alex chiang: web 6.0

So in my South American travels a couple years ago, I was astounded whenever I passed by one of the numerous video game arcades. Without fail, there would be a huge crowd gathered around a giant epilepsy-inducing blinky monstrosity pumping out megadecibels of cheesy dance-pop tracks while young Peruvian boys feverishly desperately contorted their bodies to the beat, stomping their feet in accordance with the arrows on the video monitors, whilst the crowd shouted words of encouragement. Or maybe they were trash talking (my understanding of Spanish insults was weak at best).

Thus, I was exposed to Dance Dance Revolution.

For those not familiar with this game, you stand in the center of a giant pad. There are 4 arrows, one per side. So one arrow points forward, one points left, another to the right, and the last one points backwards. As the music plays, arrows pointing in one of the four directions scroll up a screen, and it is your job to step on the corresponding arrow on the pad at the appropriate time.

When I first saw these crowds, I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen. It also saddened me to realize that America was exporting the underbelly of its musical culture via a video game. Also, since I tend to think I’m the best at everything I do, I thought it looked fantastically easy.

Fast forward to tonight. Someone had DDR for Playstation2. My new conclusions about this game are: 1) it’s a lot fucking harder than it looks and 2) it has serious drinking game potential.

Also, I want to video tape people playing it and edit out the sound and the view of the TV so that it just looks like two severely retarded adults jumping and twitching about in close proximity to each other, intensely focused straight ahead and never making eye contact. I would then collect large sums of money to never release the tapes to the public at large.

In other news, I drank something called “Sparks”. Actually, I drank two of these somethings, and that’s why I’m up at 4:45 AM writing an inane post about Dance Dance Revolution. Basically, a company noticed that Red Bull and vodka is a popular drink, so they decided to take the middleman (ie, bartender) out of the equation and sell a malt beverage drink chock full of Alc/Energy.

In a nutshell, this drink is basically like someone took a shitload of orange Gatorade, added a half-packet of Tang, a bunch of new-agey energy crap like “taurine, guarana siberian ginseng blend, and citric acid blend” along with some good old fashioned caffeine, AND made it 6% alcohol by content. It’s basically liquid candy that makes you drunk AND peppy, and I think I’ll have one for breakfast every morning from now on, it’s that good.

Read other comments about Spark (which are incidentally much funnier than anything I could write).

Also, my favorite thing in the whole world is that the Sparks website is “powered by Alc/Energy”. Alcohol? MAX! Caffeine? MAX! Taurine? MAX!