Superzapper Recharge

If there is such a thing as Teenage Hell, it is likely to be much like a place called "Five Below" that the Mole has visited a time or two here in Wilmington. I imagine Five Below to be some sort of chain. It is full of tshirts, candy, stickers, trendy cheap crap that teenagers like -- and of course, all of it is five dollars or below. Loud teenybopper music plays. I can imagine thirteen year old girls treat it as kind of mecca, rising early to bow toward their local franchise before applying press-on nails and using lip gloss. Do teenage girls still use lip gloss? Anyway, you get the picture.

The Mole is, of course, drawn to the strange and cheap (and free), and therefore has entered the mostly friendly confines of Five Below: it is further known that the Mole is the male parent of a teenage boy, who does not, to my knowledge, wear lip gloss or press on nails. However, he has the typical teen need for cool geegaws and knickknacks of varying stripes, and so I went in once or twice to find accoutrements he might enjoy.

Little did I know that I would come away with something I personally wanted, albeit at the high end level of five bucks. But there, piled high on the computer games table, was the Atari Anniversary edition, which I procured forthwith and brought home to load on my computer.

Asteroids. Battlezone -- fricking Battlezone! Centipede. MISSILE COMMAND. You can play them all you want, and for free, on your home computer, where nobody can see you. Even Pong, for God's sake. It was 1982 all over again. I mean, in the old days, five bucks would give you a mere 20 games at the arcade (Electric Palace in my old Milwaukie stomping grounds) - and being poor and sporting a comic book habit, I never played much. But I enjoyed the games...it was the economics I couldn't bear. For a quarter I could get the new Spiderman and keep it forever -- rather than a lousy five minutes of gaming that I would lose miserably anyway. With this disc I can play endlessly.

The look is the same, the sounds are the same, it is as if the games descended from video heaven (through teenage hell) to give those of us who couldnt bring ourselves to spend the money to get there honestly, the chance to be high score in our own Electric Palace....just once. Ahh, second childhood.