Well I’ve decided to offer up a new feature here on TharpSter.Org.  I discussed the matter at length with the Board of Directors, and unanimous consent was provided to me as the heart and soul of the consortium to venture out a bit beyond right wing rants, gag news stories, and whimsical soliloquies about the dogs and their assorted shenanigans.  As such I am hereby presenting to you my dear reader, my first game review.

Sure, you may scoff at the very thought of yours truly assuming the position in front of the glowing box with his opposable thumbs properly affixed to any one of the controllers provided with today’s gaming systems, only to spend hours on end either winning the prize, killing the bad guy, or planting the seeds of epilepsy and vertigo borne of the effects delivered by the game being played.  You can quash your doubts right now though, as my gaming credentials are impressive to say the least.  At this very moment, there’s a thirty year old Atari 2600 console packed up in the garage.  Snuggled into the same box is a Vic20.  I currently have a World Series of Poker application on my phone, and I play fantasy football on the web every fall.  If that weren’t enough to blow your mind, I also have a Gamecube.

One can only imagine that such a stable of gaming credentials shouldn’t even qualify me to even consider buying a selected system from the good people at Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo.  No worries though, as I honestly don’t care too much about gaming.  Sure, it can be fun every once in awhile.  I just don’t have the desire to play all of those games like I did as a teenager. 

At this point, you’re probably wondering why I’ve burned approximately 300 words and a minute or so from your precious life to announce my apathy about gaming.  The reason is because within a 12 hour period this last Thursday, two attempts were made right here TharpSter.Org to spam the comments section of The Pit Bull Diaries with references to the X-Box.  Fortunately, the settings I have for comments on this blog are strict enough that the scripted notes didn’t make their way on to the site.

Instead, I’ve decided to post the comments in their original form.  Since the individuals (if they even exist) were short sighted enough to provide their names, an email address, and a website on the comment, I’ve decided to post my administrative view of the comments with complete and utter disregard for any privacy they may even possess.  You’ll notice their internet protocol appears too.

For those of you with eyes like mine, I’ll clue you into their comments with a brief synopsis.  “Hey it looks like you have a bunch of X-Box enthusiasts here.  I play a lot of games that Microsoft wants me to pimp on completely unrelated blogs.”   Allow me to point out again that these comments appeared on The Pit Bull Diaries, which is the flagship article to a series of posts about one of my dogs.  In addition, allow me to point out that I haven’t written about any video games, and I don’t remember seeing any of my readers make references to gaming in any of their comments either.

For what it’s worth, I’ve allowed a little spam to come through on the comments.  For the most part, I delete the ones that are completely out of context for the subject matter on this blog.  On a side note, allow me to pass on the word that if I ever get into writing about hentai lesbianism, I’ll approve the comment which landed here yesterday.

Now let’s go back to the game review.

Today’s review will be for “X-Men:  The Official Game”; which was released at least for the Gamecube around 4 years ago as a prelude for the third installment of the X-Men movie series.  In the game, Wolverine runs around beating people up with his mutant like powers and rugged good looks.  The soundtrack is laced with plenty of metallic knife like sounds every time he swings at or hits the bad guy.  There’s something about a fury meter which I guess enhances his tenacity.  To be honest, I was hoping for rows and rows of alien invaders to move horizontally across the top of the screen in a back and forth motion, but the programmers of the game failed to churn up the imagination to mix it up a bit for this one.  On a scale of 1 to 10, I give it an apathetic “Whatever”.

Oh, I nearly forgot.  The pit bull loved it.