Return Fire

I’m all for adding new holidays to the calendar, even stupid Tom Chick-created ones like Game Memorial Day. Seeing as Americans celebrate Labor Day every September despite its vaguely socialist origins that go against everything that flag-wavers claim to stand for, why not give us another long weekend for reasons that people don’t really want to look into.

Though if we’re going to go through all the hassle of shutting down the banks and post offices, we might as well add the condition that the games being, um, memorialized have to be at least a year old. Hell, make it two. There are so many old games that need to be honored, especially now that my system is starting to chug when faced with most anything intimidating and new. Just bringing a copy of Half-Life II anywhere near my desk this fall will probably cause the old hoss to throw a shoe.

And before I dig under the mattress for the spare cash needed to upgrade, I want to spend a few more weeks with the likes of Thief, Thief II, Jedi Knight, System Shock 2, and Unreal. I’d even like to give Undying another go. I didn’t finish it the first, second, or third times I installed it, and probably won’t finish it the fourth, but there’s something retro and cool about it now so maybe I might. Why not? If we’re marking Game Memorial Day and adding days to the calendar (maybe I’m missing a funny here, Tom, but September only has 30 days), anything can happen.

Yeah, I know that I’m missing the point. Tom was actually commenting on how we forget about games two minutes after they leave our hard drives because there are a thousand others tugging on our sleeves. I’ve got nothing to add to that other than “It’s true.” We all have too short memories when it comes to games today. Sometimes I think we’d be a lot better off if we just refused to buy any new games for three or four months out of every year. If we just learned to appreciate what we had, and didn’t rush blindly forward.

Of course, that’d take willpower and common sense. And if gamers had any strengths in those departments, Electronics Boutique wouldn’t be taking preorders right now on the Nokia N-Gage.