The Weekly Gamage: Farewell, Old Friend

Please excuse me if I’m not my cheery self, but this week I suffered the greatest loss a gamer can suffer. I lost my couch.

I came home from school and the living room looked bare, stripped of its primary functional element. I now sit on the floor, left to plant my tush on the memories. I can remember it like I only saw it yesterday, ‘cause I did. The grayish tan of upholstery that may have once been white. The rip in the arm that got bigger every time I sat down. The numerous food stains that so covered the cushions that I could no longer cover them and instead had to pick the better side. I may see it, when I visit up north, but it’ll never be the same. I can barely recognize it under the slipcover. Truly the end of an era.

Maybe now I can get something in leather.

Anyway, in my grand, three-week-old tradition of providing useless information with my column here are the top ten losses a gamer will ever have to bear.

10. Pee Bottle
Don’t you dare act like you’ve never done this. If nature calls during a marathon gaming session there is simply no time to get up and go to the loo so use a convenient bottle. I still have mine from when I broke my ankle two summers ago.

9. Microwave
If you need food of only slightly questionable quality fast, than just pop whatever in and watch it spin around until it goes ding. It can’t be any worse for your brain than all that crap you’ve been playing. My personal favorite microwave food: Potstickers try it.

8. Refrigerator
What’s a microwave without anything to put in it? Gamers would starve without the magical cold box that’s miraculously refilled by those people who keep yelling at you to get a job.

7. Remote Control
What happens when you pass out playing Mario Kart and wake up to find out that oh, lets say The View is on? In the old days you would die of exposure before making it to the TV. Now you can just zap the demons to oblivion and go on chucking green shells. Now, where the hell is that thing?

6. Cell Phone
Who wants to schlep to their local game store just to find that there are no copies of Project Snowblind or the price of Super Smash Brothers Melee is still too much? Just make a call and still pay through the nose. Behold the power of technology.

5. TV
What’s a game without a big glowing screen to play it on? Can also provide between game breaks that I’m sure have saved many a life. I’ll gladly stop shooting stuff to watch The Office.

4. Portable
How can we game when away from our precious home setup? Why with any of the number of portable game systems available. From the taco-phone known as the N-Gage, to the slowly and painfully dying GBA, or even the good ones like DS and PSP there are plenty of choices. You can’t put a price on never having to wait patiently.

3. Console
Everything up till now is pretty much optional but the very definition of a gamer lies within a console. Whatever system you may own and whatever games you may play, you can’t spell gaming without gaming console.

2. PC
It’s one thing to have a PC for games, but this machine does so much more. How else could gamers express opinions no one cares about, spout nonsense about how their system is better than the others, or even write a column that nobody reads? Only with a PC my friend.

1. Couch
Everything on the list to this point has been pretty much replaceable but what on this list absorbs more of the users personality than the sofa. Look inside your couch and you’ll find more than just assorted fluff and enough trapped methane to gas a small Kurdish village, you’ll find a little bit of you, and if you’re lucky a quarter.

Looking ahead to the barren wasteland of new releases it’s all DOA 4, that is if it doesn’t get delayed again. Microsoft is, as promised, hitting their launch window, like a bird. If you have to return a crappy game, oh let’s say Mario Party 7, go for Harold and Kumar for your PSP so you can watch a stoner adventure while on your own stoner adventure, ah technology.

Anyhoo, looking at the news from this week. Jack Thompson took another step towards being more caricature than man when he bought stock in GTA publisher Take Two who he has constantly ripped for various things I don’t have the time or energy to get into. I personally subscribe to the Penny Arcade theory that the major videogame opponent role must be filled and it may as well be someone as ineffective as Thompson. Rather than get angry I suggest you sit back and enjoy the ride, he can do no real harm.

Some more Revolution news emerged to sweeten an already sweet pot proffered by the Big N. The possibility of the back library of Sega titles joining the Nintendo ones makes the Revolution an even better deal. Now we just need a reasonable price for the system and download service and my preorder is sealed.

And finally, the Sims got their own French postage stamp to honor being one of the top forms of entertainment in the country. This proves, once again, that the French love to maintain their trediness by commemorating anything they think is trendy.

That’s the Weekly Gamage, come back next week when I grab the gaming news, wrestle it to the ground and make it my bitch.

By Zack Rovinsky