Orbsessed

Agility orbs. How do you get your fix? Do you pack those pulsating emerald balls into a joint and smoke yourself into a sickly pallor? Perhaps you chop them up into a fine powdered dust and snort them through a £50 note. Or has it gone beyond that? Do you crave a needle in the vein and the blissful escape into throbbing green oblivion? Whatever your method, you're not alone in your shameful habit.

I first became aware of this unusual addiction in May 2007 after reading Paul Rose's column in Edge Magazine:

Crackdown is my current passion. I kind of get the sense that, perhaps, it’s not actually a very good game. There’s lots to admire about it on a technical level, but in most respects it’s pretty charmless. And yet I’ve spent more time on Crackdown than any other game this year. The core experience – running around a lovely, GTA-esque city taking out gang bosses – is by far the dullest part of the experience. Far more interesting is your characters superhuman agility, the climbing frame that is the city itself, and the ability to upgrade your abilities by collecting orbs

Now, I’m typically the sort of person who avoids collectibles in games, and yet I have been obsessively scouring every last inch of Crackdown to hear those elusive, pulsing tones. I’m currently on over 400 agility orbs and I’m buggered if I know where the remaining ones are. If a game can get a collect-o-phobe like me collecting then it’s doing something right.

My spidey senses began to tingle. Notoriously hard to please, Paul Rose – the epitome of the jaded cynic – had, in a rare moment of praise, disabled his infamous ‘grumble feature’. Crackdown had turned his hatred of collecting into an obsession. I purchased the game the next day.

Tuned into the sleazy habit of orb collecting I became sensitive to just how broad this obsession had become. Here are some of my favourite orb-related quotes:

IGN
Let's just say you wouldn't buy this game for the enthralling narrative and compelling characters. You'll buy it to become a slobbering mindless slave to orb collecting.

Deeko
The heavenly sound of those humming green orbs has been tattooed on my brain forever. It is the most recognisable noise in gaming history.

Askmen
Agility orbs are the next best thing to drugs, plus it's legal.

Random forumite
Collecting agility orbs is insanely addictive; I didn’t fuck my girlfriend until I’d found every last one of them. It took me three weeks.

Gamasutra
Collecting green agility orbs quickly becomes a mad, wonderful, psychotic obsession.

Play.tm
If video games were virtual narcotics, Crackdown would be a methamphetamine. Collecting those elusive green orbs is insanely addictive; quitting is quite impossible. What starts out as a half-hour gaming session can easily become a two or three hour binge.

Jeez, get a room already. I’ll admit that I too was caught up in the orb snaffling zeitgeist. I understand the appeal. What I find tiresome is the inability of games journalists to mention Crackdown without also alluding to those ‘narcotically addictive’ agility orbs. It’s become an illness.

Journos should be waging war against the cliché. Instead they are perpetuating the same old formulaic platitudes. With Crackdown 2 on the horizon there's no doubt we’ll have to listen to all those tedious confessions of orb-addiction a million times more:

360
Hopefully Crackdown 2 will have even more agility orbs to collect this time around. We miss the sound they make.

Edge
Can tackling monstrous enemies prove as satisfying as booting a Mexican drug lord off the roof of a tower block? We wouldn't like to say - but the siren sound of all those gleaming agility orbs will tempt us back regardless.

We get the message.