If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich (Mission Impossible, Monopoly)

I put this off for far too long. Turns out there was a reason for that. Due to wanting to hit a naming theme of three next time, we only have two games today. Neither of them were that good. Mission Impossible sure does live up to its name. We were six years away from the Tom Cruise vehicle with the guy getting crushed by the elevator and that real tense hacking sequence and blowing up a helicopter with exploding gum and shit. Instead we get this. Blah blah accept your mission, message self-destructs. I begin the game, walk forward, and shoot the first person I see... prompting a helicopter to arrest me for killing an unarmed civilian. Lesson learned. I switch to a black guy who punches things and don't punch that person as I move forward. A car comes and sends me flying. The third person is a guy with boomerangs. He accidentally kills a civilian. Game over. Back to start. Okay, so then I explore, get a tip to go into an alley, and... keep exploring. Nonlinear levels. Ah, good. Aimless wandering and unsureness of what to do. Molotov cocktails that drain your health. Men with riot shields in sewers who push you into the water and kill you. Great. This is just great. It lives up to its name alright. I wasn't fond of it.

Nor was I all that fond of Monopoly on NES. I feel obligated to waffle a bit about it, considering that I've made Lady Capitalism into A Thing here and this is a board game all about capitalism and the free market and bankrupting everyone else to win at capitalism. It's what I thought M.U.L.E. was. Why does this need to exist? Game show adaptations I understand, but this? You can play this game at home, on a table, and the price of entry is far less than the electronic video game version. Okay, you lose out on being able to play Monopoly by yourself... but was that a high demand? I played Monopoly tonight with a CPU. It wasn't as fun as playing with a real person. I do have memory of the board game, of course. Snow days with my young niece. Frigid winter days stuck in the house with no school, and she demanded to play Monopoly. Ours was the Canadian edition with Canadian street names and railroads, but it was the same game. Newfoundland was represented by the cheap purple squares. Come to think of it, I just remembered another Monopoly game we had. The CD-ROM version. That one had fancy 3D graphics for moving across the board, and you could play over the Internet. There's a reason to buy the game version; bankrupting some silly son of a bitch from Iowa, in the comfort of your own home. Not this one. Even if it was legitimized by Howard and Nester. We lost. They won. Arthur the machine mind out-capitalized me after 15 minutes and made all the money and net worth. Lady Capitalism sings his praises... for now. She's underestimated me, and all the other hard game beaters out there who suffer through the things her acolytes create via microchip alchemy, in order to make her monopoly of video gaming.

We're monsters.