Life Lessons Video Games Taught Me!!!

By Linus, The Angry Mime - linustheangrymime@hotmail.com

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Hey.

Tonto, you’re a bitch.

Sure, you put my words up on your page, which provides me with the email addresses of desperate, attractive women who love to send me pictures of them dressed in whiteface.

Sure, once in a freaking blue moon, after I rouse you out of a nail-polish-induced coma and flatten your testicles with a waffle iron, you pay me for what I write. (keeps me living on a steady diet of Tabasco and cockroaches)

Sure, you’re slapping your meat bag against Stephany’s crazy box, and it makes me laugh, how low you’ve stooped. You used to date women, Tonto. Women who didn’t smell like vomit, kitty litter, and Vicodin. Ring rats who didn’t talk your ear off about goddamn spritelys.

But, facts are facts. You’re a grade-A-one-leap-over the fence-into-the-lust-laden-embrace-of-a-junk-yard-dog-bitch.

Here’s why:

Punch Out was a crappy game. You had what – three, four moves??

You had a referee who was far too obsessed with Princess Peach to make a decent call.

The graphics looked like they belonged on a Lite-Brite.

Be glad, for once, that you escaped being the butt of a joke.

But you keep grabbing your shriveled up tomahawk and whining to anyone who’s around, telling them that this video game could have given you a better life.

Games don’t make any one’s life better. They’re timewasters, things kids do to forget that they’re living in an orphanage that’s got an inch of warm urine all over the floor everywhere you go, even in the chapel.

I will admit, though, that video games do teach you some much-needed life skills. Here’s a few I picked up in my childhood:

1) Custer’s Revenge-Atari 2600 - When this game came out, every kid in the orphanage wanted to sneak a peek at it. It was an adult game that had you play a naked General Custer, making his way past obstacles to have his way with an American Indian called “Revenge.”

Read that last sentence again.

I didn’t make that up. Your goal was to fuck the Indians. Literally.

So, one faked case of the flu, six rocks, and a trip to Babbage’s later, I plugged in my stolen Atari 2600 and copy of Custer’s Revenge, and awaited my transformation from boy into man.



Lesson Learned: Idiots will do or buy anything if you promise them nudity. Anyone with a basic understanding of graphics back then could have realized that a bunch of pink squares does not a good masturbation session make.

Also, the game was filled with more tics than Tonto’s mattress. All was not lost, however; I walked away from the experience a better, more tempered child.

The next day, I charged the orphan kids two dollars each to play the game, and threatened to beat up any kid who told each other that the game sucks.

2) Two Crude Dudes-Arcade/Sega Genesis - You may not believe this, but video game manufacturers tend to lack a lot of originality. When Double Dragon came out, hundreds of games devoted to the holy grail of kicking ass spewed forth, all with varying levels of quality.

Let me save you time, and turn you on to the best in the genre of “post-apocalyptic, bad guys all waiting their turn to meet your fury, cheap graphics” beat-em-up games. Two Crude Dudes was a perfect example of truth in advertising. You played two whacked-out musclemen who fought mutants who were created by nuclear fallout, and regained health by drinking extreme, caffeinated sodas.



Lesson Learned: Anything is a weapon. This game was the first one I ever played where you could use the environment (traffic cones, stop signs, traffic lights, garbage cans, litter, and even CARS) to hurt people.

Sure, there were the standard weapons lying around as well, but only wussies used a knife in a battle when picking up your enemies and throwing them at each other worked just as well. This revelation was a personal epiphany in this mime’s life.

Because of this game, I’ve saved my life hundreds of times over, always one step ahead of my enemies by making weapons out of the world around me.

3) Rygar-NES Version - This was less a video game than an exercise in frustration. I want you to bear in mind that this game came after Metroid (which had password save features) and The Legend of Zelda (which allowed you to save your progress in the game) and still had NO way to save your progress whatsoever.

Which would be fine if it took several hours or less to beat the game, right?

This game took me over three days to beat. I left the game on and slept in two-hour bursts. My hands were covered in bloody blisters. And, when I finally beat the game, was I privy to a spectacular cut scene? A comprehensive list of game designers?

No. All it said was “The End.”

Bullshit!



Lesson Learned: Be prepared and don’t make complicated choices. A good criminal doesn’t craft some master plan that requires years and years of research.

A good criminal knows enough about crime to make a simple, effective choice. Why work on the perfect mix of arsenic in someone’s oatmeal to rub them out, when a sock filled with rusty nails does the job just as easily?

Why suddenly start dealing with a new contact who swears he can move a carton of umbilical cords when you haven’t taken the time to discover that his last three business partners ended up parted out and sold as lunchmeat?

4.) Contra-NES Version - Every one knows the best game on NES was Contra. Why is this? The graphics? The gameplay? The story line? The music?

No. No. No. No.

Simple. Because you could steal the other players' extra lives.

When you got shot... most likely because your partner can't shoot his way out of a wet island crawling with alien soldiers to save his worthless ass, you just steel take a life and continue carrying your partner's dead weight through the jungle.



Lesson Learned: It taught the people you played with to rise up to your standards or die - skills that I use to this very day.

What games brought you some true life lessons? Send me a comment!

- Linus is a world renowned mime artist whose productions “She Walks with Ghosts”, and “Sleep” have won him several international awards, such as the Deburau Prize He also served fifteen years in Oregon State Penitentiary for grand larceny. He trained in Paris at the International School of Corporeal Mime and will beat up anyone who has a problem with it.

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