Damn, now I can't play mario party.

Of all the ways that I've done serious harm to my wrist and hands, video games comes in easily in the top 3, between computer usage, and masturbating incorrectly for years. While the repetitive stress disorders pile up with almost any game you play, some accelerate the process like using a hammer to remove a finger nail. Here are the four top contenders that have helped destroy my fingers.

Track and Field - Nes
I carry the memory of this game as if it was an abuser that I lived with, in a shed full of belts, for 2 semesters in Siberia. As much as I now hate this game-like an abuser from the past, much like an abuse victim I seek to re-create the situations that I felt powerless in taking on all button spamming challenges. This game trained me to hit hard and fast on controllers, and now I'm caught in an arm shattering cycle of bad memories and fevered tapping exercises.




WWF Royal Rumble
A gaming classic, coming in SNES and Sega Gen flavors. Old favorites like Crush and Tatanka were alive and well battling Ric Flair (who was old even then). The slaps and drop kicks were satisfying, but the grappling system was a marathon of thumb punishment. Every suplex , arm throw, DDT, headbutt, and belly to belly slam initiated by grapple required a minimum of 30 button taps. On hard difficulty, overcoming the computer easily doubled the number, and if your character was tired it went straight into the hundreds with no promise of victory. The power meter dipped and dinked and required you to overcome the arbitrarily strong force of the tiny processor on board the Sega Genesis. Even worse was playing against a friend, you have to tire each other out with the thumb-work, which could easily go on for minutes of sheer carpal tunnel inducing madness.
Here's a video that has almost nothing to do with what I'm talking about.



Final Fantasy 8 -PSX
One of the less mentioned children in the final fantasy history. The game itself can be played without button grinding, in fact I didn't even find this feature until my second play through. There is an ability called "Boost" that you can acquire from your Guardian Forces summons, it seems benign and for the most part is ignorable, but the attractiveness of this little feature is that you can greatly increase the power of your summons's effect by spamming the square button at proper intervals. Depending on the length of their animation sequence, you have small amount of time to hit the button as many times as possible, all the way up to 300. Single fights lasting more than 5 minutes this could be used easily six or seven times. Getting up the scale is tricky because if you are grinding your arm to the bone on your controller, and accidentally keep tapping it when you've got the "don't tap now" signal, the number drains back to zero.



Metal Gear Solid -PSX
This game gets an honorable mention for the torture sequence. A diabolical endurance test, plain and simple, pound the x button to stay alive. This mangled my arm so badly in such a short amount of time, the tendons in my arm warm from the heat of friction, muscles contracting involuntarily. My elbow still is slightly crooked from the punishment I channeled through it. They could even detect if you were using a turbo button! You can easily give up, but then you get the gay ending where you are consigned to a life of buttsecs with ottacon.