Metasports

My girl hates driving. She can’t stand it. She has a car that’s about one year old, with fewer than 10,000 miles on it, because what most people see as “going to the store for a quart of half and half,” she sees as, “strapping myself into an explosives-filled death cage to travel at impacted skull-fracturing speeds.” And when it comes to other drivers, she sees “going to the store,” as “I’mma t-bone me a whitey woman” in the foreboding tones of Mr. T in “Rocky III” in the accent of Osama bin Laden in “Nine XI”.

But she loves driving video games. In real life, she sees every stop as something that should be cute and cuddly as a petrified jackrabbit and every start off the line as something that should happen in maybe another five seconds so these other treacherous and murderous Trojan Corollas can show their filthy hands before she commits.

But in video games she drives like a meth head at three minutes to midnight with a trunkful of dead hookers, a bumper full of cop GPS trackers and a KFC gift card that expires tomorrow. She hits the gas pedal like a glass dick, puts the virtual Mario Andretti into the wall like it has a glory hole with her best guy friend waiting expectantly on the other side, and rams pixelated Robby Gordon like she’s his boyhood priest. She turns the Daytona 500 into Death Race 2000.

I, however, hate driving video games, because unlike my girl, I love driving. I currently own my fourth roadster since I was 22 years old – a 2001 Toyota MR2 Spyder – and after fifteen years of driving even admittedly low-end performance cars, I just can’t lower myself to drive in a video game. Driving isn’t just about the speed, it’s about the feel of the g-forces when you corner and brake. It’s about the smell of the rubber warming up when you take a diminishing radius curve at speed. It’s about the click of the gear shift as you throw it down into fourth to hammer past someone on the highway, and the sight of them falling away in your peripheral vision. None of which translates into a video game, which gives you a static view through the windshield only with almost no tactile feedback. If driving is sex, then driving video games are jerking off… and arcade-style video games are jerking off with a condom on.

Does that make sense to you? If it does, good; that means I’ll be using that justification to mask the fact that I don’t play driving video games because I suck at them.

Suck at them. In real life, I’m a pretty good driver. But once you put me behind the plastic wheel of a video game, I become a terminal alcoholic with simultaneous seizure and inner ear disorders. I step on the gas and the car spins out. I apply the brakes and sail off the track. I turn the wheel and cars magically appear for me to bounce off of… cars that squeal once indignantly and continue on their way while my car’s transmission falls to the ground, saving it from the firey wreck the rest of the car spontaneously bursts into.

So normally when my girl gets the VR driving jones, I sit quietly on the couch, drink beer and read comic books… but last night, as she explored the non-million dollar supercar portion of the XBox 360 version of Forza Motorsport 2 she chimed in: “Rob: Lookit this! Forza has your car! You can drive the 2001 MR2 Spyder in these courses!” And sure enough: there was my car, which I have been putting through the paces for eight years, available to hammer through the paces on the Talladega race track.

I have to admit: after years of trying and failing at every driving video game from Pole Position to Mario Cart, I found myself getting a little excited. Because I know this car. I’ve been driving it for seven years, so I knew when to shift for maximum acceleration. I know under what conditions the rear end is likely to start kicking out in a hard turn. I know that if you want to go parking, you need to leave the car in gear because it’s impossible to get a handjob over the parking brake handle when it’s set.

So for the first time, I sat on my kitchen chair in front of the cheapest-available XBox racing wheel from Logitech. I pressed Start…

And I hammered the fucking car into the first wall. And the into next wall. And into every fucking car that was within fifty yards of me.

“You drive like a drunk,” my girl laughed.

“Oh, bullshit,” I replied, “The problem is this horrible fucking steering wheel controller. Look at this: it only turns 90 degrees! Real steering wheels turn something like two and a half full spins. And look at these pedals! The Goddamned brake pedal is like stepping into snot! And we have to keep the whole mess clamped to a coffee table, which means I have to drive hunched over like I’m on my way to Lady MacBeth’s to convince her to do crimes. There has to be a better driving controller out there. Gimme that laptop.”

I spent a few minute on Google before announcing, “There: The actual XBox 360 driving controller. It’s got a turn radius of 270 degrees, sits on your lap, and had force feedback controls, all for a hundred bucks. I guarantee you I can drive with *this* bad boy. I’m headed over to Gamestop. I’ll be back in half an hour.”

I went down to the garage, put the top down, opened the garage door and started the car when I realized: I was going to Gamestop to purchase a controller to simulate driving a Toyota MR2 Spyder… in a Toyota MR2 Spyder.

I was on my way to spend a hundred dollars… to drive my own car.

I pulled out of the garage, and returned half an hour later. With Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2. “Here,” I said to my girl, tossing the game on her lap, “We should play this.”

“I thought you were going to get a steering wheel.”

“Changed my mind. I decided that video games are only good for doing things that are impossible for me to actually do in real life.”

“Okay, but… Marvel Ultimate Alliance?”

“What can I tell you? They didn’t have any games about satisfying a woman.”

[tags]XBox 360, driving video games, dark humor, satire[/tags]