Tea Leaves

As I outlined before, a large part of my life is spent shopping. This is not to say that I buy a lot of stuff. Mostly I just make mental lists of what I would like to buy, in an ideal world, depending on what my current obsession is. Since my most recent obsession is game consoles, naturally I have been shopping for them latey.
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It’s hard to know how to shop for a videogamer. How do you find something that’s appropriate for their age, fun, and not too expensive if you don’t play games yourself? The answer is: you bend to my will and let me choose your gifts for you.

My goal here is to recommend games beyond the “big names” — the fact is, most gamers are more than happy to go out and buy the big marquee titles themselves; if there’s a gamer in your family with an Xbox, for example, she or he probably already has Halo 2. Instead, I’m trying to find the more oblique, offbeat, and inexpensive selections.
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I found out today that the title of this piece is sadly not original. In fact, much of what I have to say is even told more concisely here. But I figured, why let lack of originality stop a good rant. So here we go.

The new Metal Gear Solid game is out, and I noticed that aside from the exception above, all the game review sites seem afraid to tell their readers the truth, which is that if this game is anything like the other two in the franchise, then it completely blows. Since they can’t possibly not think this, they must be talking in code. Luckily, I have broken their little code. What follows is a guide to translating the game reviews into rational language.
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Just finished the single player in Halo 2, so I feel like I can talk about the game in more detail.
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I have a friend who won’t play The Sims. She won’t even try it.

This is someone who likes whimsical videogames, who enjoys nonviolent, nontraditional games. So it seemed to me that even if this wasn’t her cup of tea, it would at least be worth trying. I asked her why she was so sure it wasn’t for her.

“It’s like this,” she said. “In Kindergarten, we used to play ‘house.’ Playing ‘house’ is fun, and you and your friends take on different roles and do different things. But inevitably, there would be that one person who took things to a level of detail that turned a fun game into drudgery. So you’d be playing ‘house,’ and you’d pretend to have ‘dinner.’ And then after dinner, if that person was playing, you’d have to wash every dish. And put everything back in the cabinets. And scrub the floor. And take out the trash. And so on. When I look at The Sims, it looks to me like it was made by that same person.”

This isn’t meant to trash The Sims (After all, I have already done that.) It illustrates the point that “realism” in games, like honesty in the face of the question “does this make me look fat?” can be an overrated virtue.
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