Weather always dictated my gaming habits as a child. Growing up, the downpour always gave some justification to spending the entire day sat cross legged on the floor running through Sonic 3 + Sonic & Knuckles, all in the hope that you could complete the whole thing before the Mega Drive realised that this level of excitement was just too much to bear. It doesn’t need to rain these days to force me to fire up XBLA and do it all over again, but it certainly helps bring back a great sense of nostalgia whenever it does. With the height of British Summer fast approaching, I really look forward to the much greater effect rain has on me and my gaming habits, a worthy topic of discussion if ever there was one.

But how could I ever hope to convey the profound effect of a good ol’ rain storm without first telling you how I spend the rest of the time gaming? To sum it up in two GamingLives un-trademarked words: ‘Disc Twitching’. If you’re not familiar with the term, hit up Lee’s post defining the syndrome, but this is pretty much how I spend most of my time. If I’m running the 360, chances are I will stick to one game out of sheer laziness to go reaching for another disc unless the opportunity to hit up some multiplayer arises. But when I’m soothing my core and going for a little PC Gaming, I’m arguably guilty of something far worse. Hard-Disc Twitching is when you have just too many games at your fingertips thanks to the massive expansion of Digital Distribution so that you don’t have to go rooting around for CD-ROMs and DVDs, meaing that I just can’t settle on one game.

The worst offender is of course Steam. Thanks in every way to their incredible Winter and Summer sales, as well as their generous Weekend deals, my digital games library has gone off into the deep end. If you’d like a mathematical perspective, I could spend two and a half days of my year only playing only one game before moving on to the next and I’d still have a few dozen titles left un-played come New Years Eve (and that’s assuming that I stopped at my current total and didn’t continue to gorge my way through every sale). All these games, readily available at the double-click of a button means that I’m rarely playing anything longer for half an hour.

Multiplayer sessions on Team Fortress 2 last as long as my success or until I’m satisfied that I’ve done something really cool, against all odds and at incredible expense. Anything else can hold my interest only as long as I’m made to feel welcome. Games that all of a sudden hit a long portion of exposition or drop the pace to allow you suitable time to recover from being so damned awesome just a few moments ago soon face the wrath of my /quit. With so much of my digital catalogue being so far un-played, most games struggle to survive the tedious tutorial and it can literally be months before I find the energy to dive back in, usually with just enough time having passed that I’ve forgotten everything important about what it is I’m supposed to do, why it is I’m supposed to be doing it and how the hell I’m supposed to do it in the first place. When the sun’s shining in through my window, I find that I want to do so much more with the daylight given to me and that I can’t make the time to do it properly.

When the clouds invade the sky and Mr Sun is told that he is no longer welcome, all of that changes. All of a sudden I find myself standing at the bookshelf, virtual or otherwise, trying to decide how best to spend the day. Do I fancy a complete run of a favourite shooter, but on a more extreme difficulty? Can I give that RPG a go that’s been sat on the shelf, still in its wrapper? Or maybe it’s time to just bust out a few classics that I know better than episodes of Doctor Who, see if I can maybe run an entire series in a day or play the other side of the morality coin that I’ve never been able to bring myself to do for love of the feeling you get from making that same decision every time. With a title selected, now comes the tidying of the gaming space. I can’t hope to sit on a sofa that isn’t adequately fluffed. If it’s raining too, chances are I need to think about turning the heating on as well or maybe just go and pull the duvet off the bed. If this is more a desktop exercise, then it’s time to tidy those cables out of sight, pop all the discs back in their right cases and return them to the shelf. All the while, the kettle’s boiling in the kitchen, nice big cup of tea (maybe a thermos flask ready on standby) and a reach deep into that hidden spot of the cupboard for that sacred packet of Awesome Biscuits you’ve been saving for such an occasion. It’s difficult to manage the duvet over an office chair so that you still have both hands free for the holy Mouse and Keyboard, so best dig out that jumper you don’t like wearing in public (but love all the same). Phone goes onto silent, Facebook is banished with a simple status update that no one will be able to understand and you’re all set.

These are the best afternoons in the world. Chances are that an hour into gameplay, it stopped raining but there’s no chance at all you’re going to notice. You’re set until the sun goes down now, there’s literally no stopping you until the take away arrives and you leave the game on pause whilst you watch that episode of your favourite show so that you’re not tempted to try eat and game at the same time.The sun goes down, you struggle to turn on the lamp without having to move too much from your 100% comfiness and before you know it, it’s two in the morning and the game’s end credits are rolling. You could have stopped at 11 when you first cracked a yawn but you knew that you were close, you knew that you could do it despite forgetting an entire section of the game, a part you don’t actually like but something which pleasantly surprised you all the same and recharged the battery. Tomorrow’s forecast is dry and sunny, you’re back at work the following day and you know that this is your one chance to get it done. And so it’s two in the morning, the credits are rolling and you feel great. A glance at the phone tells you that you have four missed calls and 12 text messages, you can deal with that in the morning. A look at the laptop that you’ve had running because despite how many times you’ve played that game, you still forgot how to navigate one section and you knew it wasn’t technically cheating because you’ve already done it twice before and Facebook is telling you that there are 15 notifications waiting for a response. You flat out ignore every one of them, update your status to remind everyone how unbelievably awesome you are and it’s off to bed, feeling great!

I love it so much when it rains and I’m away from my keys because it reminds me of all the good times spent in the company of an old friend. As I walked to work the other day, the heavens opened and despite not being best dressed for the occasion, I found myself smiling. It took me a while to figure out just why and as I was mulling it over in my head, I started to bring back so many other fond memories of the weather that went far beyond the wet variation of rain. Virtual rain seems to have the same effect on me, I found myself recalling all those times where I had to commute to work on the bus where I’d fire up my GameBoy Advance SP and a copy of Harvest Moon to discover that it was completely throwing it down in game. This meant that I didn’t have to water my crops! All of a sudden my chores list had shrunk to a few tasks in the barn and stables and the rest of the day was mine to spend as I pleased. I could give my cooking skills another go, have a wander into town to see what was going on in the rest of the farming community and maybe even spend some time flirting with Sarah, the girl who works in the pub.

Better still, expeditions into the many dozens of MMO worlds where the weather has taken a turn for the worse and fighting the good fight is all of a sudden put on hold in favour of a spot of fishing or sitting around in a tavern, ironically complaining about the weather. In Star Wars Galaxies, it didn’t so much as rain as it did summon the Biblical Flood. Having settled on Dantooine, the weather really did change everything. Sure I could still fight without it making any impact on my skills base and no I wasn’t actually going to get muddy, but I still wanted to maintain the illusion of living in a virtual world and so out came the rain coat, on went the big hat and away from the Voritors and Kunga Primalists I rode, back home to get my fishing rod.

It’s a tradition that has followed me into every subsequent MMO. World of Warcraft’s 1.10 patch and the introduction of weather was the most welcome addition I’ve seen in the game since it launched. I could be sat in Ironforge only to read in the trade channel that it’s raining in Westfall and my otherwise busy afternoon spent standing around outside the bank is all of a sudden put on hold in favour of donning my Brewfest hat and racing down through Stormwind to Goldshire so that I could spend some precious time fishing. For those unfamiliar with World of Warcraft, the weather has no effect on the ability to fish nor my skill at fishing. Neither is the weather persistent across the entire of Azeroth, with bad weather being only confined to the areas where it just so happens to be raining. I could go to any of the equivalent level zones and enjoy the sunshine whilst I mashed away on some poor creature’s face, but no – it’s raining and I’m going fishing.

Those lazy afternoons spent playing my favourite games are all of a sudden transferred across into the virtual world and the rain just makes me want to drop everything so that I can take comfort in doing very little and feeling mighty about doing it too. There’s just no substitution for it. If it’s snowing outside, well then me and Lee are going sledding. If it’s too hot to do anything, then it literally is too hot to do anything and you’re better off just keeping it light and spending the afternoon in the garden reading from Raising The Bar with a few beers. But when it’s raining, when there’s naturally nothing good on television and watching a DVD just won’t cut the mustard, this is what gets you through. This is how you spent your childhood and this is how you will spend your retirement. So please remember all of this the next time Michael Fish tells us that Summer is cancelled. Don’t fret so much that you’re not going to have one of those suntan things that everyone’s talking about. Forget all about the trips to the beach, you didn’t want to spend that much on an ice cream anyway, you have plenty of them in the freezer that you bought in bulk for exactly the same price.

Whilst the weather stays good, don’t worry so much about all the disc twitching, the rain is coming and we gamers invite it to stay as long as it likes. Thank you Rain. You complete us!

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