I am old, so old that Pong appeared in bars as a gigantic heavy console table when I was about 25. When the Vic 20 home computer was released, I played a game on it based on Centipede that I liked to call «Shit Tick» (because when you shot a tick, it would shit a cactus). This didn’t even have a game cartridge; you loaded it from a cassette tape. My son later got a SuperNintendo and I remember enjoying Star Fox (aka «Star Wing» in Europe) because one could fly through weird, psychedelic places without having to shoot at anyone or get shot at MUCH. (Star Fox was the first spaceship shooter using 16-bit 3D polygons!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W72WioQE0xs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ED89kalfX4E

Then I got a life and became too busy for such frivolities, for roughly 20 years.

My son, taking pity, has kept me informed of major game developments, such as when they overtook movies in terms of financial gross, and when they MERGED with movies to become interactive photoreal ones — like that cowboy one, Red Dead Redemption.

We inherited a Wii from a dead guy last year and were perfectly happy with the baby’s/old-folks’ sports games that came with it. Many of those games force you to use your whole body, and we needed the exercise.

But then, last Xistlessnessmess, my son gave us a GameStop gift card for $40. That was the beginning of my downfall as an indepently-living human being.

One day, having finished several tedious business chores involving taxes and trademarks, and feeling the need for something completely different, I decided to spend that card on something that my wife Princess Wei and I would both like. I researched the current state of Wii games very quickly but intensively.

We are generally interested in quirky games that don’t involve constant stress or tough puzzles. We are dumb,lazy, and old. We work those controllers like a blind person drives a car.

GameStop had the two promising used games, RayMan Origins and Monster Hunter Tri. The latter is one of those huge, complicated games where you have to collect a ton of crap to win anything. The graphics in the video review «slayed» me.

The instruction booklet is about 50 pages long, though, so I haven’t actually tried that yet.

However, we became instantly addicted to RayMan Origins, which looks like it was designed by Ralph Steadman with John K of Ren and Stimpy, and is really just a very old-school 2-D sideways-scrolling leap-and-bash game, but modern and completely insane. Also it moves quickly, changes scenery and monsters very fast, and is easy for a blind driver (or deaf piano player as the case may be).

When we woke up this morning, all we wanted to do was laze around playing video games.

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I ukene fremover presenterer Imagonem en serie gjesteblogger fra Ærverdige Ivan Stang, skriftlærd og radiovert for den internasjonale Church of the SubGenius. Pastoren deler her den oppbyggelige fortellingen om sin gjenoppdagelse av dataspillenes vidunderlige verden med oss.