly trying to perform what appears to be a simple jump, each time finding yourself hurling vertiginously toward the concrete below until it ends with a sickening crunch and darkness.

In summary, then: CONSTANT, ENDLESS DEATH (3/10)