Tunnels of Doom

Yes, well. I had originally thought that my purchase of BioShock would have to wait until Friday due to budget constraints (actual budget, not my imaginary $60 a Month budget). Fortunately my wife is gifty so she went ahead and bought it for me on Tuesday.

I was originally planning on going to PAX last week so I took a few extra days off to extend the weekend. Sadly PAX ended up falling through but I didn’t bother to undo my vacation time so I had a lot of opportunity to play through BioShock. You can read my full review elsewhere, but suffice to say the game is superb. It definitely earns its Mature rating, but it’s a horror-type game, after all.

The rest of the (new, abbreviated!) rundown after the hop.

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After several DS-heavy play I spent most of my time this weekend on the ol’ 360. It was a little late in coming but I finally got my shipment of games from GameZnFlix and I dusted off a couple of oldies I had meant to revisit plus there were a couple of demos thrown in for good measure. Check the details after the hop.

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Back when I was a wee lad my folks used to take me, on occasion, to various arcades. I believe that often the arcade in question was attached to a Chuck E. Cheese’s pizza “restaurant” whose food offerings contained all the basic ingredients of what you and I commonly refer to as pizza—your doughy crusts, your tomato-based sauces and your melted cheeses—but the flavors they created were quite unlike anything that you might want to pay actual currency to obtain. I’m still unclear how they managed to fail at a task that can be better accomplished with a Thomas’ English Muffin, a plastic squeeze bottle of ketchup and some Kraft Singles, but that’s hardly the point.

During one of these arcade visits I recall specifically seeing a game in the same vein as the popular Dragon’s Lair which was neither that seminal title nor its largely indistinguishable counterpart, Space Ace. This mysterious game involved, somehow, car chases and some kind of gangster activity. That is as far as my memory went. I don’t think I ever actually played the game but it was one of those trivial items that inexplicably left its print on my brain like a steel-toed boot in mud.

Later, after the spread of the Internet, I located the game online and identified it as Cliff Hanger, but I had never seen it since that one childhood encounter. Until yesterday when I stumbled across a copy of it at California Extreme. I played it and it turns out it is as bad of a game as all those Dragon’s Lair laserdisc-based titles are, but it was kind of nice to draw a close on a particularly mystifying recollection. And I did finally figure out why the game stuck with me for so long: The failure screen (akin to the regenerating skeleton sequence from Dragon’s Lair) features a fairly grim depiction of a hanging. It flooded back when I witnessed it again yesterday as being something less than traumatic but something more than easily forgotten. As a lad of an impressionable age, the invisible fingerprint of that scene has manifested itself repeatedly throughout my life in my darkest of nightmares.

I only wish I’d gotten a better picture of it. I’d make it my desktop wallpaper.

If you happened to check last week’s Gaming Weekend you may have noted there was a $60 a Month tidbit included there. This week I’ve pulled the $60 a Month update out of the weekend wrap-up in order to clarify and adjust some of the rules as well as discuss the first budget gaming conundrum (likely of many) to pop up as this holiday’s buying season ramps up.

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Perhaps to compensate for last week’s rather paltry gaming, I went on a tear this weekend and played games nearly the entire time. Not only did I have a blast but I got some friends involved, came to a sad conclusion, brought a new system into the family, cleared out some demo backlog and gained my proudest Achievement on the 360 to date. Intrigued? Then forge ahead my friend.

Forge ahead.

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Sadly there wasn’t a large amount of gaming had this weekend, mostly because my usual gaming hours (late at night after my wife retires for bed) were supplanted by a need to sleep. I did manage to squeeze in a few games here and there including some ostensibly scary stuff and the most random sports game ever. Check it out after the hippity-hop.

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