An open letter to Wii…
Dear Wii,
What’s happened to you? You’re hurting me.
I just went into my local Game Stop to purchase Boom Blox, a fun-filled puzzle game directed by my hero, Steven Spielberg, but while standing in line I saw a game called “The House of the Dead: OVERKILL.” I thought, “Surely, this must be a game that helps young people cope with the tender loss of a grandparent…but ‘Overkill’? What could this mean?”
I was shocked when I turned the box over to see that my worst nightmares had come true! The elderly patients of the nursing home are depicted rising from their wheelchairs and eating the brains of young people (something we all assume happens, so we don’t need this tasteless gratuity in a video game! Really, Wii! We play games to escape the caustic truth that one day we will have our brains eaten by a seemingly fragile old woman with paper skin. But children don’t need to hear about it so early! How can a parent protect a child from this information when you are broadcasting it in a medium we thought was all Duck Hunt and Elebits? What’s next? We leave it up to the public school system to train our kids to wield a machete? Have you already turned on your public the same way Hollywood has, Wii?)
Whenever I visit my Grandma in the nursing home I like to pretend that she and her other inmates are box turtles: slowly clawing their way down hallways, eating liquid food with one tooth, only to be put back in their separate boxes by a person that moves them from behind without warning! And instead of the natural exterior of a turtle, they have the thick, hardened shell of regret.
That’s the Wii way to look at these things! Fun and playful! Cartoony and fake! Not the way you show it in this obscene game: depicting the near-dead doing the aforementioned natural act of eating the young to stay alive long enough to get the Ski-Jump record on Wii Fit!
Now I see there are “Sexual Themes” in this game too! Where could that even fit in this piece of trash?!
Wii. I am very disappointed by this clear case of Wii-ffrontery!
Good day!
Dan
