Video Game Makers are Worse than Dope Dealers

Via Austin's Statesman -

These video game manufacturers ought to be taken out back and fed to the virtual hogs.

Last Sunday, my daughter, Rachel, 15, asked if we could go to Best Buy so she could check out a video game she loves called "Zelda."

"I just want to hold it," she said.

That sounded to me like a plea from a kid who really wants to own this game. So I suggested to my wife, Kay, and Rachel that we go to the store and just buy "Zelda."

Not that I understand the frenzy here. I'm so low-tech I can limbo under a gigabyte. I don't know "Zelda" from "Alice in Wonderland."

But I figure if a kid wants a $50 game bad enough to just "hold it," I could spring for that.

That's when I was told the game needed a $250 game system, something mysterious called a Wii.

Undaunted, I figured, what the heck, let's go for it. To make a kid happy, I can get out the checkbook.

So on Sunday afternoon, the three of us headed off to the store to buy "Zelda" and Wii, or so I thought.

We hit about half a dozen South Austin stores and couldn't find either the game or the system.

Seems like the miserable creeps at Nintendo, the video company that makes both the game and the system, had sent out just enough Wiis to create what is known as market interest.

When we left the house, Rachel was bubbly and happy. Heck, she even voluntarily cleaned her room, the biggest upset I'd seen since the Red Sox won the World Series.

But by the time we found out the Target on Ben White Boulevard had run out of Wiis, Rachel was in tears. I felt like a bag of ham.

They were out at Best Buy, too. The clerk told us that there was a guy lurking about the floor, offering to sell his Wii for $450 to distraught customers who couldn't find one. He suggested we track him down.

This attempt by the toy manufacturers to turn our children into emotional wrecks began in the '80s with the Cabbage Patch doll.

My idea of Cabbage Patch Doll aerobics would be to drag one behind a truck.

But American grandmothers didn't see it that way. Oh, no, the old birds loved this doll because their grandkids wanted one.

So the long gray line would form outside the store at 6 a.m. Then, when the doors sprung open at 7, these old women would beat each other over the head with their handbags to get their wrinkled fingers on a doll.

This tradition of rioting over polyurethane products continues today with video games. Last week, a man was shot while standing in line for a Sony PlayStation 3.

Sony ought to make an action game out of that: a bunch of cartoon shoppers in line waiting to buy toys while the bad guy on the screen guns them down for points.

Why can't you greedy buzzards at the game companies send out enough of your product to start with so we don't all go crazy? Or is that just too much to ask?

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Well said...whats up with that?