Tuesday, January 10, 2012

No. 877 – Porcelina of the Vast Oceans


Performer: Smashing Pumpkins
Songwriter: Billy Corgan
Original Release: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
Year: 1995
Definitive Version: None

Now back to the nonsense, already in progress.

After Debbie and I moved in together, I had a lot of time to kill. Work started around 3, and before we bought the house, I really didn’t have much to do before work. I suppose I could have used my time more wisely by volunteering or doing something useful for society, but I decided my time was better spent working out or wasted by playing video games.

I’ve had a love of video games starting from the first time I played Pong and then Tank in the arcades in the 1970s, through Space Invaders, Pac Man, the Atari system and finally Nintendo.

One game in particular that I found and played a ton in 1995—typically with this song and the rest of Mellon Collie on in the guest room in Gahanna—was Uniracers, where you maneuvered a riderless unicycle through these crazy tracks, doing flips and twists and combos to gain speed.

But when Nintendo went to the 64 in the late ’90s, I ended my gaming run. Part of that had to do with getting a house with a huge yard. I no longer had time for video games. But also I like my games easy-to-understand, like Super Mario or Tetris. First-person shooter or other adventure games? Not interested.

I suppose that’s why when I finally got my first iPhone last November, the first and about only app I downloaded was Angry Birds. It doesn’t get mush simpler to learn but fun to play than that. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have one more level to get through before going to work …

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