The Intelligence Estimate

I was home a few weeks ago and found myself alone in a mall with time to kill. I had seen all the stores, bought the thing I had come for and even some things I hadn't. I was so bored that I even spent 15 minutes in the massage chairs, not because I needed it but because it would pass the time. I eventually made my way to the arcade where I believe I fought zombies in every way imaginable. But I only wasted time with zombies because I was resisting the lure of SILENT SCOPE!

For the uninitiated, Silent Scope is your basic first person shooter game except you are a sniper. So as you look at the screen with your naked eye (by the way, put some glasses on or something. All the nudity is scaring the kids!) you see your basic cityscape, but if you look through the scope of the sniper rifle you see a close up of the terrain replete with little bitty terrorists who are taking hostages and wreaking havoc and generally making poor life choices.

So you get to play the part of vengeful guidance counselor. A rogue faculty member, you administer your tough-love lead salad to those wisenheimer who laughed when you told them that they should consider a career in the heating and cooling trade. But the principal didn't agree with your unorthodox methods, so he's suspended your teaching certificate. That, and having your frequent advances on the lunch lady thrown aside like so much cafeteria cole slaw, freed up your time to search out these ne'er do wells and deliver the ultimate demerit!

At least that's the story I concocted while I was at the mall. I had a lot of free time on my hands.

The thing that scares me about the game is that it is incredibly lifelike. The weight of the gun, the workings of the sight, it all seems very real.

As I was playing it I thought, "I've seen this before." And I had. It was a movie called The Last Starfighter that came out in when I was 9. It's about this lonely kid that grows up in a trailer park where his only friend is a video game called Starfighter. In the video game he slays the alien armada time and time again. What he doesn't realize is that the video game was placed on earth by aliens to train pilots. So one day an alien shows up and takes the kid off to space to play the game for real...blah, blah, blah learns lesson about life.

Recruitment! That's it! The Army has had a hard time meeting their recruitment numbers as of late. (Or, perhaps there's been a serious shortage of guidance counselors that I don't know about. ) Either way, I just slowly backed out of the arcade without making any eye contact.

"This is not my fight," I said.