I grew up listening to radio stations that said things like: “The HOME *sound of explosions* of classic rock and roll” or “From AC/DC to Zeppelin *sound of freaking laserbeams* all rock, all the time.” So, when Neversoft decided to print more money by making another Guitar Hero game, thus solidifying their strategy of riding the franchise until the wheels fly off and then skidding along on shredded axles that much farther, they may have had a picture of me at sixteen with my sullen expression peeking through moppy brown hair while sporting a Permanent Vacation t-shirt hanging all the wrong ways right on their desks when they pegged Aerosmith as a partner.

It comes as no surprise that the most overexposed gaming franchise of the past few years has teamed up with a group like Aerosmith, a quintet that is more brand than band. I imagine that someone from Activision called Aerosmith’s manager, said “hey, do your guys like money?” and moments later the manager pulled the pre-signed forms from the Sell-Out file to fax right over, thus preserving a legacy of mediocrity.

Honestly, I can think of no better band to be associated with the absolute pabulum that has become Guitar Hero than Aerosmith, a band once edgy and great, awash in all that was beautiful about rock and roll, and which has become a self-absorbed shadow of itself. Except maybe those whores in Metallica.

I'm not quite sure what drove me to buy Ninja Gaiden II on launch day. I'm not usually the type of person that anxiously waits for the emergence of a hyped title, but there I was, in my local Big Box retailer, getting the game alongside a promotional Ryu Hayabusa poster. The clerk gushed over the MSRP ($100) while I listened to my girlfriend sigh as she pictured me hanging my shame proudly. Like a Greek chorus, the voices of Internet gamers warned that I would be in for a world of hurt and frustration. I put their warnings aside, the bunch of whiny Cassandras that they are, as I popped the game in and salivated over the wanton destruction and dismemberment that my ninja steel would sow.

A week later, as my ego recovered from the atrociously hard difficulty ramp that vigorously pummeled my psyche, I traded it in for Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit. All I could hear was the disembodied clatter of a thousand Model-M keyboards typing “I told you so.”

In the last few years, an increasing amount of my time has been dominated by three completely independent activities:

1: Entirely sedentary work (in which I am lucky to include gaming)
2: Time with my family (often outdoors)
3: Extremely aggressive exercise

This trifecta has, with the emergence of the Platinum Age of Gaming (which started with the launch of the Wii and continues to this day), become skewed, as more and more time has gone into the first two buckets. My kids have grown – they stay up later, they want to do more, including play games. And my writing schedule has gotten more intense, and is all the more extended by writing about games.

This subtle shift has meant I spend less and less time exercising. I’m not really worried – I’m still at the gym three times a week, still out running or riding every few days. But it was with this long winded mindset that I looked forward to Wii Fit. Here, I thought, was a place where I could kill two birds with one stone.

Not so much.

“Of all the sounds despatched abroad,
There's not a charge to me
Like that old measure in the boughs,
That phraseless melody

The wind does, working like a hand
Whose fingers brush the sky,
Then quiver down, with tufts of tune
Permitted gods and me.”
- Emily Dickinson, THE WIND

Wind Waker (Gamecube): “Wow, this game really lets you wake the wind! But you know what would be even better? A magic dog.”

Okami (PS2): “Now that’s more like it! But I wish it would come out for the Wii, so I could buy it twice.”

Okami (Wii): “And for my third wish, let’s make it a much smaller, downloadable game, ditch the dog, add more precise wind control, and sexy alien ladies making out with each other.”

LostWinds (WiiWare): “So close! So very, very close.”

“Hold the line!”

He’s my captain. So I stand there, sweating under 40 pounds of 110-degree metal. The left side of my shield, which I would normally have tight to my side, is canted over the right side of Cedric, another newbie fighter. To my right is Jason, a vet. His shield is over mine. I can feel the press of them. A shield wall is no place for the homophobic.

Running towards us, the crazy, armor-hating bastards called the Tuchucks are running at us in a dead sprint. Screaming. Painted blue. Just behind them is an advancing line of orderly shields. Hundreds of them.

The noise when they ‘chucks hit our shield wall is a soundboard mix of screams and angry metal and breaking wood, so loud my ears crackle. My sword – just a hard, heavy stick of rattan - comes out from behind my shield. In a well practiced snap, I hit him on the head as hard as I possibly can. The shock travels all the way into my shoulder, which cries in pain as it pops out for the third time this week. The ‘chuck falls to the ground. “Good!” he yells.

Yes. Yes it is. It’s very good.

"There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes." -- Doctor Who

It's a typical evening, not long before bedtime. I'm at my desk trying to get some work done and the whole gang is in the living room giving the new Mario Kart Wii a run.

I manage to block out the sprightly music and stay focused on my malfunctioning stored procedure until my daughter's dulcet tones cut through the music coming through my headphones with an indignant, "You little pink B*TCH!" Princess Peach threw a painfully timed blue shell, and after the inevitable spin out she'd come in fourth. I pop around the corner with an admonishment about the language and she retorts that I should try this for myself.

Next thing I know I'm halfway through the Luigi Cup.

You can't escape the contrast with the other things going on in the gaming world. I don’t know why Nintendo released this game in the shadow of one of gaming’s biggest megillahs this year. Maybe they didn’t think there was much overlap between the two audiences. Going from a world where you are seriously discussing whether or not the 10 Second Rule applies to picking up and eating the hot dog a freshly murdered NPC just bought from a vendor to this cute and sparkly world is jarring at best. But I didn't come here as a refuge; I came here to RACE!

Take a few laps with me.

For most of the last few years my gaming has been in challenge-mode. I've sat at my desk, with its countless plastic chits and an endlessly revolving series of mice (ever searching for the perfect one), playing Sins of a Solar Empire, Chess, Team Fortress 2, Bioshock, WoW and all the rest of the greatness that’s been heaped upon gamers in this nascent second-golden-age of gaming. But they've been focused, intellectual experiences. Even in games like Bioshock, where the story and emotional context have been center stage, I've felt very much present. The burning-away of the flesh hasn't been happening.

I blame my chair.

Long ago, indie games were simple little distractions, easy to pick up and put down. I have nothing but admiration for the thousands of programmers with versions of Brickout where the bricks say "moo," but those days are over. That doesn't mean that all indie games have succumbed to feature bloat. On the contrary, some of the best ones stick to one thing, make it look pretty, and add a few hooks to keep people playing. Audiosurf takes your music, turns it into a racetrack, and lets you drive on it. Everything else is window dressing. The core experience is identical to blasting your favorite song while speeding and rapidly changing lanes in time with the music. Audiosurf is just as much fun, but without the cops.

Meet Travis Touchdown. Despite being marked for death by every assassin in town, he's still the coolest cat in the violin factory. He has a cool name, a cool car, and his weapon of choice is a beam katana. (A "beam katana" is the the closest you can get to a light saber without George Lucas tossing you into a pit with teeth.) He also doesn't force the player to swing the Wii remote around to pull off his coolest moves, which is a true blessing. Instead, he allows us to calmly mash A most of the time, and "recharging the beam" involves a simple, dignified gesture familiar to all of us.

But Travis is also the lamest assassin you'll ever meet. He lives in a tiny apartment filled with collectible figurines of underdressed teen witches. The closest he gets to social interaction is renting videos in the "How to Make Love" series and returning them after watching the first two minutes. His friends barely tolerate him and his enemies always get the drop on him. His only motivation is to kill the top 10 assassins in the world, which is a noble endeavor, but what really keeps him going is that his employer Sylvia might sleep with him, once, when he gets to #1. Before every match, Sylvia gives him a pep talk about how stupid and pathetic he is, telling him he's sure to die. What a flirt! Ah, love in the time of beam katanas.

Everyone thought I was crazy for wanting to play Lost: Via Domus. My friends balked at the notion, my co-workers snickered. Even the clerk at Blockbuster, certainly a man of exquisite gaming taste with his unkempt goatee and vaguely hung over stare, wondered out loud if the game would be worth the outrageous rental price I was about to pay. I just smiled and placed a twenty on the counter, confident that I knew what I was buying into.

Yes, I thought, this game is going to suck. But I'm going to play it anyway.

Lost: Via Domus does indeed suck. With its creepy wax mannequin models, bland voiceover work, excruciating gameplay design and complete disregard for anything that made the source material appealing, the game practically has a black hole in its dark center, eager to pull you into its event horizon of frustration, ineptitude and cheap gimmicks. I'm hard pressed to find a license tie-in that is as terrible as this. And yet, I'm still playing. And I'm going to finish it.