Don't Trust Dr. Mario, He Is Not A Real Doctor

It's my birthday!

This post has absolutely nothing to do with that!

I'mma keep it short because i want to go to bed!

Amanda recently bought Civilization Revolution for the Xbox 360, and she's been playing it obsessively for the last week or so. I can't pull her away from the damn thing. So, since we need to be cleaning the house for the party this weekend, this morning before she woke up i removed the memory card which contains her gamer profile from the system and hid it in my pocket. Fortunately, to my utter surprise, she did not fire up the Xbox the moment she set foot downstairs, but instead waited patiently for me to finish the pancakes and then got straight to work on the house. I was amazed. Just yesterday i saw her walk in the house with Alyssa after they'd been out shopping, plop down on the couch and start playing Civilization within one minute of entry.

So anyway, we got to talking about this while we were both working in the same room, and i said to her, "You know, we have the same problem that my parents did."

"Oh?" she inquired.

See, we have little, mostly playful spats now and then about how much higher her gamerscore is than mine. I just rolled over 8000; last night she hit 10000. For my parents, in the age before Xboxes and gamerscores and such things, there was Dr. Mario.

Mom was really, really good at Dr. Mario. Dad, not so much. She was constantly beating him. He was getting to the point where he didn't want to play with her anymore, because he didn't stand a chance of winning, ever. And, in the days before online play, this left Mom with nobody else to play with. So they struck a deal: Mom would play three levels higher than Dad. Eventually, this deal had to be modified to five levels higher.

Even that wasn't really enough; Dad was still just really good at getting his ass kicked. Sometimes at night, when i was supposedly asleep, i'd hear them arguing over the trivial details of their Dr. Mario games. But the real kicker was, one time Mom fell asleep while playing...and she still beat him.

This is a common occurrence for Amanda. Amanda will fall asleep during games all the time and still beat everybody else. Usually we're speaking of board/card games here, like Settlers of Catan or Phase 10, not video games. But the principle carries over.

But the whole memory card thing this morning is what really brought up the parallel between Mom's mid-90s video gaming habits and Amanda's current ones. One time, i'm going to go ahead and call this 1994 because i think it was about the time that Tetris 2 came out (i was going to go with the release date on Dr. Mario, which i looked up on Wikipedia, but 1990 seems waaay to early for this to have happened), Mom finally recognized her addiction to that damn pill-dropping game and asked me to stage an intervention. She asked me to hide the Dr. Mario game cartridge from her for a period of time, which i did.

Well, one night, probably just a couple days later, she went out of town for some reason and wasn't coming home until the wee hours. I didn't think much of this...until she woke me up in the middle of the frigging night.

"Where's Dr. Mario?" she asked.

I mumbled some unintelligible gibberish. "You told me not to give it to you."

"That's ok. You can give it to me now," she persisted.

"But it hasn't been long enough," i protested.

"It's fine. Just give me Dr. Mario, it's ok." This may have gone on for a little longer, but i don't imagine much; after all, i just wanted to go back to fucking sleep. The game was in a bucket under my bed. I fished it out for her and went back to sleep.

In conclusion, don't trust Dr. Mario. He'll get you hooked on his little pills, and pretty soon you're harassing your single-digit-aged children in the middle of the night to get your fix. What a fucking jerk.