Extreme Doing Nothing
These foolish games are messing with our heads.
      by Rachel Hyland

Mr. Pointy goes digital.

Like with Podracer. While this was undoubtedly the coolest -- though least probable -- scene from Episode 1, the game it spawned is just pretty much incredibly dull. Of course, I don't really have a great deal of manual dexterity, little interest in racing, and I don't even drive (plus, Star Wars and I are barely on speaking terms) so it was never going to be my thing. But I bravely stuck it out, played it for several hours, I tried to like it, I really did... but I think it's pretty safe to say that I just do not have a high midichlorian count. I am a midichlorian blackhole. If it had been me on that ship shouting "Yippee" and going for the heart of the evil trade federation ship thing, I would probably have ended up screwing with the autopilot, and all the Gungans would have died.

...

Sorry, was I dreaming?

I'm awake now. Sadly. 'Cause due out in December, just in time for me not to buy one for anyone for Christmas, is another game from a movie that I am not too excited about. The movie: The Little Mermaid II. The game: The Little Mermaid II: Pinball Frenzy. Oh, yeah, it's a Pinball Frenzy, baby! 'Cause I know that the first thing I think of when I contemplate the wonders of the deep and the mysteries of its mythical inhabitants is a little silver ball being projected around a flat screen lighting up when it hits stuff. Man, this game looks like just the thing to not get the kiddies excited about buying the video. (And I thought that The Lion King II was enough to do that.)

Your foe in the Buffy video game is the ultimate evil: The Angry Puppy. No, really.

But these examples of bad media-inspiration don't mean that I'm not excited about the promised delights of Buffy computer games. 'Cause I really, really am.

Of course, at buffy.com, there is already supposed to be a Buffy game... of sorts. Exactly why they chose to make a game with a sucky demon from a comparatively sucky episode like "I Robot, You Jane" is anyone's guess, and the fact that the game is under construction -- and seems to have been forever -- is unsurprising, given the track record of the site's overlords. So, never got to play that one, which was a tragedy, as preventing Moloch from escaping from a scanned page onto the 'Net sure sounds like hours of fun to me.

There is another Buffy game already extant on the web that I have played, however. On what is surely one of the slowest loading sites in Christendom is a little Buffy game, entitled The Harvest Duel. This challenging game pits a little-red-dress-clad Buffy against her Season 1 nemesis, The Master, whose remarkably Mr. Magoo-like minions are hell-bent on running across a particular field in which some people are loitering after dark. It is your mission to throw stakes at them. I'm so hopeless I killed someone who could have been Xander, plus some random-looking vamp-meat, about ten times before I got into the rhythm of the stake throwing. And by then, I was just bored.

Tuvok (Tim Russ): he's so unfair!

Luckily, the actual Buffy game looks and sounds like it's gonna be a whole heck of a lot cooler. Rumored to emerge from chrysalis in Spring 2001, the few screenshots that Fox Interactive have generously provided thus far are looking suitably demon lair-y, and the word on the cyber street is that the game will revolve around Buffy, with the help from the early Season 2, late Season 3 Scooby Gang, kicking a little demon booty. While this plot is hardly surprising, yes, Virginia, this will be a fantastic game.

But way before that we have the Buffy game for Gameboy Color, sportsfans. Despite sounding remarkably like a cross between "Inca Mummy Girl" and... oh, quite a bit of Season 1, you will not believe how excited I am about this, and how eagerly I yearn to spend a couple of hundred dollars on a new handheld so that I can play it. As soon as it is released in my poor excuse for a country, that is. Or I finally give in to my innate geekiness and order it at Amazon.

'Cause it's really only when playing the computer games based on characters, events and universes that I have already come to know and love -- like Buffy, The X-Files, the Discworld, Babylon 5, Power Rangers; there's even a Rugrats game! -- that I truly get the whole gamer thing (the non-Tetris gamer thing, I mean.) And I do get it. 'Cause I have come to know that even Role Playing Games, which I have long disdained following some bad experiences with Carmen San Diego, can get quite involving. Perhaps a little too involving.

When I was lured into playing the cooler-than-the-show Star Trek: Voyager: Elite Force recently, I soon became so swept up in the life of my alter-ego, Lt. Munro, that when she did something entirely non-regulation that made me... uh, I mean, her... get in trouble with Lieutenant Commander Tuvok, I was all injured innocence. "B...but, I didn't do that!" I exclaimed, taken aback. (And I didn't, you know. I was framed!) Laughing at my vehemence, the friend who did the luring raised a cocky eyebrow, as Moses to the doubting Romans after he made all of the snakes disappear from Ireland -- I have my own theology, okay? -- as though to say, "Take that, Tetris Girl!"

Which was the exact moment that I came to realize that my life was just waiting for computer game obsession to come into it... and, much as I had denied it, that it had already begun. With games being made of my favorite TV shows, movies, books and comics -- and, plus, I loved the movie of Super Mario Bros. -- it was almost inevitable that I would, at some point, enter the ranks of those spending some non-quality time with their joysticks... and even get the ol' PlayStation out of mothballs.

I was made to see that even though I have long thought myself a staunch disbeliever in the whole gamer ethos -- of experiencing nothing, and yet doing it extremely well -- the same genetic predisposition that inclines me toward the genre also makes me a ripe target for addiction to the kind of fantasy dramas that computer games can provide. And, though loathe to admit it, I concede that I have become officially hooked on more than just my beloved Tetris... and I am really excited about those Buffy games. And my friend -- for such he calls himself -- made me realize this hard truth with only a supercilious, knowing gaze.

So I beat him up. What? Lara Croft would have done the same.

The 11th Hour would like to extend special thanks to WC-Kai, O2, Sunshine and My-Friend-Brad for their gaming expertise.

We welcome your comments on The 11th Hour and this feature. Please send letters to: letters@the11thhour.com

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