We're Going to Cover That In Phase 2

Six years ago, I became obsessed during the holiday season about getting a PS2. This obsession was due to a number of reasons. The first was a very practical one: I needed a DVD player and among other things, the PS2 was a DVD player. The second was that I had been laid off from my dot com job and not only had plenty of time to try and get one, but tons of time to actually play it once I got it. The third and most important reason was that other than my Atari 2600, I had never owned a video game system and I had become convinced that the time was finally right.
For years, I religiously went over my friend’s houses to play Baseball Stars, Super Tecmo Bowl or Bonk’s Adventure but never owned those games or the system they were played on (Full disclosure: my father during a misguided Atari loving phase bought a Jaguar but that sucked and I try to forget about it). I was at that time when I started to develop a love hate relationship with video games, something which would only get stronger over time, moving away from loving and towards hating as I started to see my friends getting totally sucked into games like “Bond” where they would sit inside all day, playing endless tournaments, never getting up off of their asses except to maybe get a drink of something. I took a perverse joy out of being the “other guy” – who hoped on his bike and went for a ride or who went for a walk instead of playing all day – and let everyone know it too.
This love/hate relationship came to a head when I lived my senior year of college with Bryan who not only had a Playstation but spent an enormous amount of time “lost” to it. I would berate him on a daily basis to put the controller down and get outside to the point where I felt like his mom. Then, towards the end of the year when senioritis was truly setting in, I picked up “Metal Gear Solid” and sure enough was absolutely hooked, to the point where I was soon coming home from my internship during lunch to squeeze in a few minutes of gameplay.
Hate had become love – the siren song of the pixels was too much! About a year and a half later post-graduation, I heard tons of hype about PS2 and decided that I must have one and sure enough, using much gile and cunning (and setting my web brower to automatically refresh every 5 seconds on a day that I had been told Amazon would be getting them in stock) I was able to procure one and have never looked back since.
That is, until a few weeks ago when I heard that the new PS3 would cost over $500. I started to look back on how much I’ve used the PS2 the past few years and sure enough, its pure gaming usage has fallen dramatically since I moved out of my 2 br converted to 3 bachelor pad and moved in with my then girlfriend/now wife. Gone are the Fins/Jets Madden battles that would rage into the early morning. Gone forever is the kind of life where for one magical day I could sit and play “Metal Gear Solid 2” for 15 hours straight. During that day, my roommate got up, found me sitting Indian style in front of the TV playing, went to the gym, came back, went out to get breakfast, came back, went out to get lunch and run errands, came back, went out on a date, came back and I NEVER MOVED! Over the past few years, aside from bursts of Grand Theft Auto action, the game system really didn’t get played. In fact, MGS 3 (Snake Eater) stayed in its box for a solid year because I knew it needed about 40 hours of my time to beat it and these days, I don’t even have 3.5 hours to get to the movie theatre, sit through the Bond flick and get home, let alone 40 hours for a silly video game.
With this mindset of “not having enough time” – a reason I never joined the WoW (Worlds of Warcraft) universe – I started to read about the Wii and its strategy of going after the “casual” gamer. After a lot of thought, I realized why I wasn’t playing anymore: I just didn’t have time and had become a “casual” gamer myself. My wife is getting ready to go out for the evening? 20 minutes of game play coming up! Everything that I read and/or saw about the Wii made me want to get one even more – hell, one of my favorite video game accessories of all time was the Nintendo light gun that was needed to play “Duck Hunt.”
Now, having stood outside the Times Square Toys R Us for over 3 hours on a Saturday morning in December, having had a Wii for about a month, having not only brought it to my sister-in-law and brother-in-laws house but brought it into work to demo it for co-workers but having so everyone I know can see it, I have to say that it was one of the best moves I’ve made in the past decade. That is maybe a bit of hyperbole but you get the idea.
The reason why I love it so much is because the Wii is a machine that is just plain fun – you really want to yell “wee!” when playing it. The games, while very simple, are lots of fun and you really work up a sweat while playing Tennis or Baseball, so much so that Nintendo has already issued a recall for the wrist straps to make them stronger as people have been losing control of their remotes and destroying their TVs and windows. There is a feature called “Wii Fitness” where each day, you are run through 3 out of 15 different training exercises and at the end, you get your “Wii Age” which is supposed to show you how in shape you are. I started at 60 (oy!) and now I’m down to my actual age (29). I’m hoping to get under 25 sooner or later – I got to 26 before going away and like real life, if you don’t train everyday, you lose a step and sure enough, my first day back pushed me into the 30’s.
There are also other fun features besides the games. One is the ability to show pics on your TV if you use an SD flash card as your camera memory (which I do). When my mom, sister and in-laws came over my apartment recently, I was able to show off my trip photos right on my TV instead of having everyone crowd around the computer screen. Another is the Wii Message board, where others who have Wii’s can write you notes (my friend Jay used it to talk trash when we faced each other in fantasy football playoffs – yeah, phone calls, SMS messages and emails were not enough…) and as the Wii has built in Wi-Fi, there are channels like the Forecast Channel where you can always get an up-to-date weather report.
As time goes on, I’ll post more about it. Right now, I’m ready to leave and head home to see if my age today is going to go up or go down. Maybe I’ll also play my wife in golf or hit a few balls either at the golf range or in the batting cage. Each should take only a few minutes – the kind of game play my life wants and needs right now!