Hey, remember me? My name’s Wil, and I used to write about geek stuff once a week. Well, now I’m doing it once a month. It’s good to be back.

My extremely active imagination was forged in the playground fire of a childhood spent weak and strange. I read books while other kids played football; I played and wrote computer games while other teens went to makeout parties. While I couldn’t get to second base on the kickball field at school or in Justine Baker’s house, by the end of middle school I had taken the One Ring to Mordor, destroyed the Death Star, and designed and populated countless dungeons.

The real world was a pretty miserable place for a kid like me. I did everything I could to find ways to step out of it: one page at a time in a book or one quarter at a time in the arcade, the more immersive the game, the better. I was never a huge fan of Battlezone’s gameplay, but it remains the closest I’ve ever come to actually driving a tank. I always favored the sit-down versions of games like Pole Position, Spy Hunter, and Sinistar. They felt more . . . real . . . than their stand-up brothers, providing a cleaner escape from the kids at Pinball Plus who took pitiless joy in pointing out that my shoes were Traxx from Kmart, not Vans from the mall.

While game designers and arcade owners did all they could with cabinet systems and sound design (I defy anyone to tell me they didn’t want their Slush Puppy “shaken, not stirred” after a particularly rousing round of Spy Hunter, with music blasting behind their heads, their feet jammed down on the gas, and imagined breezes blowing through their feathered hair), it was our imagination that did most of the work of creating the alternate reality, especially on our console systems at home.

The earliest video games didn’t just encourage us to use our imaginations when we played them, they forced us to. Yar’s Revenge, the best-selling original title on the Atari 2600, has simple yet entertaining gameplay, but it was supported by an extraordinarily rich backstory, turning it into one chapter in an epic struggle for cosmic justice. When I was 9, I wasn’t just chipping away at the shield while I readied my Zorlon cannon; I was helping the Yar extract revenge on the Qotile for the destruction of their planet, Razak IV, as illustrated in the comic that came with the game.

When I was 10 or 11, I arranged a TV tray, a dining room chair, and a worn blanket to make a small tent in front of our 24-inch TV set. I carefully moved our Atari 400 onto the tray and plugged Star Raiders into the cartridge slot. I flipped the power on, picked up the joystick, and booted up my imagination as I sat in the command chair of my very own space ship. For the next hour, I was a member of the Atarian Starship Fleet. I was all that stood between the Zylon Empire and the destruction of humanity. Through my cockpit’s viewscreen (developed at great expense by the RCA corporation back on Earth) I blasted Zylon starships and Zylon basestars, and I would have defeated them all, if my meddling mother hadn’t made me stop and eat dinner!

Over the years, I built bigger and better immersive environments for myself, using transistor radios and walkie-talkies to complete a cockpit with a Vectrex as the main viewer. I made maps of whatever jungle I explored as Pitfall Harry and hung them on my bedroom walls. I created star charts and galactic maps for everything from Asteroids to Cosmic Ark. When I copied game programs out of Antic magazine, I dimmed the lights and did it in the dark, because that seemed like something real hackers would do. (This probably explains a rash of headaches suffered by real hackers throughout the ’80s and ’90s.)

In 1984, after cutting my teeth on the Atari 400 and TI-99/4A, I got my first Macintosh computer. While it had word processing and drawing ability like nothing I’d seen up to that point in my life, it didn’t have any real games, and its programming environment was confounding to the point of uselessness. There wasn’t enough combined imagination in the world to make MacVegas fun, especially when my friends with Commodores and PCs could show off a game like King’s Quest. I was despondent.

My disappointment softened when I discovered Macventure games by ICOM Simulations: DeJa Vu in 1985, Uninvited in 1986, and Shadowgate in 1987. While these games weren’t as technologically advanced or immersive as some in the arcades, they gave me access to worlds that were richer than the ones I’d visited before. They felt less linear, less finite, and engaged my imagination in ways I hadn’t felt since I built my first Atarian Starship in our living room so many years before. And when I finished them, I got a diploma that I could print out – slowly – on my dot-matrix Imagewriter.

As I grew older and came of age in the ’80s, I looked to gaming more for stimulation and entertainment than for escape. I was still attracted to immersive environments, though, and loved games like Defender of the Crown and NeTrek. Around 1988 or 1989, an unlikely game captured my imagination and transported me to another world like nothing had before. Maybe it’s because I was such a huge geek, maybe it’s because I’d been reading Choose Your Own Adventure books since I was in fourth grade, or maybe it’s because I was working on Star Trek every day and my imagination was constantly in an excited state, but Infocom’s The Lurking Horror completely pulled me into its virtual world. It was just green text on a black background, and there wasn’t even any sound, but I was Flynn to its MCP. I spent hours – okay, days – exploring G.U.E. Tech and the nightmares therein. My imagination took the words and created something scary and real. I had finally found the totally immersive game I’d been looking for my entire life in my fragile eggshell mind, where I got to control everything from the sound of a floor waxer to the darkness of the steam tunnels. After I finished it, I played every interactive fiction title I could get my hands on, from Zork to Leather Goddesses of Phobos to Planetfall to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (I think I’ll get over Macho Grande before I get over my inability to capture the babelfish without using Invisiclues™.)

My kids live in a very different world than I did. Their immersive, narrative gaming experiences are the space shuttle to my paper airplane. Several months ago, I showed my 17-year-old stepson some of the classic Infocom games that I loved when I was his age. After growing up in a world where our Xbox 360 is more powerful than every console I owned in my entire childhood, combined and squared, he could appreciate the historical significance but was otherwise unimpressed. (“This is what gaming was for you? That’s weird.”) I was a little saddened, but it quickly passed. After all, when I was his age, I could only dream of one day putting myself into a living, breathing world like Liberty City. It’s a consequence of progress, I guess, and I’m sure that one day he’ll show my incredulous grandchildren these games he used to play that were confined to a television set. (“You had to use an external console, not a chipslot? That’s weird.”)

As I wrote this column, I got a jones to hop in a bathysphere and spend some time back in Rapture. I already finished Bioshock once, but it wasn’t the plasmids or the music or the visual design that pulled me back; it was the story. It was a desire to experience Andrew Ryan’s world once again, to find every single diary and explore every single room, to feel like I was back under the sea in that incredible place.

I played for several hours one day, discovering some new areas and reliving some half-remembered favorites. I eventually found myself under Sander Cohen’s spotlight, pulled away only when my wife asked me – for what was apparently the third or fourth time – to come to dinner. I saved the game and shut down the console. After we ate, I grabbed my controller, and prepared to go back to Fort Frolic.

What I found was worse than a room filled with Splicers: the dreaded Red Ring of Death. To anyone who doubts the narrative power of modern video games, I submit myself: I felt like I was in the middle of a book, only to have it ripped from my hands and thrown into a fire. I felt like I was watching a movie, only to have the film catch and burn through somewhere in the fourth reel. It was fabula interrupta.

Waiting for my 360 to get back from the gaming doctor and restore my access to Rapture and points beyond isn’t as bad as one might think, though. I still have all my books and movies and hobby games and other nerdly escape routes. And, I confess, I keep a Z Machine interpreter on my Mac, so I’m never too far away from an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.

Wil Wheaton imagines there’s no heaven.

Does anyone need yet another excuse to go out and buy a Wii? If you're looking for a vital reason to give your parents, here it is.

USA Today is reporting that the Wii is a very useful tool in rehabilitation.

What are they calling it?

Many patients don't like Physical Therapy. Having personally dealt with PT, it becomes extremely boring very quickly. The activities performed can create painful experiences, and due to the simplicity of the exercises, the mind really has nothing else to concentrate on.

It's the truth. I think that some of the Physical Therapists work a night job as dominatrices. They enjoy their day job a little too much. The Wii does you the favor of giving you something to concentrate on while performing activities to help you recover.

The article goes on to describe how the Wii is beneficial in helping wounded soldiers.

It doesn't stop there. The elderly are using the Wii to get healthy, and one of the side effects is the elderly are using it to bond with the grandkids.

Although excessive Wii'ing does have some side effects. I have seen these effects first hand while hooking up a friends system, and letting her win the first couple games of boxing. The conversation the next day included "Are you sore from playing Wii?" I guess it really is exercise.

There are other cases too.

It is good to see the Wii being put to use to help people who have been injured or are in need of some light exercise, like the elderly. It also does a wonderful job of bringing friends and family together and creating memorable moments!

Just remember kids, Wii in moderation. To much Wii'ing will make you go blind, uhm, I mean, give you tendonitis.

DevilsReject totally lets his friends beat him at any Wii game, just to make them feel better about themselves.

Earlier this month Microsoft’s Xbox LIVE service was unreliable at best. Users were greeted with either frequent Yo-Yo disconnects (Connected! Not connected. Connected! Not connected.) or cryptic messages about Windows LIVE IDs - just in time for the post-Christmas present game-fest.

As they attempted to address the situation, Microsoft assured their loyal players that it was not the result of hackers or hardware failure, but the “largest sign-up of new members to Xbox LIVE in our 5 year history,” according to LIVE’s manager Marc Whitten. And instead of a simple apology, they decided to hand every LIVE subscriber a free game for their trouble.

The game description, from Xbox.com:

punk invites Xbox enthusiasts to check out the Xbox Et Al Group.

Amidst all the hoopla in the $40 billion global video game industry, it seems Santa doesn't care about Blu-Ray or overpriced consoles either.

Nintendo's Wii, the little arm-waving, ass-shaking system that could, outsold Sony's Playstation 3 by more than three to one in Japan in 2007, regaining first place in total sales. Mario & Co. couldn't be happier.

Nintendo enjoys the same 3-1 margin in sales against Sony in North America. When your system can't last long enough on shelves to gather dust (and customers are left sucking the dubious cash cow cock of chain stores to buy overpriced "bundle" packages), you're doing something right.

Or, you know, your company fails at increasing supply to meet demand.

I happen to have a sunnier disposition where the Wii is concerned. Mostly because I camped out for 12 hours outside the nearest Target that fateful November morn to be #2 in line. Your personal experience may differ.

Kamide also notes the Xbox 360 is still going strong this side of the pond. That's right. Microsoft is still #1 in the US, selling more than 4 million units this past holiday. However, Bill Gates' little "Red Ring of Death"ed love child is still holding the rear in the Land of the Rising Sun.

Not to mention the problems they encountered with Xbox Live outages.

Much like the storied sports rivalries of old, the fight between the Big Three and their loyal fanbases is everlasting. I don't know about you, but I'm too busy killing zombies and saving princesses to go throw the ball around.

thefreak owns 15 different gaming systems. He's a bigger dork than you.

With the holidays fast approaching, the question facing wannabe rockers and those who would buy gifts for them is clear: Rock Band, or Guitar Hero III?

It’s not as simple as it may seem. Both games have strong and weak points, and while they both have The Rock[1] in common, they are distinctly different games, and choosing which one is right for you or your favorite lil’rocker[2] can be a difficult proposition. Since we’re talking about a substantial amount of money here – though the GH 3 360 bundle has an MSRP of $89 and the Rock Band Special Edition has an MSRP of $160, both are in limited supply and are going for Tickle Me Elmo prices online – I thought I’d use this week’s Geek in Review to review both games, highlight their differences, and justify to my wife why I’ve played both of them so much in the last two weeks, I have a serious RSI in my right forearm and wrist.

Note: I have the Xbox 360 version of each game, so that’s what I’ll be referring to in this column.

Let’s begin with a few similarities: both games have outstanding set lists, featuring a good balance of current and classic rock songs at various difficulties. A big part of the fun for me in these games is unlocking new songs as I play without knowing what’s coming up next. If you’re like me, you won’t want to see the complete Guitar Hero III setlist, or the complete Rock Band setlist.

However, you may want to know that both games feature songs from Metallica, The Killers, The Rolling Stones, Weezer, and a few others. Only one of them has extra cowbell, though.

Both games also work with the wired and wireless Guitar Hero controllers on the 360, though I’ve heard complaints that there are some issues with the PS3’s wireless controllers, giving PS3 owners what they deserve for buying a big stupid blu-ray player with some gaming thrown in as an afterthought.[3] Both games regularly release new songs through the Xbox Marketplace, and so far, I’ve found Rock Band’s DLC to be vastly superior to GH 3’s.

Both games have fun career modes for single and multi-player, and since that’s where the similarities end, let’s look at them both on their own merits.

Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock.

This is the fourth Guitar Hero game (if you count this summer’s profoundly disappointing Rocks the 80s) so players know what to expect: pick a rocker, grab a guitar, and start working your way through setlists of increasing difficulty on your journey to Guitar Legend (which doesn’t sound as cool as Rock God, but if you get all the way to the end on Hard or Expert, you’ll feel like one. Trust me.)

What’s Back
Several of your favorite characters have returned, including Lars Umlaut, Johnny Napalm, Casey Lynch (who gets a serious hotness upgrade) and Judy Nails (who gets a serious boobies upgrade.) The rock store, where you can buy bonus songs, guitars, costumes and rockers has also returned. The basic style of play is unchanged, and Neversoft (which replaced Harmonix when they split off from RedOctane) did a great job with all songs. The hammer-ons and pull-offs function the same way as they did in GH 2, but the overall difficulty has been ramped up quite a bit. I read on the ‘tubes somewhere the suggestion that GH3 Hard = GH2 Expert, and I can mostly agree with that.

What’s New
The graphics have gotten a serious upgrade from the last time around, and it’s stylized without being too cartoony. There are a couple of new characters, all-new venues, and a new storyline with awesome cutscenes that tracks your band’s rise, fall, redemption, and . . . well, I don’t want to give away the ending, but it’s fun and cool.

Two completely new additions to the game are the Boss battles, and the Career Co-op mode. The Boss battles pit you against real-life rockers Slash, Tom Morello, and a mystery opponent, in a face off that replaces star power with battle power. When you play against these guys (or against a friend in multiplayer) you don’t get stars to increase your score and get the audience on your side. Instead, you collect different ways to fuck with the other guy, like the Whammy, which forces him to wail on the whammy bar before he can play any additional notes, and the Amp Overload, which causes his fretboard shake and notes to blink, making it insanely difficult to play them correctly. Personally, I hate the battle mode, but I also hate the Red Hot Chili Peppers and that damn screaming Emo music, so clearly I do not have my finger on the pulse of the damn kids today. Both of my kids (16 and 18) think Battle mode is awesome.

Career co-op mode takes the old co-op mode but gives you encores songs that can only be unlocked when you play with a friend, and an entirely different set of cutscenes. I liked it, because it added the sense of achievement I got while playing through the solo career mode to the fun I have rocking out with a friend (or, more frequently, one of my kids.) Unlike Rock Band, players don’t have to pick an instrument and stick with it, so you’re free to switch off between bass and guitar from song to song.

What Rocks
Nearly all of the songs are performed by the original artists. If you think that’s not a big deal, go play Guitar Hero II and report back. Five paragraphs, double-spaced, please.

Though the setlist is obviously focused on songs with blistering solos, it’s still a well-balanced collection of different genres and difficulties. Each song is accompanied by the year it was released, which is a minor detail that I nevertheless appreciated.

Poison frontman Brett Michaels did motion capture for all the male singers in the game, and I can honestly say it’s the first thing he’s ever done that I thought was awesome.

Sonic Youth’s Kool Thing. I know, I know, I said I wouldn’t spoil any of the setlist, but this song is so fucking awesome it deserves special mention in this section, because it’s not the sort of song that you’d expect to find in this game. Now, if they’d only give us some Bauhaus . . .

What Sucks
The audience. They didn’t put anything new into this subroutine to improve on the crowds in GH2. Everyone moves around in exactly the same way, looking like one person replicated over and over again, sort of like a gathering of Ron Paul fanatics.[4]

The vocal on Pride and Joy is so bad, Zombie Stevie Ray Vaughn was recently spotted prowling the Texas countryside, looking for revenge.

When you go from the penultimate setlist to the final setlist, the difficulty explodes, and songs cross over from “challenging-but-fun” to “oh my fucking god why can’t I get past 90% on this?” I suppose it gives a sense of real accomplishment when you finally make it to the final boss battle, but I just found it demoralizing. That’s not to say the songs are bad. Three of the songs in that setlist are my favorites in the game, even if they’re so damn hard to play I want to smash my controller like I’m a member of The Who.

Finally, my biggest complaint about the game: there’s advertising everywhere, and while I don’t mind that sort of thing where it makes sense – like Ernie Ball strings, and Gibson guitars – there’s stuff that feels totally out of place, like all the Pontiac crap in one level, or obviously intrusive, like the cans of Red Bull that seem to end up littering every single stage.

Guitar Hero III continues where Guitar Hero 2 left off, and it rocks just as hard. I can say with complete confidence that if you like any of the games in the franchise, the latest installment won’t let you down, and will seriously rock your socks off.

Rock Band
Because Rock Band exists in a world that’s already seen four Guitar Hero games, is seen as a natural competitor to that franchise, and wouldn’t exist if not for Guitar Hero’s success, it’s nearly impossible to let it stand entirely on its own merits. No matter what, it’s going to be compared to Guitar Hero, which is a shame, because while there are similarities, Rock Band is an entirely different game, that’s satisfying to play for entirely different reasons. It's not just Guitar Hero with extra instruments; it's much more.

Rock Band takes Guitar Hero III’s career co-op, and adds singing and drums. There’s a solo mode where players can choose one of the different instruments and work their way through different setlists, but it’s not nearly as fun as multiplayer. In fact, to steal a phrase from Penny Arcade’s Tycho, this game needs to be played with other people, because that’s where it shines.

Bass and guitar is exactly what you’d expect, and if you’re familiar with their Guitar Hero counterparts, you should feel right at home. Rock Band isn't nearly as forgiving as Guitar Hero 2 and 3, though, and the hammer ons and pull offs look and respond very differently than what you're used to. This will probably put some people off, but I adjusted fairly quickly.

Rock Band ships with a guitar that’s modeled after the Fender Stratocaster, that is decidedly different than the controllers you’re used to. I like it, but it takes a lot of getting used to. This is one of the many areas where Rock Band’s comparisons to Guitar Hero hurt it: the controller looks and feels good, and has a nifty 5-way switch that lets you apply effects like echo, wah wah, and chorus to your solos. There are also tapping buttons high on the neck that can be played without strumming during solo sections, but players who are unwilling to adjust to the new axe won’t ever get to enjoy those little tweaks.

Players who choose to sing will get a microphone and will be scored on pitch and annunciation. Unlike some other karaoke games, you can’t just hum your way through songs and expect to get a good score, so if you don’t know the words to a song, find someone who does. We had a lot of fun setting up a rudimentary mic stand (built from a box kite tube, some bungee cords and a chair, naturally) and taking turns singing while we played guitar or bass, but at the more advanced difficulties, you’ll want to focus on just one instrument to get high scores and unlock new gigs. And singers? In some songs, you’ll get to bang your microphone like a tambourine . . . or a cowbell. Yeah, that’s right: a cowbell.

The drums are my favorite instrument, and I’ve heard real drummers say that if you can play the drums in Rock Band on Hard, then you can play the drums in real life. When you drum, you’ll see a vertically scrolling section just like the guitar and bass players. You play notes by banging drum sticks on colored pads that sound like toms, snares, crash and ride cymbals. There’s also a foot pedal that thumps like a bass drum. The best part about being a drummer is releasing Rock Band’s version of starpower, which is cleverly called “energy.” When you build up enough “energy,” your section will switch to four glowing vertical bars of color [5] indicating that you can imrpovise a drum fill. This is so much fun, because it gives wannabe drummers like me a chance to play along with a real song, and then add whatever flourish we feel like bringing to the song before hitting the crash cymbal and sending our score into overdrive.

Rock Band lets you do all of this with 58 songs – 51 of them by the original artists – and a shitload crapton of downloadable content, which Harmonix has pledged to keep updating every week from now until the end of time. Already, they’ve released songpacks from Bowie, The Police, Metallica, and Queens of the Stone Age. Eventually, players will be able to purchase entire albums, starting with The Who’s Who’s Next.

What Rocks
Multiplayer, baby. It’s all about the world tour, where you get to name your band, give it a motto, and fill it with characters you and your friends have created.

The loading screens are pictures of your band in action, and they add a level of realism to the “I’m in a rock band” fantasy that will put a smile on your face if you’re willing to commit to it. I squeed a little bit when I saw a loading screen with my band’s name – and my character – on a billboard.

Customizing your band and characters. There are countless graphics to choose from, so you can design an original logo (perfect for the inevitable T-shirt sales) for your band. As you progress through the game, you can customize your characters with tattoos, haircuts, and costumes. There are so many options, you can make your player look like a reasonable recreation of you in real life[6], or you can mold yourself after your ultimate rocker (I made myself look like Elvis Costello, because I don’t want to go to Chelsea.)

The Big Rock Ending: At the end of certain songs, you’ll be presented with an opportunity to blast out one of those huge endings that brings the house down. What makes it really cool and fun is that you get to just wail away on your instrument to build up a huge bank of points . . . which you only get to collect if you hit s randomly-assigned note or series of notes at the end of it all. If your whole band pulls it off, you can get tens of thousands of points and a huge cheer from the audience. If any one of you misses it, though, you won’t get the points, and you’ll just hear crickets.

The artwork is magnificent, and the set design in each venue rules. In some songs, your lead singer will even leap into the audience, just like a real rocker.

When you are really rocking, the audience will actually sing along with you. This is seriously cool, but if you have 5.1 surround, it cranks up to 11 on the awesome scale, as it seems to come from all around you.

What Sucks
There are some minor annoyances in multiplayer. For instance, if I start a session as a guitarist, I can’t switch my character to drums for one song without signing out and logging back in, and if I’m the band leader, I’m stuck with one instrument for the life of the band. That’s stupid, and the game would be much more fun for casual players if we could choose what instrument we’d play at the beginning of each song.

To unlock new venues, your band must amass a certain number of fans. The number of fans you gain each gig is determined by the difficulty level of each member of your band, so you reach “fan caps” where the game comes to a halt until you can successfully play at a higher difficulty level. For some players, this isn’t bad at all, and is a good motivator to try harder levels. For casual players, though, it totally sucks. I know plenty of people who love to play on Hard, but have no interest in playing on Expert. The way I understand this, unless Harmonix removes the fan cap (which I think they’ll have to do, eventually) some people won’t ever be able to experience the entire game. That’s just fucking retarded. Not everyone wants to play the game on Hard or Expert settings, and preventing those people from enjoying the game the same way Hard and Expert players do is stupid and wrong.

There is an even bigger problem, though, that almost breaks the game for me: it’s infuriatingly repetitive in multiplayer career mode, especially at the beginning. As you advance through different cities and unlock new gigs, you’ll be faced with challenges, where the audience randomly picks songs for you to play. The RNG that decides the songs is thoroughly fucked, and frequently results in forcing you to play the same song three times in 30 minutes. If it’s a song you love, not such a big deal; but if it’s a song you hate – like Wanted, Dead or Alive, for instance – you’re screwed. If you’re trying to introduce new players to the game who are used to Guitar Hero’s “one and done” approach to playing songs, it can be a massive turn off. In fact, this problem has driven both of my kids and all of their friends away from Rock Band. While some people claim that playing the same songs over and over again is realistic and more like being in a real band, I totally disagree. I’m not looking for a perfectly realistic recreation of being in a band, I just want to experience the fun of playing songs that I’d never be able to play for real with my friends. I want to play Don’t Fear the Reaper and Won’t Get Fooled Again, and I don’ t want to have to play Celebrity Skin fifty fucking times to get there.

I have a solution to this, though: the game should ask itself if a particular song has been played in the last two hours. If the answer is yes, it chooses a different song for your band to play. See? Done and done.

Those two annoyances aside, I just love Rock Band. I love the feeling of pointless accomplishment I get when I see I’ve gotten 100% on a solo, or improvised a particularly wicked drum fill. Mostly, I love the way Rock Band lets me pretend like I’m in a real band, playing for real people on a real world tour. In fact, to fully enjoy it, you and your bandmates should totally commit to the fantasy, and rock out as hard as you can while you play; it’s the only way to unleash the game’s full potential.

The bottom line.
These are very different games, and I like them both for very different reasons. If you have friends who can consistently get together with you to play, Rock Band destroys Guitar Hero. If you’re going to be playing alone, or if you’re buying for a teenager who thinks the greatest achievement in life is getting 5 stars on Buckethead in Expert mode, mashing guitar buttons like we used to mash Street Fighter buttons, then Guitar Hero III is a clear winner.

Whatever you choose, you’re going to get a great game that’s a ton of fun to play. For those about to rock, I salute you.

[1]That would be the music type of The Rock, not the kind that wants you to smell various things which are cooking.
[2] I say “lil’rocker” because it conjures up images of those adorable, chunky plastic toys, and let’s be honest: that’s how people view us when we’re shredding our balls off during a solo on Expert.
[3] Yeah, that’s won’t arouse any passions, will it?
[4] I’m feeling randy today. Ron Paul supporters and PS3 owners? Look out, Truthers. You’re next.
[5] I hear that’s fairly common for real drummers in real bands, especially if your name was John Bonham.
[6] That’s clearly not me. It’s Posh. Durr.

Wil Wheaton’s band is called Zombitis: Dawn of the Shred. He’s currently accepting applications from potential groupies.

Geeks find many way to set aside the mundanity of the real world these days. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of companies compete for our time and our money, and we can find ourselves with more escape pods than ever before, an embarrassment of riches that can be overwhelming, with dire consequences if we choose . . . poorly.

My limited time is the most valuable commodity I have. I can always earn more money; I can always eat more food; I can stay up late if I didn’t finish that load of laundry in the afternoon. (Curse you, Guitar Hero III: Thief of Daylight!) But I can’t get back time that’s already spent – in some cases, wasted (the time, not me) – on hollow pursuits, so I think very carefully about how I invest my limited free time, and my even more limited “me” time. Here's a look at a typical afternoon spent in a twisty maze of options, all enticing . . .

Oh . . . this should be interesting.

Well, that door wasn’t much fun, was it?

Does anyone (who does not live in easy driving distance of an Alamo Drafthouse [My editor, Andrew, who lives in Austin and goes to the Drafthouse all the time, made me include this. Bastard.]) really enjoy going to the movies any more? I don’t know anyone who says, “Man, I can not wait to go spend a crapload of money so I can watch a crapload of commercials, surrounded by idiots who just won’t Shut. The Fuck. Up.” What is the consistently compelling reason to go out to the movies? I’m trying to escape the frustrations of modern life and the idiots in it who just keep on making more idiots. Why not just stay home and watch something on DVD or cable? Thanks to Netflix and Blockbuster Online (okay, and bittorrent) just about any movie you’d ever want to see is rarely more than one day’s wait away. While there are certainly some films that deserve to be watched on a big screen, like Lord of the Rings, or work better with an audience, like Grindhouse, they are exceptions to the rule. I just don't understand why anyone with ANY sense of dignity at all would . . .

Right. Moving on to door number two . . .

That door made me--

--stabby.

So this problem with commercial loudness will eventually be solved by Dolby Volume, but until that day arrives (and we all upgrade our equipment) does any self-respecting geek watch a show when it airs anymore? Since I got my DVR, I don’t watch anything when it starts. Instead, I wait ten or fifteen minutes and then watch it delayed on my DVR so I can skip the commercials. It’s not that I hate commercials as a class (although, seriously, American beer guys? Beautiful, sophisticated women do not drink cheap, nasty American beer. Give it up already), it’s that I hate commercials that are so loud they wake up my neighbors. I find that I prefer watching movies on my home theater or television shows on my DVR because I control the environment and the experience when I watch. That takes care of the commercials, but what about those annoying animated advertisements that litter the screen and get in the way of me enjoying the show that’s on? Until someone develops AdBlock for television, our only choices, really, are to wait for the show to come out on DVD or just suck it up. I will admit to sucking it up a few times a week, for shows like Heroes and How I Met Your Mother.

Until things change dramatically though, non-DVR broadcast television isn’t earning my time at all. It can’t compete with washing the dishes, much less catching up on my blog feeds or what lies beyond the remaining two doors.

Speaking of . . . let’s see what’s behind Door Number Three . . .

If the biggest problem we have with books is that we just don’t know what to pluck from our two towers of “really want to read” and “really want to read again,” what is there to complain about? Books are great for getting away, whether you’re a geek or not. A book is relatively inexpensive (free at your local public library) and portable, and if you break down your investment by the hour, you get a lot more for your money in a book than you do in a movie. There are no commercials, no annoying idiots shoving fistfuls of popcorn into their mouths in the seat next to you (or, if there are, you can move), and – best of all – you have complete control over when and where you do it. You can read during breaks at work, between classes, when you’re avoiding writing your column, or, uh . . .

. . . when you should be doing other productive tasks.

It should be no surprise that, as an author, I love books and can’t find an awful lot to dislike about them. I freely concede that there are bad books out there (I'm looking at you, Dan Brown), but you can always set a bad book down and pick up five books that are more to your taste. There are more books published each year than anyone could ever read in a lifetime spent doing nothing but reading. We live in a rich, rich time -- reading is available for everyone who cares to make the effort, and you can read about any topic you want.

I imagine that if I were a filmmaker, or television producer, I’d feel differently about the first two doors than I do, but I just don't see the same variety, the same creativity in the visual media that I do in print. There is good work out there, but you have to really dig for it. In the bookstore, it's right there for the taking.

Finally. Let’s open door number four . . .

In real life, it’s a lot harder to settle down and choose just one game, especially when I’m faced with such limited free time. I read an article in Wired earlier this week by a guy who said he’d become a suicide bomber in Halo 3, because asymmetrical warfare worked to his advantage when playing multiplayer online games. He was time-poor, so he couldn’t develop the same skills as the hundreds of thousands of students and unemployed writers who have time to spend practicing non-scoped sniper headshots day after day.

Just like the huge stack of books, the best and worst thing about video games is the time involved. I can spend $40 to take my wife to a movie, and we’ll have a nice three or four hours together. I spent $50 on Halo 3, and without even finishing the campaign, I’ve already spent 30 or more hours with my friends in online matches. It’s the same way with Guitar Hero, and I assume you WoW players would have a similar experience to report -- if you just stopped killing boars in the forest long enough to talk to us, of course. (I keed. I keed.)

I think of my time as a valuable currency that must be earned by anyone who wants me to exchange it for whatever they’re selling. When we geeks talk about investing our money and our time into entertainment and escape, movies and television just can’t compete with video games, comics, novels, or going through a few hundred RSS subscriptions that you save for the times when you have a column due and need a geeky way to kill time under the auspices of--

Pushy, pushy. I'm just trying to figure out what I'm leaving out. I keep feeling like there's something missing . . .

I hate cliffhangers.

Wil Wheaton still remembers how to get the Babel Fish.

Each week, Ariel Waldman serves a tasting of the latest in sex and tech.

Video Game Vixens Get Centerfold

Playboy gives the fantasy female heroines from the previous installment of Girls In Gaming a closer inspection. Leaving imagination behind, the "Playing Rough" series shows all by stripping the lady characters down to nothing but their deadly weapons. Featured in the series is “Keaira” from Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, “Church & Black” from Clive Barker’s Jericho, “Morenn” from The Witcher, “Yoko Retomoto” from Kane & Lynch, “A’Kanna” from Conan, and “Sarah Morrison” from Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa. We have yet to pick ourselves up a copy of the December issue of Playboy, so we can't confirm if the fantasy game babes in fact made centerfold, but sexing up our screens definitely deserves a spread.

Women Keep It Casual

Times Online asks if women gamers are less faithful. The question comes from statistics that point to 74% of casual gamers being women, and thus enjoying less-commitment. If the ratio sees off kilter, it may be due to the fact that most men won't admit to merely being casual gamers.

Soft-core "shiny gems" are at least less likely to lose sleep over, unlike an all-nighter with "hard-core" Halo 3.

Girl On Girl On Game

Girls and gaming are no longer isolated instances across the industry. From the Frag Dolls to the PMS Clan, chicks with joysticks are everywhere. As such, a new website with the tagline of "Because sometimes we use our hands for other things," aims at an alternative non-male market. According to LesbianGamers.com, "If you're a girl who likes girls who likes games, you've found your place on the internet". Having launched just recently, the founding ladies hope to build a lively community for lesbian gaming.

Previously: Girls In Gaming

My wife and I are both in our mid-thirties. We have two kids, one of whom is in college, but we must look young, because we still get carded in restaurants, bars, and even at the market. It happens so frequently, we’ve made it into a contest, to see who can get carded most often, and in the most unlikely circumstances.

This last weekend, I pulled ahead in our contest, when I was carded at the mall, while attempting to buy a video game.

“Wait.” I said to the cashier. “You’re carding me for a video game?”

“Yeah,” he said, “It’s an M-rated game. I have to.”

“I’m 35,” I said. “This is hilarious.”

“I’m sorry, but my manager is standing right there, so . . .” he said.

“Well, I don’t want to be a dick, and I don’t want to get you into any trouble.” I said. I reached into my wallet and handed him my ID. “But isn’t this sort of lame?”

The manager nodded. “It’s the stupidest thing in the world, and it’s all because of the Grand Theft Auto thing.”

“Hot Coffee, right?” I said.

The cashier handed me back my ID, and turned around to get my game out of the Big Drawer of Games We Don't Want People To Steal.

“Did it strike you guys as a little weird that parents groups and politicians were totally fine with the violence and criminal behavior in GTA, but as soon as their precious little children – who shouldn’t have been playing the game in the first place – could see some crappy simulated sex, they lost their fucking minds?”

They both laughed. It was clear that this was a regular topic of conversation in the store, among employees and customers alike.

A young couple walked up to the cash register next to me. The guy excitedly held a copy of Madden in his hand, while the girl – clearly a long-suffering Xbox Widow – patiently waited with him.

“I mean,” I continued, “don’t they know that their precious little children have access to far more explicit sexual material online? They’re worried about a simulated polygonal sex act while little Timmy can get all the bukkake he wants with three clicks?”

The guy next to me stifled a laugh as the manager finished ringing them up.

As they walked out of the store, the girl said, “What’s bukkake?”

The three of us at the counter didn't try to stifle our collective laugh.

“That’s not even the worst part,” the manager said to me. “Check this out: if I sold a minor alcohol, I’d get about a $300 misdemeanor fine. But they’re trying to pass a law in New York and here in California that would make it a $1500 fine and a felony for me to sell this game,” he held up the game I was buying, Dead Rising, “to the same kid.”

“That’s fucking retarded,” I said. “Laws like that have already been struck down in Louisiana, Oklahoma, Michigan, and Illinois!”

“Oh, we know,” he said, “but that’s not stopping them from trying in pretty much every state.”

“Thank you Jack Thompson,” I said.

The cashier laughed. “That guy’s an idiot.”

“And get this,” the manager said, “if a kid comes in here and tries to buy an M-rated game, we have to tell him that he has to come back with a parent, but when he comes back with a parent, I can’t sell the game to the parent, because he’s going to give it to the minor.”

“What?”

“Yeah,” he said, “try to figure out the logic there.”

He handed my game to the cashier, who put it into a bag while I signed my credit card slip, no doubt joining a long list of potentially dangerous future criminals who will one day go on a zombie-killing rampage across the country, armed with hockey sticks, pie plates, and cash registers. I held my breath, and wondered if anyone would read the Minority Report.

“Well,” I said, as I put my wallet back into my pocket and picked my subversive contraband, “thanks for being our nation’s eleventh line of defense against children with parents who aren’t involved enough in their lives to pay attention to ratings and decide what’s appropriate for them.”

When I got home, I had my staff send me some Internets with information about this proposed New York law. What I read was chilling:

Do these politicians even know what they’re doing, anymore? Or are they so busy pandering to the authoritarian nanny-staters that they’ve lost their collective minds? It’s bad enough that they think video games are as harmful to minors as alcohol abuse, but they actually want to put people in fucking jail for up to four years for selling a game? The only thing that surprises me, to be honest, is that I haven’t heard any of these opportunists invoke 9/11 (9/11! 9/11! 9/11!) as some justification for this insanity.

Look, I’m a parent, and I am also a gamer, so I know what my kids are playing, and when they're playing it. I also know that there are thousands of parents who aren’t gamers, who rely on ratings to know what’s appropriate for their children. I also fully support retailers not selling M titles to children, the same way I support movie theaters not selling tickets for rated R films to minors. But making it a felony to do so? That’s outrageous.

It's especially stupid and wasteful, too, since it will most likely be struck down in New York like it has been everywhere else, because, according to common sense and the judge who granted a preliminary injunction against the effort in California:

There are real problems facing children in America, like underfunded, overcrowded schools, a criminal lack of health insurance, abusive parents, and Hannah Montana. If lawmakers are really going to try to “protect the children,” they should stop wasting their time and our money pandering to those who think video games are the new heavy metal music.

Wil Wheaton has a warm, secret, fuzzy heart. In a box under his bed.

When I gave my keynote at Penny Arcade Expo, I wanted to give context to the whole reason we all gathered in Seattle. To do that, I tried to take the audience on a trip through gaming history, as seen through the eyes of someone who witnessed the evolution from Atari 2600 to Xbox360 first hand.

I understand that there will be an official PAX'07 DVD released sometime before our Sun goes supernova, or Duke Nukem Forever goes gold, but until then, here's some video of me talking about the first time I played a Nintendo Entertainment System.



Here's what I put into my notes, for those of you who are YouTube impaired, or want to find those places where I broke away from my prepared remarks to heed Fiona Apple's timeless advice to just "go with yourself."

After briefly browsing the action figures and board games, we turned a corner and saw it: the Nintendo Entertainment System, sitting at the end of an aisle, waiting for some lucky kid to pick up its controller and take it for a spin.

We looked at each other, marveling at our good luck, before bolting down the aisle and grabbing the controllers so that no one could get between us and unlimited video game bliss.

There were sixteen different games to choose from. It was incredible. My eyes raced across the colored titles spread out before me:

Golf? No. Golf is lame.

Clu Clu Land? That sounds like math. Next.

Kung-Fu? Bori -- wait! Kung-Fu? Like in the arcade?!

"Let's play Kung-Fu," I said.

"Is it cool?" he said.

"I'm pretty sure it is, Jer," I said. "I think I've played this at Pinball Plus."

(Pinball Plus was our local arcade, owned by a guy who would give us free tokens for good grades. He sold the place in the late eighties, and it was renamed – I am not making this up – The Enterprise. I felt right at home there, for all the reasons you’d think.)

I hit start and was so impressed and excited by what I saw, I think I peed a little.

It was unlike anything I'd ever seen on a console. It made our Atari 2600 feel as technologically advanced as a set of alphabet blocks that was missing three of the five vowels.

"Oh my god, Jeremy! This is just like the arcade!"

"Yeah!" He said, spurred on by my excitement as much as his own.

We alternated between Kung-Fu, Excitebike, and Pinball until our parents dragged us away, what felt like hours later.

Once we were in the car. My brother said, "Mom! Dad! That Intendo is so great!"

"It's Nintendo, Jeremy," I said, in my very best Serious and Mature voice, "and it's probably the most advanced computer system that will ever be made."

That was my favorite line in the entire keynote, because I can still hear myself saying it, and recall how passionately I believed that.

I'm pretty heavily in love with my Nintendo DS, and I have a massive crush on my Xbox360, but the Nintendo Entertainment System will always hold a special place in my heart that's like . . . well, you know how there's the person you lose your virginity to, but then there's the person who shows you how to actually, you know, do it right? I lost my virginity to the Atari 2600, but it was the NES that made me a man.

Wow. Uncomfortable metaphors FTW.

Wil Wheaton made this half-pony half-monkey monster to please you, but he gets the feeling that you don’t like it. What’s with all the screaming?

I love video games as much as many of you do. Hell, I spent the last six months of my life up until my big move west working in a video game store, and playing video games between classes.

Early on, I vowed not to become one of those World of "Warcrack" addicts after dating a fellow whose idea of a date was me coming over and watching him play said game, along with Halo 2 (he made me stand in a line with him for 3 hours for the midnight release of it, where I had at least seven dudes from the line recognize me from SG), and along with Unreal Tournament, which to this day makes me dizzy watching someone play. Besides being put off by the game because of these boring "dates", I was not willing to pay a monthly fee on top of paying the initial $50 for the game, and after playing a trial version, I decided I'd rather stick to D&D anyway. No offense to WoW players, it just wasn't my cup of tea.

However, this article is not about my game play, but rather of those who over-do it.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case. Games Digest reports:

And you may laugh at the last line of the above quote. I mean, I seriously can't fathom being so wrapped up in a video game where I can't bring my WoW character into a pub, or hit the "pause" button in Halo, or just not continue right away after an untimely death in Unreal, or what-have-you, but one 24-year old South Korean man, died from just that in 2002.

And 10 days after Kim's death, 27-year old Lien Wen-cheng died after playing games for 32 hours in Taiwan.

Upon researching the writing of this article, the longest I could find anybody playing video games, in this case, Starcraft, and dying as a result was a whopping 50 hours. Dag, yo!

So be careful game addicts!

And if you're going to "binge" on your video games, make sure you stock up on those energy drinks, I recommend either:

Mountain Dew Game Fuel (in the Halo 3 can)


or, my personal favorite:

Bawls


Sid is glad that Trevor and I are lucky enough to have a cat who warns us if we've played too much by knocking the controllers out of our hands.

This last weekend, I delivered the keynote address at the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle.

PAX is a huge gathering of gamers of all sorts: table top gamers, retro gamers, FPS gamers, handheld gamers, and every other type of gamer imaginable.

I was excited to deliver the keynote, but also terrified. The average age of a PAX participant is around 26, which is significantly younger than me at a crusty old 35.

I worked my ass off to come up with something relevant to this crowd, and settled on a brief history of arcade and console gaming before I hit the real point I wanted to make. You can hear the entire keynote (and read some of my personal highlights from PAX) here, but this excerpt illustrates one of the main points I wanted to make: gaming is a social activity, and gamers are not anti-social freaks.

When my Wii arrived, I named it “Wii-ton” (HA!) and from the moment I plugged it in and started playing Wii Sports with my kids, I felt the magical excitement and pure joy of playing a video game that I haven't felt since my brother and I spent every waking hour playing NES twenty years ago. I knew I’d come across something, uh, Revolution-ary in gaming. When we got Warioware, and had way too much fun making total asses of ourselves jumping around and posing, I understood why: the Wii is about playing games together. The reason I play Wii games more than anything other than Guitar Hero is that it’s a social gaming experience, just like playing Combat or Dodge’Em on Atari, all of those games on NES, or getting friends together for an MKIII or NHL Hockey session on Genesis.

This is the thing that drives me crazy when I hear Jack Thompson, Hillary Clinton, LA City Attorney Rocky Delgadillio, or any other opportunistic, pandering, condescending politician lecture us about the alleged dangers of video games as some sort of anti-social activity. Gaming. Is. A. Social. Activity. Whether we’re playing an analog table top game in someone’s dorm room, a console game in our living rooms, or meeting up in an Online MMORPG with Leeroy Jenkins, we are engaging in an inherently social activity.

The only thing anti-social about gaming are those few people who are so perfectly described by John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, and while they’re annoying, at least they aren’t trying to tell us what we can and can’t play.

The social activity of gaming is part of the foundation of my outstanding relationships with both of my stepsons, too. When I bought Super Mario Bros. on Virtual Console, I asked my seventeen year-old stepson to play with me, eager to share with him some of the joy I'd experienced when I was just a few years younger than he is now.

As I entered level 1-4, he said, "Wil, remember: you have to jump over the chain of fire and onto the top of the box."

"Listen here, sonny," I said, in my best Very Grumpy Old Man voice, "I was playing this game when you were in short pants!"

"Yeah," he said, "so was I."

"That's funny," I said, "because it's true."

We’ve had countless moments like this one, whether he’s owning me in Guitar Hero or Halo, kicking my ass in MarioKart, or asking me to help him make MAME work on his MacBook. I’ve heard parents complain that video games are bad for kids, or harmful to their emotional development, but I’ve never seen a video game reduce a kid to tears as effectively as one of those screaming, hyper competitive little league dads. I’ve never known a kid to feel like crap about himself because he can’t win a Pokemon battle, but I’ve known plenty whose parents make them think they’re worthless because they don’t want to play football.

Speaking of parents and children and video games and opportunistic, pandering politicians: it’s none of their fucking business what I choose to play with my kids, and I wish they’d stop trying to tell me – and everyone else by extension – what my kids can and can’t play. I didn’t let my kids play violent or graphic games when they were too young to understand what the game was about because I’m a good parent who is involved in his kids’ lives, not because some idiot politician tried to score easy political points with the authoritarian 20 percenters who think censorship is totally awesome.

I wouldn’t let my kids play Vice City – even though I loved it and played it nightly for months after they’d gone to bed – because I felt it was too graphic and explicit for them. When my son turned 17, he wanted to know if he could play it, and called me while I was in Las Vegas for business to get permission.

"Mom wanted me to call you and find out if it was okay for me to play Vice City,” he said when I picked up the phone. “I think it's okay, because I'm seventeen and everything, but mom said she wasn't sure and wanted me to talk to you about it since you've played it."

Ryan is 18 and in college now, but even at 17 he was an incredibly mature and responsible person. I knew that he understood the difference between reality and video games, and I was actually more concerned about the time he spent playing them, than the content of the game.

"Well," I said, "you're seventeen, so you're able to buy yourself tickets to rated 'R' movies, and Vice City isn't much different than, say, Scarface or Goodfellas, but hold on a second and let me think about it, okay?"

"Okay," he said.

I put the phone to my chest, and explained the situation to my friends.

"Does he know that it's not okay to hit beat a hooker with a baseball bat and get his money back in real life?" my friend Ryan said.

"Good question," I said. I put the phone back to my ear and said, "I have to ask you one question: if you pick up a hooker in real life, is it okay to hit her with a baseball bat to get your money back after she gets out of your car?"

"Well, since hookers are empty shells and not real people," he said, "then yes. Yes. It's okay to whack her with a baseball bat."

I relayed this to the table and added, "I think he's mature enough to handle Vice City."

"Tell him that he he also has a future career in Hollywood," Ryan said.

That was a year ago, and even though he played all the way through the game, he never did whack a hooker, or do a drive by, or blow up a mall, or go for an INSANE STUNT BONUS by jumping over a canal in a stolen car. He did, though, get emotionally invested in the characters and their stories. He was sad when the game was over, because he wouldn’t get to spend any more time with them.

I had a similar reaction when I completed San Andreas. I knew these characters, I cared about these characters, and I was genuinely sad when their stories came to an end. I frequently feel this way when I finish a long novel, and occasionally at the end of a movie, but never so acutely as I did after over 100 hours of San Andreas. Whenever I hear one of these aforementioned douchebags pontificate about how dangerous and antisocial and devoid of redeeming qualities video games are, I get a little stabby, because these games we love to play are much, much more than the simplistic bloodbaths Mass Media likes to portray them as during May sweeps.

Just as the multiplayer games are social activities, so are the single-player games narrative works of art, and they should be treated that way.

And incidentally? They’re fun! And isn’t that what all this is about? We play games because they challenge us. We play games because they distract us. We play games because they give us bonding experiences with our friends and families. But most of all, we play games because they bring us joy.

Wil Wheaton says, "Don't be a dick!"

According to a magnificent feature at 1Up.com, forty years ago this week, Ralph Baer became the first person to ever develop and play a computer game hooked up to a television. The game was called Ping-Pong, and though pony-tailed purists give credit to 1962's Spacewar, most people acknowledge the creation of Ping-Pong in 1967 (obviously the father of Atari's Pong in 1972) as beginning of the arcade era.

So with video games officially entering middle age this week, call in sick to work (tell them you have Pac-Man fever, of course) and celebrate the big birthday, geek-style.

Have a Video Game Film Festival:
I thought there were a ton of movies based on video games, but according to Wikipedia, there are only a handful of films with video games integral to the part. Huh. Apparently, one scene in an arcade doesn't rate. (Sorry, Midnight Madness.) In fact, there are so few, you could watch them all in one day . . . with some related activities to celebrate, of course.

* Watch the brilliant documentary Once Upon Atari, then invite Towlie over to play invisible tank pong with maximum walls in Combat.

* Watch The Wizard, then apologize to your parents for freaking out at them when they wouldn't buy a power glove for you when you were a kid. Alternatively, you could have a drinking game where you have to drink whenever there's a glaring video game continuity error, but don't complain to me when you pass out in thirty minutes.

* Watch Emilio Estivez in The Bishop of Battle story from Nightmares, and cry softly because arcades as easy to find in the mall as Duke Nukem Forever.

* Watch The Last Starfighter, then play Star Raiders 2 on Atari 800. If you do well, tell all your friends you're going to be recruited to defend the Frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada. Don't forget your towel, hot shot.

* Watch Wargames, the movie that lead to parental and congressional freakouts about teenage hackers who could star World War III from a payphone! Oh Noes! Invite some Mooninites over to play Lite Brite and Defcon.

* Watch Tron, then invite Tron Guy over to play Trak-Ball and Frisbee, in a gymnasium lit entirely by ultraviolet light. In fact, if you do this, invite me too, because this sounds pretty awesome.

And while we're on the subject of movies, does anyone else remember scenes from the 80s where the kid is playing Pole Position, but the sound is clearly from a different game, like Defender? That used to drive me crazy. Come on, Hollywood! You already expect me to accept Tom Cruise as an actor, so you've got to meet me halfway here.

Play the Classics in an Emulator:
I will never forget the first time I came across MAME. It was just before I met my wife, and I was playing Doom late one night in the dark. Alone. Again. In an effort to track down some new WAD files, I stumbled onto a now-defunct site which claimed that I could play classic arcade games from my youth right on my computer at home. It was an outrageous and unbelievable claim, surely part of some effort to trick me into doing something I'd eventually regret . . . but the lure of Mr. Do! and Tempest was impossible to resist. I downloaded MAME, and then some roms for, uh, evaluation (which I quickly and legally deleted 24 hours later. Yep.) I was hooked, and played arcade classics I loved, like Berzerk and Pac-Man, and once-beloved games that I hadn't thought about in decades, like Thief and Kick.

Of course, the legality of MAME and other emulators is murky, so I'd never encourage anyone to download Andy Holfe's brilliant Arcade Ambience, track down a complete set of MAME roms, and spend an entire weekend with everything from Gyruss to those silly Japanese pseudo-porn games based on Qix . . . but there are a lot of legal alternatives, many of which you can play right on your 360 or Playstation (and don't forget the Virtual Console on the Wii, which is its own thing entirely.) There are also lots of self-contained units that hook up to a television, to bring something resembling the arcade into your home, or recreate those classic console days, when Shasta and frozen yogurt ruled the world.

I love emulators. As a parent, I get to share games with my kids that were important to me when I was their age and younger, and as a Gen Xer, I get to relive those days for less than twenty bucks. Ah, who knew you could put a price on nostalgia? Walt Disney, that's who.

If you're one of the damn kids today, it's unlikely that these games are going to Dig your Dug, but if you're a parent of one of the damn kids today, many of them are as much fun to play now as they ever were. So, after your film festival, you can . . .

* Play the Atari Flashback 1 or 2. It's amazing to me how Adventure is still fun, and how hard it remains to jump over the crocodiles in Pitfall.

* Get carsick while playing Mattel handheld football.

* Play the Midway and Namco collections on your favorite console. Beat Smash TV, and wonder why you ever spent more than one quarter trying to finish that piece of shit. Play Sinistar, and try not to get scared all over again when he says, "Beware! I live!"

* Play the Activision collection on your Gameboy, and try to score enough points to qualify for those Activision patches you had twenty years ago.

* Play Intellivision Lives! with only one thumb, to recreate the experience of using that weird Intellivision controller.

* Download a Commodore emulator, and track down a copy of COMPUTE!'s Gazette. Build your own game by copying the code from the magazine and compiling it yourself. When you're done, spend the rest of the day PEEKing and POKEing at the code to find the one character you transcribed incorrectly, and locate it just before you have to get off the computer for dinner. To complete the experience, have your mom come over and turn the machine off without writing your program to the cassette drive.

As a child of the 70s and 80s, video games were one of the biggest cultural influences on my life. I may have learned everything I needed to know about being a teenager from John Hughes, but if aliens ever attack Earth, or I'm ever trapped in a maze with robots, I'll have video games -- and Ralph Baer -- to thank for my eventual victory.

Wil Wheaton always wanted to be a contestant on Starcade.

Just before the end of Spring break a few weeks ago, my wife and I took our kids camping for a few days. I'm not the biggest fan of camping, but we've done this since we were dating, because it's an inexpensive way to get away from the real world and all its responsibilities, and force me to get offline for more than a few hours at a time (I'm not the only technophile who gets the shakes after ninety luddite minutes, am I?)

This year, rather than some sort of rustic camping experience on a secluded beach or high up in the mountains, we did some car camping down in Chula Vista, at this campground we used to take the kids to when they were really little. With our oldest heading off to college in a few months, I think it was as much about the nostalgia of those simple days as it was about the convenience of easily-accessible showers and a camp store, but if we were expecting anything like what we saw ten years ago, we didn't find it.

First of all, the campground has WiFi. Wait. What? WiFi? In a campground? Yes, JOSHUA, there is WiFi, and you can play Global Thermonuclear War from the comfort of your own tent. It was hard to believe, but I saw just as many guys sitting at a picnic table playing World of Warcraft as I saw people reading books in the shade of a tree.

There have always been RVs with television antennas, but nearly all the ones I saw this year had portable satellite dishes, so their owners wouldn't miss a single moment of CNBC or the TV Guide channel while they were away from home.

Isn't the whole point of camping to get away from these things? I thought so, but I'm probably out of touch, and the people who choose a well-developed, freeway-close campground probably aren't looking for the most rustic experience in the world, which is entirely reasonable, I think.

However, I did see something in this campground that really grinds my gears. While I played Frisbee with my kids, a bunch of other kids riding bikes around us, I saw one child, probably 7 or 8 years old, sitting outside at a picnic table, playing a gaming console. This kid was glued to his button mashing, oblivious to everything going on around him. His parents brought him camping, where he was surrounded by other kids his age who were all playing together, and there he was, glued to the PS2.

What. The. Fuck.

Now don't get me wrong: I love gaming. I love technology. In fact, I almost wrote a column this week all about the majesty of handeld games in the 70s and 80s (Merlin and Mattel D&D FTW!) and when I was younger, I took my Mattel Football and then Gameboy just about everywhere with me, but my parents gave me limits, (I didn't miss Old Faithful erupting because I was playing Tetris, for example) and they certainly never brought our Atari 2600 with us on a vacation.

I've been ruminating on this for some time, but I've recently concluded that there is, in fact, an entire generation of parents, about my age or just a little older, who are substituting technology for parenting. As a result, there's an entire generation of children who are overstimulated and undersocialized, and in some cases heavily medicated, because their damn parents would rather distract them with a DVD or video game than, you know, interact with them.

Is this the new way we're supposed to raise emotionally healthy and well adjusted kids? I must have missed a memo, because these people are everywhere.

Next time you're in the freeway and you see one of those obnoxious SUVs with the fucking little family sticker on the back window (you know, the one that has the adorable little stick figures of mom, dad, their seven kids and the dog) take a look as you pass them. In four out of five cases, the seven kids are all watching a DVD. On the way to the store. Because god forbid they have ten minutes in a row where they're not watching Dora or The Wiggles.

In restaurants, it's all too common to see parents completely ignoring their kid while he plays a PSP or Nintendo DS, and I've recently seen kids watching an ultra-portable DVD player while they drink Coke after Coke as mom talks on the cell phone, oblivious to everyone around her – including her child.

There's a car commercial running right now that is an unintentionally powerful and disturbing commentary on how many people in this generation of parents are raising their kids. It starts in a school lunch room, filled with kids who are jumping and running around, throwing food, and generally raging out of control. A teacher tries to get them to settle down, and is ignored, so he flips down a little display, like you'd see in a car-based DVD player, and the entire room instantly turns into slackjawed, television watching zombies. What's the message here? "If you can't get your kids to listen to you, don't worry, all it takes is a little DVD action to do it for you, so you can get back to the peace and quiet you inexplicably thought you'd enjoy when you had seven fucking kids."

I know this basic phenomenon is nothing new. As long as television has existed, parents have sat their kids in front of it while they did other things, but the current portability of media, and the complexity and depth of handheld video games, is leading to a generation of kids who are so used to its constant presence, when it's taken away, they just don't know what to do with themselves -- and neither do their parents. If you've ever seen a kid running around a grocery store like a ferret on crystal meth, while their hapless parent stands by and avoids eye contact with other shoppers, you know what I mean.

When this generation of kids, who have never learned how to sit still or entertain themselves for more than a few minutes at a time, grow up and meet the creepy home schooled kids whose parents have substituted mythology for science and history, the shit is really going to hit the fan.

When that day comes, though, I have a plan: I'll just carry a portable DVD player with me at all times. If any of them tries to give me shit when I'm collecting my social security check, a little Dora should transform them from annoying Customer Service Jackass into helpful Customer Service Zombie in a matter of seconds.

Wil Wheaton is totally winning this contest he's in with Rob Corddry.