James on Games

1. Okay, by now I've lost track of who brought it up, maybe it was Boz, but re: the Mork and Mindy game, I remember it well, because I gave it to my best friend in Fairfield as a birthday present, not long before I moved to Turlock and he moved to Baldwinsville, NY and was never heard from again. My recollection is that the Mork and Mindy game was pretty fucking lame. It required you to do things like say "Shazbot" at certain times, and if you forgot to say it, like forgetting to say "Uno", then you had to drink, or maybe you had to chug, I forget.

2. Mousetrap! I vaguely remember this game, but I didn't have it. I just have a dim memory of trying to get a friend who did have it to play it with me but he abjectly refused on the grounds that he'd already given up on it because it was so fucking hard to play.

3. Critter in the Candy used exactly the kind of pop-up plastic thingamafukker with a dice inside that T is talking about, except with three sides "Cherry" and three sides "Peanut" (chocolate candy interiors) and three sides live (Genesis). It was a stand alone unit, not part of a game board unlike the one T refers to, which I do vaguely remember however but I don't know what the hell game it was, I just kind of remember it.

Critter in the Candy was a stupid game that I remember only from coming home after elementary school (where my 4th grade teacher, in response to a foolish statement I made, with no knowledge whatsoever of the proper socio-cultural milieu but simply knowing that my parents had already suggested that my destiny most likely lay in going to college rather than learning a trade, notwithstanding the fact that killing fleas with table salt is STILL the best job I've ever had, but having simply heard of this institution as being a fine, upstanding local institution of exclusive quality, to the effect that I wanted to attend Stanfurd University, to which she replied that if I wanted to go there I'd better learn to write better (No shit, teach! Yup, a 4th grader probably can't write well enough to enter a fine Junior University like Stanfurd. Ohh, that's a clue, all right!), but I suppose I know what she meant and took it to heart and went to Cal instead) to my Grandma's house, where was she was concurrently running a day care business and I got to play that stupid game with lame kids that would start crying and bait my Grandma into foolish statements like "I'll give you something to cry about" plus the cat liked to scratch me in a special place and she told me not to tell anyone, and I haven't. Until now.

4. I think the game that all the Durfee siblings have recognized, but no one else has, is Payday, but I'm not sure. I never had that one myself, but remember playing it. I preferred the Mad Magazine game, where you got to do wacky things like switch chairs but leave your money behind. Actually, in retrospect it's now clear that the Mad Magazine game was marketed to kids, but the true secret target audience was their ex-hippie parents who would stay up after tucking their adorable little urchins into bed with their blankies and invite their friends over and play the game while smoking a bong.

5. I think I played Perfection a few times, but I got Superfection as a birthday present (I think). Durf is absolutely right about it. T is wrong. Sorry, I call'em like I see'em. WYSWYG, I guess. Anyway, Superfection was fairly challenging at first, although after playing it the first few times you quickly memorized which pieces went together and it became easier, but the biggest problem, and the reason that even at the innocent age of 7 or whatever I knew that I'd gotten the shaft was that the box it came in showed madcap pictures of a mirthful family clustered around the Superfection game like apes around an obelisk, becoming punch drunk with gaiety as the timer expired and shot all the damn pieces a foot in the air, flying all over the place, some of them propelled back into dark recesses where they would never again be found, like Tracer disks or Michael Jackson's music career, when in real life the pieces would jump up about 2 centimeters and fall back into place, making the whole exercise rather pointless, kind of like this sentence.

6. Lite Brite was the bomb! In theory, at least. My cousin who lived in Fresno had one (along with Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys, neither of which I had, but that's because my parents quickly realized that with me the best bet was to invest the whole Christmas bonus on Legos), so I was always excited to go visit him, also because in summer his neighborhood was consistently visited by the Ice Cream Truck, unlike my neighborhoods at the time, first in Vacaville (neighborhood too new), then in Davis (because ice cream isn't organic and trucks are an evil mode of transportation, but I think there was a Smoothie Bicycle instead, or perhaps a guy riding around on a burro selling liquefied wheat germ with a "floater" of beet juice, brown sugar-coated tofu chunks just a thin dime extra, but a full Washington quarter if you wanted the carob-coated macaroon made with broccoli-flour and wild klinkberries, you know, as a "dunker"), then in Fairfield (cause Fairfield just plain suxx), and finally in Turlock (because the damn Portagee kids already got to the truck and knocked it over, but they left a trail of Missile Pops and Fudgcicles and got sent up to the Northern California Industrial School for Boys, up in Susanville, where the warden says, "Okay, Silva, you've been here before, I guess you know the drill. Fall in line! No, your other left, Portagee!!"), but the problem was that in practice, I could enver translate my creativity with Legos and drawing maps and inventing sci-fi scenarios into anything halfway decent, settling always instead for simple geometrical shapes using less than 10 colors and with a rather large pixel size of maybe 5 mm or so, and never covering an area of more than 10 by 14 inches or so.

7. Okay, I played my share of Risk, but I was never a Risk nerd. To be sure, I was a D&D nerd, but I never really liked "Strategy"/"Warfare"-type games as much as some people I knew, the type of people who described themselves as "Gamers", and no, that didn't mean you could count on them for 30 minutes every night, with 10 points, hard work on the glass, and solid D. However, I will remind you (I think I've told this story before to at least some of you) that as a freshman at Unit III, I played one game of Risk with two people from my floor (the 8th), one of whom hadn't played since he was about 10, and the other of whom had never played before, and I won (fairly easily, using the time-honored "Bering Land Bridge" strategy--hold North America for 5 extra armies and sweep through Asia via Kamchatka--either that or I used the Fischer opening, or the Queen's Gambit), and somehow, on the basis of this one friendly game that I think was played while working on a third 12-pack of Keystone that same night, word spread to the serious, hardcore Risk nerds on the 7th floor that I was the "8th Floor Champion", and even held the unified title sanctioned by all three major Risk sanctioning bodies (IRF, WRC, WRA, plus the WWF as well, and the WTO), so they invited me down to put my title on the line the following weekend (leaving a few days for training--roadwork, heavy bag, speed bag, the works), and early on one of them, a 29-year old junior transfer from Cupertino (who was dating an 17-year old freshman from the women's floor, but they made a good couple because they were both the sort of people who always left their mouth hanging open, agape, as though they were dumbstruck by the bold postmodernist statement made by the architecture of Unit III) declared in a voice ripe with challenge and raw with long-dormant territorial instincts savagely unleashed on an unsuspecting freshman ingenue (me), that he was going to "wax the board with [my] behind." The game went downhill from there, I lost, and since then I've generally stuck with 221B Baker Street.

Okay, that's probably enough. Sorry about the length, but when you respond as infrequently as I have lately, and when faced with a topic this compelling, the thoughts tend to back up in your system, and you just gotta let'em spew forth.

Take it easy,

The Colonel James (1999.12.13)