TurboTiger had recently acquired the new Nintendo Wii video game console after standing hours in line in the cold, cold night. In his recent post, he gave the console pretty rave reviews altho noting that the graphics aren’t much superior to the competition.

The unique thing about the Wii is that instead of pushing buttons and directional joysticks and triggers on a control pad, you actually hold a handle-looking controller and make large swinging motions to get your video game character to take the same action. I was actually getting impressed reading TurboTiger’s gaming experience, until I got to the part of the post where he says his arm’s actually sore from all the gaming action. And then a new thought dawned on me.

Do you find anything ironic in the fact that the success of today’s games is to make an action so advanced that you’re simulating actually DOING the activity in real life (like using “Guitar Hero” guitars and “Donkey Konga” bongos as controllers), and people are shelving out big bucks for this imitation, when THEY CAN DO THE ACTUAL ACTIVITY FOR FREE?! Somewhere, the video game industry is laughing at us. Probably in Japan.

P.S. This reminds me of when GigaPets backfired on me. I was in high school and these little keychain simulated “pets” were all the rage. Remember Tomaguchi or something like that? Anyway, you have these little digital creatures on a tiny console that have living-creature needs. For example, my cat would get hungry, so then you push the button to feed it. Then it’d eat and poop. When you see piles of poop, you gotta push the button to clean it or the cat will get sick from being around its own pixelated feces too long. You also have to train it by throwing a ball of yarn around so it can get some exercise, otherwise its spirits go down and it gets sad and sick. I’d wanted a housecat all my life, but when I lived with my parents, my mom’s allergies made cat ownership impossible. So I got the GigaCat. This cat would wake me up at 3 or 4 in the morning with its little electronic cries because it was hungry or there was too much poop gathering on the screen, or sometimes it’s just lonely and cats are nocturnal and it wants to play. Don’t tell me it didn’t know what time it was, cuz that keychain sucker had a freaking CLOCK function. If I don’t wake up and take care of business, the cat gets really sad and ill in the morning, laying there all skeletal and weak, unresponsive to the yarn and sometimes even to the food. It freaking broke my heart. So I did the good pet owner thing. I fed it, cleaned it, kept it happy, until I couldn’t stand it anymore and, after deciding my mom was right about how much it’d suck to own pets, I let my digital cat die. I think I may have cried. Now that I have Dodo, REAL CATS ARE SO MUCH FREAKING EASIER TO LIVE WITH THAN STUPID DIGITAL CATS! I was sure then, too, that the inventors of these digital pets were papercutting themselves to death rolling around naked in our hard-earned cash laughing at us.