Pop Culture Curmudgeon

Chuck = Best. Show. Ever.

The ultimate winner of the writers strike is Chuck, hands down. (Well, I’m pretty sure the studios won quite a bit monetarily, with that 17-day window and all, but creatively speaking, Chuck has come back bigger and better than ever.)

Last night’s episode contained enough shout-outs to video game geeks over 30 to leave a poor girl breathless. And hubby was excited to hear the song from the Transformers movie. (”The Touch” by Stan Bush, for those of you who, like me, thought yourself above animated movies when the Transformers movie came out.)

When I was in college, I worked with two big Rush fans. They would shroom and listen to Rush in the projection booth of the local theater. They would take a week off work to see all Rush shows within driving distance. And then they would talk about the shows for the next three months. They were tools who left their cushy theater jobs to write video games. Thus, the use of “Tom Sawyer” to beat what is apparently a very hard video game had special meaning for me.

I did not hang out in arcades, so I never played Miss-Ile Command. My full-size arcade game experience is limited to brief flirtations with Spy Hunter and Arkanoid and a year-long love affair with Bubble Bobble. These dalliances all happened at the theater, while working with the Rush dudes. I have a copy of Bubble Bobble for the Playstation. I also had it on my cell phone a few phones ago. Bub and Bob are timeless, but the game just isn’t as fun if you can’t power up with fast movement, fast bubbles, and strong bubbles all the time. And, without the joy of bonuses for having the appropriate score at the end of each level, it just isn’t the same. If you know how to power up the PS1 version of the game on the PS2, please tell me. I will owe you big time!