The Wallflower Report

So I’ve been playing a lot of Wii games lately at my friend Paris’s place. She just got a Wii a few weeks ago which surprised me because she never used to be into video games before, you know? Like when I tried to get her to play my Nintendo games she would always call them “vulgar bourgeois distractions”.

But now she tells me that the Wii’s free form interactive playing style is going to help her unleash and harness her creativity, and I’m all like, duh, Paris, you can’t harness something at the same time as you unleash it, but she’s all like “Why am I discussing metaphor with somebody who has the intellectual capacity of a thimble?” and I’m like, “I don’t know, but it’s kind of rude that you’re doing that as the same time as you’re talking to me.”

By the way, “bourgeois” is a French word that means “the way it sounds when you try to say ‘bizarre’ with a mouth full of marshmallows.” I like to keep this blog educational because as those celebrity public service announcements on NBC always say, “The More You Know…”

Though they never actually finish the thought which makes me think that they don’t know what happens the more you know and the whole thing is an experiment to find out. Like they tell you all this stuff just so that you will know more and they find out what happens?

Um but anyway I was going to talk about Wii. Instead of buying like the new Metroid and Zelda and other actual video games, Paris got a bunch of these party games like Wii Play and Carnival and Playground and Mario Party 8 which I guess are all okay. I mean they’re fun anyway, and you can play them with more than one person which I guess is what keeps them from being vulgar bourgeois distractions.

Of the games that she got Playground is definitely my favorite. The story is as old as time itself: you’re a kid in a never-ending recess and you have to challenge other kids to games in order to win stickers and marbles. The marbles are for buying stickers. For some reason the kids’ lives all seem to revolve around stickers.

Okay, so forget about the story.

The point is that you play all these games, like dodgeball, which is really fun, and slot car racing, which is really fun, and a dart gun shoot out, which is really fun, and tether ball, which is really there, and there’s this game called “Kicks” which is like if volleyball and soccer had a baby and it was raised in The Matrix but like without the killer computer machines (at least as far as I know).

The only problem is that I never get to play it by myself because it’s actually like Paris’s game, which means I always get stuck playing with her and the thing is that she’s not actually that good at it. So she never wants to play head-to-head against me but if we play on a team we end up losing. I asked her what difference does it make if she loses to me or the computer but she threw a Wiimote at my head.

I think if I can get her to play the Mario Party game she might get over the whole sore loser thing though, because you have to play against each other but the game goes back and forth so much and the actual winner is pretty much random. So far she hasn’t shown much interest in it because it’s kind of a frustrating game and stuff but next time I go over I’m going to bring my strategy guide along.

It was actually like the strategy guide for Mario Party 1 back when Judy and me used to play that on our N64 but in my experience it works just as good for any Mario Party game.

Also it’s not so what you might call an “official” strategy guide so much as a cocktail napkin with the words “dink heavily” on it.

It was supposed to say “drink heavily” but we were both really drunk when we wrote it.

~Ariella Rasputin Wallflower

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 21st, 2007 at 12:10 am and is filed under Video Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.