Addiction, thy name is 'Guitar Hero.'

If you own a Playstation 2, do yourself a favor. Do NOT buy 'Guitar Hero.' Do not PLAY 'Guitar Hero.' If a co-worker starts talking about it, leave the room immediately. Trust me, you do NOT want what I have. And for once, that sentence doesn't deal with my sexual history.

I can't stop thinking about this game. Neither can a lot of people who play it. One try, and you're hooked. All you have to do is put on this controller (that comes with the game):


Looks like a Fisher Price reject, doesn't it? That's what I thought when I first saw it. I made fun of my friends who played it. Then, when no one was around, I tried it. Played 'Thunderkiss '65' on Easy. And that was all it took. If they ever do a redesign on the controller, they should just make it look like this:


Now I wake up every morning, and whatever song I'm currently stuck on is in my head, tormenting me, until I beat it, and then it's the next one. This is a vicious, never-ending cycle. For almost a week straight, it was Queen's 'Killer Queen.' I already hated the song to begin with, but being stuck on it, and having it play in my head repeatedly was pure torture. Now, it's Cream's 'Crossroads.'

My biggest problem is that I get stuck on songs I don't like, or don't know very well. I couldn't be lucky enough to get stuck on Helmet's 'Unsung' or Hendrix's 'Spanish Castle Magic,' although now that I'm on the Hard level, I'm sure I'll get stuck on Pantera's 'Cowboys from Hell' and Ozzy's 'Bark at the Moon', for weeks on end. But every time I think I've hit a wall, I go back and play other songs to get higher scores, and the practice helps me get past wherever I was stuck.

Some of my friends aren't very good at it, and some of them are good enough to require a real guitar, or a life, or maybe both. I don't think any of us will ever get to THIS point though. But that hardly matters. A bunch of us had Monday off, so I had everyone over to play some multiplayer, and when the last person left almost eight hours later, I continued to play for about two more. That's not a video game. That's an addiction. I've accepted this fact, but I don't want help, so the road to recovery is a long ways off for me.

Don't even walk past a video game store right now. Someone in there is talking about this game, at this very moment, and you don't want to get sucked in.