w00t PaWN: (s)he's a pinball wizard

I have more first hand experience playing video games with ma husband this weekend - you see, I don't *always* write these reviews from the objective and, some might say, "judgey" sidelines, on rare occasions, I get in there myself and tear it up.

We started by playing the demo for Zen Pinball on PS3, which has a few Starwars demos, they were fun so we decided to buy the whole thing.  It's $10 price tag required a few minutes of discussion, until I had the brilliant idea of considering it in terms of quarters, which is 40 quarters, which is not that many in terms of pinball games (.50 cents a game, single player).  So, it was sort of a bargain.

Video pinball games try to imitate the actual play of pinballs - you release the ball and operate the clickers and you can even "bump" the machine, and otherwise the balls follow the Newtonian physics of a regular pinball machine.  The Starwars games adds a few extra elements like a Boba-fett that floats around or a Darth Vader that shows up and tries to mess with you, but generally you just shoot the ball around.  I liked those games quite a bit.

By Sunday we bought another pinball game on the PS3 called Pinball Arcade, which replicates some "classic" (according to M) pinball games (with no fancy stuff like in the Starwars games).  I didn't like those as much as Zen Pinball because they were harder to play and I lost my balls pretty quickly.  I find it very boring to watch someone else play a pinball game, but M seemed to like watching me.  Although, basically whenever I play any video game, he stares at me like someone might admire a monkey playing the piano.

He was quite excited to play some game called Bride of Pinbot, in which there's like a robot lady that "comes alive" as you hit various levels within the board.  I threatened to "whip out some feminist analysis" and he claimed, "It's just a game!" which I countered with "It perpetuates the culture of misogyny!" and that's maybe one of the reasons we don't play too many video games together.   But, actually, I mean, aside from the inherent gender inequalities, we had a really good time.