Gameboy - Gameboy

Well haven’t I have been awfully lazy recently? It’s been over a week since last tapping out any random German dictionary-based idiocy, which makes me feel as impotent, in textual terms, as a wrinkled, eighty-nine year old set of cock and balls. Whenever there’s been a gap in my writings this long, I’ve had the excuse of being away - either making that obligatory twice-yearly trek up north to slake my family’s relentless attention-hunger, or exploring foreign lands, mostly while drinking my face off. Even then, I usually wrote a large amount of introspective bollocks on a napkin, beer mat or spare limb. This week, however, there’s nothing. Besides watching my usual can’t-be-arsed-to-get-out-of-bed hour or three of the BBC News channel, eating cake, and sticking on the occasional film, I’ve not done much else. Oh, unless you count the several hours of XBox 360 that seems to have, with cold efficiency, stolen every other waking minute. (Not counting heading downstairs for a cakey-refill.) The bastard. (The Xbox, not the coconut sponge.) It‘s just mad how much gaming has evolved since I was a kid. The opiate, the element making today’s games so horrendously addictive is the incorporation of the internet, allowing you to have ‘friends’ who, with XBox Live! become instant piss-taking voyeurs. When you log on, it tells you what game they’re playing and precisely what it is they‘re doing. Microsoft’s villainous masterstroke was the adding of Achievements that give you points toward your Gamerscore - a number that lets everyone know how utterly shit you are at computer games. Say you kill Mr X on game Y, you’ll get an achievement. All your friends can see instantly which ones you have or don‘t have, and therefore poke fun accordingly. This means if you’ve got any shred of misplaced pride, you’ll spend fifty billion hours in a futile bid to get that bigger score, not caring that you’re drying out your contact lenses, giving yourself a painful, George Best-esque bloodshot-eye makeover. Eons ago you could make up all sorts of boastful crap about what crazy Mario or Tetris levels you’d got to on your (I sense you’ve been craving tenuous, so….taaa-daaa!) Gameboy, but now you have to put your control pad where your mouth is and actually do it. With the accompanying microphony-headset, XBox Live! players can also enjoy masses of shit-talking with thousands of more than willing opponents. “Get the fuck off my team you loser, you suck!” These people are not only displaying their base-level anti social prowess by staying indoors playing video games all day, but they’re ramping it up to new heights by being absolute wankers to everyone in a virtual world too! They should have their fingers broken, then sawn off. Then reattached in the wrong places. Fancy your smashed-up thumb as your middle finger? No? Or all ten crunched-to-fuck digits on a single hand? Well stop being such a belligerent bell-end, Mr ILoveKittens93, and maybe you’ll avoid a violent - but in no way sexual - re-fingering. Well, maybe a little bit sexual. Ten on one hand? And this has just got horrible, but thankfully my Gamerscore urgently needs raising, so that’s it.