Games

The game is dead; long live the games.

So today comes the news that "Guitar Hero" is no more. I never played the game myself - well, that's not entirely true; I think I tried it once and sucked big time. But sons #1 and #2 played it incessantly for a while, and for a while it was not uncommon to hear dueling axes at full volume coming from the family room. And if anyone needed proof that it was a bonafide cultural phenomenon, all you had to do was show them the memorable "South Park" episode that resulted from the game.

But with one down, two have returned from the dead, with the news that "Oregon Trail" and "Where In the World is Carmen Sandiego?" have been resurrected on Facebook. We played a lot of Carmen Sandiego when the kids were young, but "Oregon Trail" is the first computer game I ever played. In the Summer of 1980, the school district where my dad worked decided they didn't want to leave their brand spanking new Apple II Computers in an empty office during summer vacation, so he was allowed to bring one home for a few weeks. The graphics of the game left a lot to be desired - basically, they were stick figures - but it was a lot more enjoyable than the PC version that was introduced about 15 years ago - that thing was always crashing, and was so damned hard that it was next to impossible to make it to Oregon without losing half of your crew to dysentery.

I'm not sure I'll be tempted to play either of those on Facebook, but if they decide to release a Facebook version of "Roller Coaster Tycoon," then I'm in trouble.