I recently got caught up in the media snare for Grand Theft Auto 4 – evidently the biggest video game to ever happen anytime anywhere. This was odd on one level – since I had never purchased any of the Grand Theft Auto games – and the only real first person shooter-type of games that I had really dabble in – to any real extent were the last two Halo games – which I hardly count because of all of the hopping and sword play that they allow for as essential parts of the games. It was also especially odd that I – who could hardly be called a person that would be at all susceptible to any kind of blitzkrieg marketing campaign would be draw to this vixen siren of a video game – because I had just days before bought a game that I had been giddily clamoring for – for a long long time. That other game was a Mario Kart that would allow me to play online against my distant pals and which had the added super-straight-awesome of friend codes. My friends could now yet again – even one further step beyond their normal Wii codes – all be categorized in an indecipherable system of numbers and letters that wouldn’t turn out to be at all frustrating to try to set-up games with while on a cell phone and navigating the menus to play one or two nail biting races – hooray!

Anyway – to the point. I bought Mario Kart and really loved it a bunch. Two days later I followed my compulsion and went in and purchased GTA4. I will admit that I did play the new game for a bunch of hours for the first couple of days. Running around, going on a date at a bowling alley in Coney Island, flipping through radio stations and then also the stuff that would end up getting to me the most – which was all of the driving – over people and sidewalks and people that I ended up doing. I would pretty much just sit there and wait for the police to cuff me as I contemplated the guilt that I would feel after going too fast around a corner, hopping a curb and taking out the crowd of people that were milling about in their little fake video game New York. I would then look over at my Wii that was raring to go with a game where I could drive, mini-turbo around hairpin curves and blast people with a variety of colors of shells to my hearts content.

I realized that I had made a grave misjudgment in buying two games in the span of three days – and so I hatched a grand plan. Nintendo was going to be coming out with another silly game for their already silly system – and I kind of knew that I was pretty excited about it – for reasons that I couldn’t really figure out at all. I had come to the conclusion that I was going to walk into the game store, return my hyper-violent game that I had to wear headphones to play to keep the Bumpercar household moderately chaste and then let them know that I would be using the credit to purchase none other than Wii Fit. Don’t worry – I know that there was no real reason to tell them the game that I would be getting with my credit – but I was kind of excited at the prospect of the sneer that would wash across their “hard-core gamer” face when I let them know. And as luck would have it . . . sneer they did.