The Evil Borg Kitty "Mecha-Anchovy", my first real foe.
Enemies are hardly new to humankind. It pretty much happens whenever there are more than three people in a room, and because of a basic principle called "factioning", the producers of the day stage morality plays in the guise of "reality" t.v. shows, catering to the interests of the drunk and/or mentally ill among us. Me, I prefer the classics in those old school renditions by Shakespeare, but as a publisher, I respect all revisions, updates, and new editions of this ever appealing and exciting classic tale of Good vs. Evil. Who will win?!
Harbinger of Gloom, the evil "Doom Shroom"!
It's all so falsely cliffhanging that students since time immemorial have created drinking games about spot societal clichés to pass the time; time that would be excruciating without a serious crutch to numb and dull the senses, which puts us on pretty much the same level as the morality tales' participants. And just like my college days, I still prefer cartoon enemies over the real, dull, and repetitive kind. After all, new foes are so fun to create, aren't they? Witness my ascent on the game Bejeweled Blitz, as I climb the ladder up, up, and away! The evil Tiki Gods get angrier and more powerful as I rise, and also, strangely, boringly, achingly repetitive. Thanks for watching with me.
I had a post-Apocalytpic dream about an Alien Yeti invasion=I won!
The
first cold of the season I catch comes right on the heel of fall
allergies. It's a long bout initially, but after that bad brush up, I
tend to be set for the rest of the winter, minus a cold here and there.
So, what did I do? I read some, but I find I lack the proper attention
span when I'm really down and out for the count. Thanks to a WiFi
connect, I used my iPhone to surf while flat on my back for a few weeks.
It was a fruitful journey.
The Nature Conservancy's magazine.
I caught up with Game of Thrones and some of True Blood,
played video games (won a belt in Bejeweled Blitz!), searched online for a new place to
live, took breaks to eat and occasionally shower,
going out only to get groceries, leftover Halloween candy, and new fuzzy slippers,
and take a look at an apartment that didn't pan out. In the meantime, my hair
grew and grew, like something out of a fable.
Mother of All Dragons.
Then,
last weekend, I broke with my health rules to drink some very strong
caffeinated green tea, so I could stay up and watch the fights for UFC 167.
It was a wild ride, just like my illnesses tend to be: not often, but violent,
and going the distance. I'm still working my way back to a 100%. Stay
tuned.
We do. We love them so much, we even take pictures of our high scores. By the way, can you touch my Tetris, bitch? No, you can't. See? It's that bad. What games are you playing today?
After T.V. console sets, the next step in gamer evolution was the hand-held. The only arcade game I could stand (like George "Can't Stands Ya" Constanza) was Frogger. The rest seemed accurately designed to milk as many quarters as possible from the player. As a kid, that gets frustrating, especially when game after game ends in under 30 seconds. Where's the fun in that? GAME OVER!
My brothers had their hand-held games, too. The best was Mattel's Electronic Football: a simple black screen with red dash marks. You started at one end of the screen to work your way towards the "end zone", which was the other side of the screen. After awhile, I got the hang of it. Basically, after one or two moves forward onto the field with a up or down direction thrown in as a feint, you used the "up" arrow key to position the mark representing your player to the very top of the screen, then used the right arrow key to move forward, which dodged all the other marks, to get you into the end zone for a touchdown.
It became a flawless formula, satisfying in the same way as solving a Rubix cube. But once learned, those games lost their luster fast, becoming so much plastic fodder for the garbage dump, where I'm sure they still are, since this was pre-recycling days. Computer games replaced arcades and hand-held games, which is an article for another day. Suffice to say, I'm back to playing hand-held games on, you guessed it, my iPhone. So what am I playing now, with all these tech advances? Tetris. And it's still so, so good. Current high score: 637,767.
For kids of my generation, video games are revolutionary. Children naturally like to play the hours away, so having a game pre-packaged for you to interact with at your command (controlled by your hand), became instantly addicting. It was candy for the electronic age.
In my family, it was also another way for my oldest brother to re-establish his predominance in the pecking order above his younger siblings. He took pictures of the t.v. screen whenever he got a high score on a game, to secure future bragging rights. According to his wife, old habits die hard. My bro battles it out digitally with other air travellers, heckling the low scorers from aisles away. That's some serious gamer roots. My father is not immune to the bug either, though he jokes that the last time he bested a game was Pong. He's funny :)
How boring does this look to us now?! And yet, back then, motion graphics were a big deal. Now, since me and my bros were nerds, a fact I have laid the groundwork for in previous articles (Monster mag, Super8 animation, Star Trek, Star Wars, comic books, Renaissance Faires, the list goes on and on), we knew that this first generation technology would tighten up real quick, and we wanted in.
Thus began our campaign for a system of our own. Given my parents rather Luddite and Spartan tendencies, our childish requests often fell upon deaf ears. We get gifts only a few times a year: birthdays, Christmas, and for the kids, at Easter. Children in the family get goodies in the form of a candy basket stuffed with that plastic green grass, laden with jellybeans that have sunk to the bottom, (making it a treasure hunt), plus a stuffed bunny or some other small toys. That's it, homeboys. Those are our values.
When the craze hit, we fought for that years Christmas gift hard. We got one big gift, plus stocking stuffers and clothes. The group family gift, by unanimous vote, had to be a gaming system. Since Dad's interest was piqued, it was a lock and we knew it. Sweet. Atari was the real high end system, but there was no way my parents would green-light the cost of a frivolous t.v game. We wound up with the Sears knock-off version called "Intellivison", probably because my Mom thought it sounded more educational. Yo, check this out:
It's a trip, right? I'm sure readers can guess why we were so enamored. Because we HAD the dice version of D and D. (Cough) nerds (Cough). As basic as the graphics seem now, the mystery of not knowing what would happen at any level or what foe would appear was intoxicating. We loved it. Video game arcades sprung up in malls across America, making quarters scarce in every household. Without those precious coins, no tokens could be bought. Arcades were dark dens of inequity with neon lighting, places where "bad" kids hung out, shaking down other kids for change, as alluring as any dragons' lair. Fortunately for me, my tastes did not run to a group setting. I thought (and still do) that Ms. Pacman and Galaxia sucked, with the exception of Frogger. I tend to hone my "skillz" in private.
The big TV networks knew this was a major youth movement. The execs tried to ride the video crest, nervously watching the audience numbers drop in lieu of this huge home entertainment wave. Here in the tri-state, WPIX Channel 11 had this hilarious call-in game for kids to test their mettle against their version of a video game. It was ridiculous, because younger kids had no idea how to match their voice to what remains a hand-to-eye feat, so they just sputtered out repeatedly "pixpixpixpixpix" in cute, wispy kiddie voices while me and my brothers laughed our asses off.
One unfortunate caller must have lost his front teeth, because his words came out sounding like "Piss!" over and over, totally off target. We were hysterical with laughter, caught in a raging fit of the giggles, face down in some pillows or sliding off the beat up couch in the family room. Embarrassingly still, the announcer said at the end, "Oh, I'm sorry, Michael from West Hempstead. You're score is 0. I'm afraid you've won nothing." Then there was the awkward response from a six year old struggling to grasp what just happened, responding in a small, shaky voice, "Oh, ohhhhhkkkayyyy..." or just an abrupt hang up. The prizes were lame anyway, like a gift certificate to a pizza place or something like that.
How great is that?! Brings back lots of good times. More articles on games to follow, my friends, that's for sure.
