VGE: Where The Wild Things Are...

Welcome to Video Game Equivalent, where I try to find you an equal to a movie, book, show, or comic in video game form.

To me, Where The Wild Things Are captures the feelings of youth and innocence. To capture such imagination and scope is a real feat. With this edition of VGE, I will give you video games that capture such a spectrum of emotion.


Creature Feature

Shadow of the Colossus
While sharing many similarities with the movie, Where The Wild Things Are, Shadow of the Colossus has you instead in a MUCH darker role. You are the wanderer, you have brought your love to a forbidden land where, in order to give life back to her, you must journey and kill the 16 colossi that roam throughout. The game feels biblical, and not in the "a man mustn't lie with another man" sort of way. The enemies are enormous and make you feel insignificant, along with the mostly empty land devoid of any human life giving you the overshadowing sense of loneliness and isolation. As you kill each colossus, as satisfying as it is taking one of them down, you feel a sort of disenchantment. A fleeting sense of regret and sadness hits your heart as a giant beasts eyes slowly go dark and tumble to the ground. Where the game starts as an epic fantasy, it eventually turns into a dark tragedy that makes the players do more than just react to the game - it makes them think.

I feel life a kid again, minus the uncontrollable bladder!!!

Super Mario Galaxy

I dare you not to smile while playing this game. Shigeru Miyamoto is perhaps the greatest video game creator of all time. Giving the world such classic game characters as Donkey Kong, Link and Zelda, and of course Mario. He's the Walt Disney of video games minus the rampant antisemitism. Super Mario Galaxy has Mario, once again, saving Princess Peach from the nefarious cluthces of Bowzer. Honestly, were you expecting a murder-mystery story? Anyway, the game has Mario jumping, stomping, and plumpering across the cosmos on a variety of different planets and moons. Playing the game makes one feel like they did when they first played Super Mario Bros. for the NES. It's fun, fluid, and you can spend hours trying to catch that last damn star and not even notice the passage of time. In a period of video games incorporating barrels of violence and profanity, it's nice to see a game that reaches back to the more innocent roots of video games.

Those are my two cents, spend 'em wisely!


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