You know those ridiculous vibrating electric football games that worked just barely well enough to keep you playing them? I poked around and bit and was pleased to see they’re still available. If they’re still for sale, then someone’s buying them.
The football video games have matured to such a degree that every conceivable detail of the game is captured. So one of these would be a quaint experience indeed for a kid accustomed to playing football on the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3. After playing with all of the painstaking attention to gazillion-way runner control, rigorously detailed playbooks, four-deep audible sets, player fatigue, weather, and so forth, wouldn’t the vibrating football world be funny?
Remember the joy of effortlessly kicking field goals from your own goal line (and then watching the ball sail across the room for a total scale distance of 700 yards)? How about the agony of giving up a touchdown on a simple screen, solely because your whole damned secondary is just spinning in place? Remember gauging the angle your running back unexpectedly develops, and trying to predict whether he’ll cross the goal line or run out of bounds first?
I tell ya, these kids today are wrecked, and they don’t even know it.
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I had one of those things. It was great. We would spend hours holding “tryouts” to find which base would make which player go straight for the longest period of time. You know, back in the days when kids had an imagination.
On another note, Bo, I am surprised you have not blogged about the LSU-Bama game. I only saw the second half but it looked like a pretty good game all around. I hated to see that “no interception” call late in the game because it will bring out (and already has) all the “refs stole it from us” junk. Reading the blogs, there seems to be about a dozen bad calls in that game against LSU. Most are just bitching about the poor officiating across the SEC and the conspiracy theories about the SEC keeping two teams undefeated so we can win the MNC again. I just can’t buy the “refs stole it from us” argument. When you consider they run 50 to 70 plays a game, bitching about one does not make sense to me. OK, in this case it was a turnover basically allowed Bama to ice the game with a field goal. But, if LSU had not let Jones score on a long run the previous possession, they would not have been in that position.
BB_FAN: I did blog about it here, and I’m definitely with you on the refs. They’re human, and they will make mistakes, and instant replay doesn’t expunge controversy from every single situation. I don’t moan when I’m “victimized,” nor do I apologize when I benefit. Haven’t since I was 12. 🙂
I’m thinking about getting the boys a vibrating football for Christmas, so they can share our fun and frustration.
My dad had one back in the mid-70s. Jets vs. the Colts. With those tiny little felt footballs. Man, I wonder what Mom ever did with that set. Probably sold it for nothing in a garage sale. Dang….
Never played a complete set of these. Friends were always missing things like the kicker piece or the ball. I did pick up this gem on Ebay to play with the kids – like my Mom did for Brother BD and me.
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/14567