The Terror of London, guest post by Black Bear
I’d thought originally that I might write a guest blog about something pleasant, like a trip to a museum or a luncheon out at a fancy place in the Big City. Little did I know, however, that I was bringing a weapon of mass destruction along on the trip… namely, my iPod.
I got an iPod Touch for myself as a holiday present last year, and it’s still new enough to be endlessly fascinating for me. Like everyone who owns one of these jiggers, I have downloaded enough silly time-waster games, both free, and not so free, so as to have hours of entertainment at my fingertips. (Or at least an hour, depending on screen brightness and battery life.) I’m a puzzle person, so I like puzzle-games; I’m particularly fond of Unblock, and Burning Monkey Puzzle Lab, and so on. I’m a bit of a cribbage freak too, the single app I probably use most is my cribbage game. I have also spent an embarrassing number of hours playing Rock Band in recent weeks. But when I handed Robin my iPod so she could play with it on the train, she immediately locked onto a game I had downloaded months ago and then completely forgotten about: Fingerzilla.
Fingerzilla is a pretty simple game concept. When the game begins, you’re presented with a screen showing a bird’s-eye view of a happy little city of office-buildings, cars, cheerful pedestrians on their way to work… and it’s your job to destroy every single one of them and raze the city to the ground. You do this by tapping the screen rapidly with your finger; every area you touch explodes in a fiery blaze and a sound of crashing rubble, a la Godzilla striding purposefully across Tokyo. It’s fairly spectacular. But even more spectacular from my perspective was the zeal with which Robin embraced this game. I’m fairly sure that other folk on the train were nervously edging away from us as Robin ravaged the tiny hamlet of Oakville. “Did you know I can EAT people? tap tap tap crash aiee! Hey, I just smashed a helicopter!!‘ tap tap tap tap* And so on, while I squinched over in my seat giggling wildly.
At the end of the game, you’re given a screen mocked to look like a newspaper, informing you the results of your rampage. “Town of Oakville Sustains Minor Damage!” screamed the banner headline. “ONLY MINOR DAMAGE???” screamed Robin. (Well, not screamed, necessarily. But it was said with emphasis.) “MINOR DAMAGE? I’m playing it again.”
And so it was that the poor town of Oakville was destroyed, not just once, but again and again and again this fateful afternoon. Few Oakvillites survived to tell their grandchildren of that dark day.* But those that did whispered tales of the horror from the skies, the fearsome beast which took purest joy in its wanton devastation…. the scourge known only as
Robinzilla.
* * *
* She left out the ‘munch’. When you eat someone, they scream and you go MUNCH.
* Actually quite a few did survive, because she kept doing “only minor damage.” Being a monster takes practice—Tokyo wasn’t destroyed in a day, after all.
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