So my family got a Wii for Christmas. My wife (the lovely and talented Aries28) and I bought it for the kids. Naturally, the kids have played with it for maybe five hours, total, in the past eight weeks.
It’s not that they don’t WANT to play; they’d play all day if we let them. It’s that my wife and I hog the thing shamelessly.
She is hooked on the Wii Fit, which as you know is a tool of the devil. It’s a little fitness program that tells you your body mass index and weight and such, and lets you do various exercises. According to the Wii Fit program, I should be about 13 feet tall to have a decent BMI. Aries28 likes to do yoga with the Wii Fit, although she gets angry at the on-screen trainer sometimes. “It’s been 30 seconds already for the Tree Pose, you Nazi bitch!”
But the Wii’s apparent inability to tell time is not what frustrates me. No, my disgust centers around the game Monopoly.
Monopoly on the Wii is strikingly like real-life Monopoly – you shake the dice, move around the board, pay rent, etc. It even lets you set your own rules for the game, like if you land directly on “Go” you double your salary, or if you land on Free Parking you get $500. I’ve looked for the option where you can steal money directly from the bank when you need it (or even when you don’t), which is how I remember playing Monopoly when I was a kid. Apparently that’s only available in the expansion pack, though.
One nice thing is that you can play Monopoly by yourself – the Wii will create up to three other players to play against. And this is the crux of my frustration, because the Wii, technological marvel that it is, cheats like a baboon-licking mother.
I mean, sure, the roll of the dice brings an element of chance to the game. I understand that. There’s no guarantee that the little computer iron, or the little computer shoe, or the little computer thimble, will land on my properties. It’s when they consistently avoid my properties for forty-seven consecutive trips around the board that I call foul.
Take, for example, the orange properties. They’re at the end of the row, close to Free Parking. I love to get these properties if at all possible, because players wind up in jail a fair amount during Monopoly, and once you leave jail you’re staring right down the barrel of my orange real-estate Derringer of Doom.
Except EVERY SINGLE ONE of the computer players can happily avoid my orange properties with no effort whatsoever. They’ll roll a seven, which puts them on Community Chest (Bank error in your favor! Collect $200!) or a ten, which puts them on Free Parking and gives them $500. I want them to roll a six, eight or nine, which would create financial ruin for them and possibly cause them to commit suWiicide.
Conversely, if one of my computer opponents has a monopoly, I’m guaranteed to hit it on each and every trip around the board. If, by some miracle, I manage to miss their properties, I’ll land on Chance and get sent there anyway. I swear, there must be about 30 different cards in the Chance deck that say “Advance to Illinois Avenue” or “Advance to St. Charles Place” or “Advance to Boardwalk”. Somehow, these cards get lost in the electronic ether when I own those properties, because they never seem to show up then.
And don’t even get me started on the boneheaded trades the computer players will make with each other. Trading Baltic Avenue for Boardwalk? Sure! Trading Oriental Avenue for North Carolina Avenue? That makes perfect financial sense … if you have the intellect of an iron, or a thimble.
It’s gotten to where I’ll talk to the little pieces as they move around the board. “Oh, you think you’re so smart, don’t you, Car? Wipe that smirk off your face, Shoe! I’m gonna get you this time … and the little Dog, too!” And they just smile knowingly amongst themselves, because they know that the next time I come around the board, I’ll roll doubles and land on Pacific Avenue and have to sell all my houses and mortgage all my properties to pay the stupid rent. And once I do that, against all the odds on my very next roll I’ll get a three, and land on North Carolina Avenue and go bankrupt, having been beaten by a shoe, and a car, and a dog.