2001-09-06 - 11:56 p.m.

Whomp That Sucker!

I guess I have an addictive personality. Since this round of Planetarion is in its death throes, I'm looking for a way to amuse myself. A couple weeks ago Lily turned me on to this online gaming site, POGO.com. I'm still not clear exactly what it's about. Is it an online casino? Well, it SEEMS to be free... all it costs to play is YOUR IMMORTAL SOUL!!!

Only kidding.

The game that Lily and I are addicted to is called "Word Whomp," and I am trying to think of a way to describe it so I don't sound like an utter idiot.

I hope that most of you are familiar with the "Whack-A-Mole" games that used to be in video arcades all over the place. Basically, you score points by pounding the plastic moles on the head with a rubber hammer as they pop out of random holes. It's a hand-eye co-ordination sort of thing.

Word Whomp is very much like that game, except it is a word game. You have six letters, and you have two minutes fifteen seconds to make as many words as possible. The letters are held by animated gophers, and as you hit them, the letters appear in order and the gophers have little stars orbiting their heads.

So the game serves a dual function: you get to test your skill at forming words out of random letters, and you get to take your rage out on one of God's creatures. Hey, it's a hit!

For elderly Mr. Hamster the main trouble with the game is the time limit. I'm sure that I could completely solve most of the puzzles if I only had another minute, but life does not work that way.

Ah, I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the cuffs of my trousers rolled.

You are given six random letters, and generally there is only one six-letter word you can make with them, but there area many three, four and five letter words you can make. I have to wonder who the hell is choosing these words. Yesterday one of the words I got was "SNOTTY." "BLOKES" was another one. I got "DOGGIE" this morning. Are the 15-year-old English Schoolboys who usually play Planetarion supplementing their incomes by thinking up words for Pogo on the side?

Something curious about the game is that people seem to be playing it just to play it. Your "prize" for solving the puzzles and getting words are Pogo "tokens." Right now I have about 35,000 of them, but there are people that have 100,000 and I've even seen people with over a million. You have to Whomp a LOT of gophers to get a million tokens. The thing is: what are the tokens FOR?

From what I understand, for every token you get a spin at a prize. Nobody seems to keen on turning in their tokens because people seldom win any prizes. Word Whomp has a "jackpot" that slowly grows, but it never seems to get over $400, and days usually go by between wins. Meanwhile, anywhere between 5,000 and 16,000 people are wasting their time bashing gophers.

Is this some sort of ploy to get us to gamble online? There are a lot of ads for online casinos. Well, they are not going to get me to waste my money there! Instead, I'll be wasting my TIME here! Guess I outsmarted them! I think...

That's the thing about games like this, since there is no clear stopping point, you keep playing and playing and playing and playing, even after you SHOULD be in bed sleeping.

I asked Lily how she found out about this damnable game, and she said that her friend Tanya showed it to her.

Well, so now I know who to blame. Maybe I'll short-sheet Tanya's bed or something to get even.

Just as soon as I finish this next game.

Countdown: 5 Days Behind