Don’t hate the player

Ed makes me think that I don’t know if we’ve ever mentioned that we LOVE video games. I mean seriously. If that email Stace just got informing her that she just won the lottery in some African country pans out, I can see me spending my days sitting around the living room in my boxer-briefs playing video games until I get Carpel Tunnel Syndrome and my skin actually turns transparent from lack of sun so I end up looking like one of those pure-white cave fish you see on the Discovery Channel.

You know the cliched scene in movies where the teen or pre-teen hangs out in the basement playing video games non-stop? Me. And what’s so wrong with that, Mr Movie Producer? That gamer kid isn’t hurting anyone huddled down in his basement playing “Halo” nineteen hours a day. I’ll tell you what I think the secret worry about gamers is among society at large. I think people are secretly afraid that gamers will never make time to meet women or will never figure out how to mate. So then society as we know it will cease all because some poor kid can’t make it out of the lake section of “Halo” because he can’t avoid the stupid-assed laser-guided-missile-shooting helicopters. Well… I can’t make it out of that lake section because of the stupid-assed helicopters, either… but I did produce an offspring so get off my back Mr Whining-About-How-We-Have-To-Save-Society Guy. We love video games… deal with it.

Stace and I loved the quest games. The Legend of Zelda. Link. Castlevania. All of the Final Fantasy series. So many others throughout the years. We always played quest games together. Stace would usually guide us through the maze or dungeon with a hand-drawn map while I would control the joystick and do the actual fighting most of the time. This was because she had a much better memory for how to get us through the maze. Then we would trade. We played quest games for years until they became so complicated that you had to buy the strategy guide and follow it faithfully just to complete the game. Well what’s the point of that? That felt an awful lot like doing your taxes. The whole point of a quest video game is to figure it out on your own. Like “Alone in the Dark” now that was a GAME! The whole instruction manual was one page and half of that was the warning about epilepsy. Sweet!

Once we got stuck in a dungeon in “The Legend of Zelda” for about 16 hours of game time because we came upon a little monster that said, “grumble grumble” every time you got close to him. We tried everything we could think of to get past him, but no dice. We poked him with spears. We stabbed him with our sword. We dropped bombs on him. Nothing. The little asshole just stood there completely unscathed saying “grumble grumble” and killing us if we touched him. Finally… the heavens opened and angels began to sing… one of us realized maybe the “grumble grumble” was his stomach and maybe just maybe he was hungry. We rushed Link out in the open countryside to earn some money then back to the nearest town to buy some meat. We hauled the meat across the countryside, back through the dungeon, and threw it at the feet of the little monster. Sure enough, he grabbed the meat and stepped aside allowing us to continue on our quest. After being stuck in the same place for so long, I felt like we had solved the mystery of World Peace when that little asshole moved from in front of that door. Good times.

Then the games moved onto computer and got even more complicated. I remember there is one game that I still have regrets about. It was called “Pathways into Darkness” and I played it about 15 years ago on this old Mac that we had at the time. It was a really extremely fun game that I never finished cause the computer couldn’t handle it when you got too far into the dungeon. Then that Mac died altogether so I never got to finish the game. My understanding is that “Pathways” eventually turned into the “Halo” series, so you can kinda play one of its “offspring” now, but I’ll never be able to finish the original. I still regret that.

Another type of game we always enjoyed were the strategy games like “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” and “Pacific Theatre of Operations” by a favored company called SNES or something like that. They have since gone out of business I think. Or at any rate they don’t produce the same type of games any more. Their games were always on a grand scale and they allowed you to play as complicated-nitty-gritty-detailed or as seat-of-your-pants as you chose to play because you could delegate some parts of the game to the computer if you wanted. We always leaned toward keeping total control though… gosh imagine that.

Seems like today there just aren’t many big games out there that are the type we like to play. I mean while I don’t have any qualms about driving a car real fast and shooting police officers and hookers… well it’s not really my cup of tea, either. So we usually end up playing time management games like “Diner Dash” or puzzle games like “Tetris” and “Big Kahuna Reef”  –  which we love, too, so that’s cool. But still sometimes I miss the quest-type games that we could play together.

Stace had an idea years ago for a game that I think would be a great game if it was done right. She said they should make a game out of “Pride and Prejudice” where you have to attend society functions, ride herd on your family so they make a good impression, and figure out how to entice Mr Darcy into proposing. I think they should make a realistic game called “Dispatcher” where you have to move freight around the country while dealing with real-life type stuff like lost drivers, truck breakdowns, bad weather, lazy drivers who whine if they get too many miles, idiot load-planners who double book loads, etc. Mostly though I just wanted that one cause I was convinced I could do it better than some of the idiots we’ve had as dispatchers in the past.

All this talking about video games… now I’ve got myself all worked up and I’m thinking maybe I need a new game. Maybe I’ll check out Ed’s “Fall Out 3″ and “Team Fortress” but I’ll have to get a new joy-stick cause the one I’ve got now sucks ass. I’m convinced that’s why I can’t avoid that stupid-ass helicopter with it’s damned missiles. It can’t possibly be my 43 year old reflexes that are the problem…