Monday, July 18, 2005

I am finally a poseur gamer!

I broke through my resistance with the help of another and actually went out and purchased an X-box this weekend past! I am so excited.

Allow me to explain. I have been following the gadget blogs and the gamer community for a while yet I did not own any game system. I could comment on the reviews for all of these games that I had yet to play. I am not a hacker, I am not a cyberpunk, yet I am drawn to the allure of technology. The best you could say is that I am a poseur. As an Honest Hypocrite I am comfortable with admitting that. My one foothold in the early adopter bin is that I have owned a Treo 600 for a year and that my current peer group and associates (except for one) are blissfully unaware of all of the cool technology passing them by. Remember all the folks I told you about that still don't know what a blog is.

So I am officially a poseur gamer. My current favorite videogame is Lego Star Wars. The player follows the theme of the movies but all of the characters and sets are made of Legos, which convincingly blow apart into Lego pieces if you shoot at them. I am pretty sure that this is a game for five year olds, yet I find it a little difficult to play because I am getting old, or at least slightly less adaptable. For example, in one level you get to pilot Annikin's Podracer, but you must complete each section of the race in a fixed amount of time and you can't run into rocks and things. For the life of me, I have had to play it over and over, memorizing a little bit each time and coaxing my misadapted reflexes to the new technology. It generously puts you back at the same location each time to do this. I beat it last night, but I am sure some toddler somewhere thinks the game is easy and boring.

One amusing part of setting up the game is that my fiance was very impressed with just setting the time on the X-box. It has been a long time since either of us have owned a video game system and the advances have been meteoric. She wants to know why the time setting interface on her computer can't be as cool as on the X-box. So I ask you out there on the internets, why can't it?

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