Competition and trash-talking

I've been saying that $#!t for years. And if you ever heard it, it meant your ass.
- Jules, Pulp Fiction

"I got glove" is the Bomberman equivalent of Ezekiel 25:17. If you hear someone in one of the adjacent corners say it (in my case Gerald or Andrew), it means your ass. He simply waits for you to lay a bomb, and when you move to safety, he punches another bomb into your safe haven, and kaboom, you're dead. Then the hand-to-hand combat begins. One of the best parts of the game is actually seeing the stats after each round that show who killed who. It's pretty easy to lose track in all the chaos.

I used to play tons of Bomberman in high school, with Russ, Eddy, and Alan, so when I first started playing with my rookie housemates, I dominated them. Five rounds, five wins, game over. Unfortunately, the glory was short-lived. They quickly got better, and I had already maxed out my potential, so I began to win less and less. Now we play on a near-nightly basis, and the only thing that exceeds the intensity of the games is the intensity of the trash-talking. We have bestowed upon each other such subtle and creative nicknames as "slut", "whore", and popular variations of "cat" and "female dog", to say nothing of the vulgarities that naturally come about from playing with characters that are white (Hubert), black (me), red (Andrew), and blue (Gerald).


Competition seems to be at the core of everything we do in our house. In addition to nightly Bomberman, there's Friday night poker, SHHNHB, online hearts, darts, tennis, golf...we even joined a public fantasy football league the other day just to see who could draft the best. Wait till our actual league starts up. There's IRC poker, which the four of us play at work (if you use Trillian, you are welcome to join us), and we haven't even busted out the Game Cube since I moved in, which opens up a whole new level of four-player mayhem. Just about the only thing we do together that doesn't involve competition is watch movies, though I suppose you can sometimes include online hearts in that category as well, since we often collude in order to boost our rankings. It's pretty easy to shoot the moon when you control two of the four hands at a table, especially when they sit across from each other.

So the question is, what's next? This past Saturday, we finally cleaned out most of the junk that had accumulated downstairs during the previous two years, and the living room is now in fantastic shape (we should have taken a "before" picture). The entertainment system is all set up, which we used to full effect on Saturday - Jurassic Park and T2 during clean-up, and The Hunt for Red October afterwards. We are also back to the two-television setup that I previously enjoyed with DanFran, which allows us to watch movies while playing video games, or follow a sporting event on mute while watching a show. And the dartboard is still there as well. (picture courtesy of Hubert's Random Blog)


But now, thanks to our clean-up efforts, we also have an entire back room to use, if we can only figure out an effective way to use it. We could easily move one of the living room TV's there, but only if we really make good use of the rest of the room, because otherwise we would just be losing one of the coolest features of our living room. Moving the dartboard would be a start; we could turn it into a game room. Perhaps put a poker table back there, which could also be used as a second table for SHHNHB. We discussed the possibility of a foosball table. Unfortunately, the one that Randy bought for me got ruined in storage, but a decent one isn't too expensive. Andrew is leaning heavily toward a mini-hoop with electronic scoring like one of these (largely due to Jeremy's influence):


Lots of potential to do something fun in there, and there's no reason we couldn't accomodate all of the above since they are small items that could be moved around easily depending on what we were doing. If you have any bright ideas, they are certainly welcome! The only thing we cannot do is a pool or ping pong table, because there isn't quite enough space for either. Too bad. But whatever we end up doing, I'm sure it will fit in with the core values of the house: competition and trash-talking.