Gleaming the Gamecube

Awhile ago, I got rid of my Playstation 2, because I felt it was unlikely any game was going to do better than Grand Theft Auto 3. Believe the hype: for dangerous-driving, prostitute-bashing, mob-boss-assassinating fun, you can't beat GTA3. So I said goodbye to the game system, confident that I'd seen the pinnacle of PS2 achievement.

But then, inevitably, I started missing the convenience of games. And it turns out that my laptop is not sufficiently manly to play the latest games, so I found myself in the videogame market again. That's a metaphorical market, you understand, not some magical place where there are stacks and stacks of videogames just waiting to be bought. Well, except that there actually were a lot of choices, and I guess they were, in fact, in stacks. What a time to be alive.

I had four basic choices as to which game system to buy. Option 1, buying a new computer that could play the newest games, seemed like too much money. At least, for the kind of computer I have in mind. Buying a PS2 would seem too much like admitting that selling the last one was a mistake, and I try never to make the same mistake too many times while people are watching. So the choice was really between an X-Box and a Gamecube.

Both systems have silly names, so that was a wash. That was good for awhile, because it kept me from making a decision. But then I played some X-Box games and while they were certainly pretty, they didn't make me choke on my own drool or anything. And then I heard about the Gamecube game "Eternal Darkness", which is a lot like a Cthulhu game. Like, it's even got a sanity meter. And old gods and everything. So I was all over that. Plus, this new version of Resident Evil sounds pretty cool.

I haven't gotten into either of those games yet, because they start pretty slow. So far in Resident Evil, I've wandered around for a bit, run from one zombie, and killed another. And in Eternal Darkness, the story is pretty much the same: except for a brief zombie-killing interlude in Ancient Rome, I'm still in the part of the game that consists of poking around a spooky old house. So far it's not all that riveting. I mean, I hate zombies as much as the next guy, but at this point, there just aren't that many zombies in the games yet. So I've been playing Gauntlet: Dark Legacy, which isn't a very original game. It's fun, though.

Now that I've picked a game system, I'm obligated to defend it to the death. Already the X-box enthusiasts at work have started telling me how I got the wrong one, and how their machine can beat up my machine, and so on. It's hard to work up any enthusiasm for the fight, because in my head I'm still fighting the "TRS-80 vs. Apple ][" war. So the only point I bring up in these arguments is that the Gamecube is about a quarter the size of the X-Box. It doesn't sound like much of a contribution, but I've found that when someone's determined to argue with you, you don't need to do much to keep up your side of the argument. Just my continued refusal to take a hammer to my Gamecube is provocation enough, apparently, for people to tell me at length how great their game machine is.

I don't have a lot of time to play. I don't have the most action-packed social life in the world, but it's enough to keep me from the 24-hour videogame binges of my youth. Plus, there's this here website. I tell ya, I don't understand how all those guys with gaming-related webcomics find the time to play all those games and write comics about them.