Epically bad, but working on it.

I’ve always had a little bit of a computer game problem. Never life-impacting in any serious way, and certainly--compared to legions of Gen Xers who grew up just behind me--it’s nothing more than an occasional distraction, but they do attract me, and sometimes I feel a little indolent when I jump in for too long.

I think it’s fair to say that I bought my toddlers the early HyperCard based Cyan game “Manhole” in roughly 1989 because I wanted to play with it. Undoubtedly I lost at least a couple of parenting karma points for insisting to my three year old that the hipster dragon who offers you a biscuit was not scary, and we should play on. Because I wanted to play on.

Sometimes when the littles napped, in our early plug-in external modem days, I went as much online as you could in 1988 and played a text-only multi-player quiz game on Compuserve called...what was it called?...oh yeah--”You Guessed It!” When Jeff came home and asked how my day had been, I did not like to tell him that I had played “You Guessed It!” I’m not sure that an itemized list including 3 coloring book pages, 1 trip to Giant, and 2 loads of poopy diapers would have been more impressive, but for reasons that are not quite clear to me, computer games have always been a slightly guilty pleasure.

And yet, despite the fact that Pong emerged in hotels everywhere when I was 11 years old (I played an embarrassing game once, against a random man in a hotel lobby who just wanted to try it, and needed a partner...I missed every return,)...yes, despite that, my fascination with computer games never extended to console-based games.

What was our first console guys...the PS2? I think so. I never played with it, except for a little Karaoke Revolution and DDR. Ok, ok...I also did a good bit of drumming on Rock Band when we upgraded to the PS3. Beyond these large-muscle things though, I never diddled with joysticks and button-based controllers. Too confusing. Too visually chaotic. On the rare occasions that a kid would insist, I’d clutch my controller like a pilot in a death-spiral, trying desperately to discern whether I was the green thing with a mustache bouncing around on the screen, or the red thing with sparks flying out of it. I really didn’t know. The television speakers would yell “ee oo ah...wheeeeoooooo....eeeeeeehhhhhh.” The kid would say “want a rematch?” I’d say, “did you win?” Because I really couldn’t tell, except in that there would be electronic confetti and applause exploding onscreen.

So, I was a little surprised to find myself kind of wanting to buy Epic Mickey, from the moment I first got wind of it this winter. I don’t know what the hook was. But then, my friend Betsy began detailing her progress through the Epic Mickey's “Wasteland” Environment, as a running Facebook status commentary (thing #1,) and Amazon emailed me a 24 hour opportunity to buy the game for $29.99 (thing #2.) So I did.

My first thought was that it was for Gabe. It is true, of course, that Gabe’s usual taste in games runs to post-apocalyptic wastelands where rusted, lag-bolted metal structures are smeared with guts, and zomboid ghouls are apt to be trying to rip your lungs out. But he’d still like Mickey. It wasn’t for me. Until I started, and it turned out to be for me.

So, apart from this confession that I do waste a certain amount of time on video games of both the computer and console varieties, there is this second confession: When I control Mickey Mouse, he has the hand-eye coordination of a 3-legged moose who has just been hit with a tranquilizer dart. He tends to fall off cliffs and stuff like that. Most of the time I’m waving my wiimote around shouting “Where’s my aiming thingy?” while streams of spladooshes, bashers, and blotlings pound Mickey into the pavement. Nevertheless, with the help of those who have gone before (online walk-throughs and videos, as needed,) I have made my way 2/3 of the way through the game.

I wonder where that Pong guy is now? I could offer him a rematch. This time on my quarter. I might return 2 or 3 volleys.