February 23, 2013

I Dreamed of a PlayStation 4


Tweet: Sony has unveiled the PlayStation 4, and yet the grass continues to grow! It has to be stopped!

I dreamed last night that I brought home a PlayStation 4, plugged it in, and sat down for a weekend of wonder.

But the only game it would play was called "Cut the Killer Grass."

In this game, you begin by choosing your lawn mower. The good ones of course are locked—shown in their splendid glory but dimmed to indicate they are unavailable. You have to unlock them by scoring points.


In Level 1, you are facing only a small lawn to mow. In the background you can see neighbors out cutting their grass, the wives gardening, the children playing. Ah, to be a child again ...

A meter at the top of the screen shows the average height of the grass, measured in millimeters, and every few seconds, the measurement rises.

The grass is growing before your eyes!

So you buckle down and begin mowing: one long line down the center of the lawn, turn, then come back, now showing a visible lane of freshly trimmed turf . . . and the meter has moved down only a single millimeter.

But confident with your new-found lawn-mowing skill, you walk to the refrigerator to get a beer, and when you return . . . the grass has grown two more millimeters.

Setting the beer aside unopened, you grab the PlayStation controller and light into the lawn again, down, back, down, back, down, back until more than half the yard now is neatly trimmed grass. But the rest is growing!

You continue to mow the remaining half, but by the time you finish, the area you started in already looks ragged. And the meter shows you still are not in the zone needed to beat the level.

So you return and start again, this time moving faster and faster, until, finally, the meter falls to the level that indicates "Lawn Mowed."

You have beat Level 1. Your beer is warm. And you now see what Level 2 offers: A much-larger lawn, this one with a hill and scattered rocks that will destroy the lawn mower blades.

Oh, God! When will this nightmare end?!


Read more in Hellacious Homeowner: The Saga of Owen Cash.

No comments:

Post a Comment