Coleco Vision as commentary on the human condition

Ah, the Coleco Vision! I remember playing this often as a child at my grandmother's house. There was a game called "Nightstalker" which was basically a Pac-Man style maze-game in which you had to avoid these bad, parallelogram-type bad guys who chased you around the screen. The thing was, systems of this sort (2nd Generation) didn't have the power to actually end the game with a series of cinema screens and and lush music. So instead, the game became progressively more difficult until it was literally impossible to survive. The farthest I ever got was a level where the boxy bad guys outnumbered you something like 10 to 1, they could destroy your safe zone, and, oh yeah, they were invisible. At that point you just had to sit there and watch your guy die about 1.4 seconds after the level began. At the time I was ignorant of the bleak, existential despair that my little collection of pixels must have been feeling, along with the absurdity of an enemy who invisible and deadly, but the memory of the experience carries a certain poignancy now.

Of course, having nothing to look forward to past level 12 made the game pretty stupid in hindsight.