Have you ever been involved in a three-month-long feud with a pro-wrestling champion? And no matter how many chair shots you administer, or tables you put him through, you still can’t seem to get the pin? What about when after losing match after match, you are finally forced into a Loser Leaves Town match for the belt?

Well, I lost that match, so about six weeks ago I got in my car and headed out on a road trip. Apparently, over a year ago, Paul tricked me into signing some contract while I was drunk, so I’m forced to keep writing reviews. Here’s one of them. 

-- By Zack Huffman

What happens when you're rarely around a computer? Onlines columns that you write suffer for it. I was about to write a piece about an overnight bus trip I took with a bunch of liberal weekend warriors for a huge anti-war protest in D.C., which included an account of our sad descent into tourism taking us to a huge mall complete with a visit to the local arcade and a ridiculous videogame that had be designed for drunks and retards in bibs to catch their drool. Sadly, this is going to have to wait.

In a lame attempt to make up for it, I'll quickly tell you about Indiana and the bad-ass X-men videogame.

In Bloomington, Indiana, we spent a week illegally camping in the woods that run along a large park in the outskirts of the downtown area. The town was small enough that we could ride our bikes across town without it taking too long. This was good, since I had a flat tire on my car and hadn't bothered to get it fixed immediately. We spent the entire week drinking, eating dumpstered food that we cooked over our fire and riding our bikes to the local radical book store, and to the community music center for a ton of cheap if not free shows.

Meanwhile, X-Men, which was released something like 15 years ago, features the less popular line-up of characters that came between Chris Claremont and John Byrne's incredible run to the era of Jim Lee and Joe Maduerera (whose name I couldn't be bothered to spellcheck.)

There are six playable characters including Cyclops, Colossus, Dazzler, Storm, NightCrawler and Wolverine in his less-common brown and orange costume. The game is a standard beat-em up game, with tons of characters making appearences. Bosses include, Pyro, The Blob, Juggernaut, The White Queen and, of course, Magneto.

It really is a great game that isn't too difficult to beat provided you have an hour or two to kill and a ton of quarters. It's even easier with all six characters in play at the same time.

So that's about it for my really shitty, last-minute, sad-excuse for an article. I'll probably go into Indiana with more depth sometime in the future, but for now bare with me for a month, and I should have a better piece next time. I might even have less typos!

-- Zack Huffman {11-01-2006}