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Posted by Ace on September 27th, 2009 filed in game geek, letters from Ace

For some time now, and with no obvious provocation, Jack has been pulling video games off the shelf that we haven’t touched in ages and booting them up again.  On some level I find this troubling, as it suggests to me that maybe he’s bored, and I should be doing more to engage him in ways that don’t involve a screen.  But in other ways it seems completely natural, as the majority of them are games that I wound up playing in whole or in part for him while he cheered me on, because he didn’t have the patience and coordination to play them alone.  So now he’s looking at them with a fresh eye:  remembering what they involved, and having the satisfaction of testing them with his current, more highly developed skills.

The irony of this is that most of these same games are utter pieces of crap.  One in particular, the Monsters, Inc. PS2 game, is in a dead-heat tie with Earthworld from the Atari 2600 for the title of The Worst Video Game I’ve Ever Played.  I cursed my way silently through every wretched, repetitive, suck-shit level of it, trying to smile for Jack’s sake, because he loved it so much, and praying that I could just get to some kind of screen that said THE END so we could claim that we finished it and I’d never have to turn the damn thing on again.  And now here he is, gladly revisiting it, voluntarily!

I do hope we finally finish Ico someday, though, before the PS2 burns out like the Xbox did.  It was originally reviewed by the now defunct Electronic Gaming Monthly as taking about 10 hours to complete.  We’ve been working on it for– three?  four years?…

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