Sundays where you’ve got nothing to do are the sort of days where you just have to sort of go out and see what happens. I had some errands to run, so I thought I’d do just that.

I have had cravings for a railroad game for some time now, primarily since I found Chris Sawyer’s Locomotion to be lacking. I’m the sort who thinks about owning a game for months before I hit some sort of critical fulcrum that tips me into going shopping. I set out this morning to run some errands and decided it was finally time to buy a copy of “Sid Meier’s Railroads!”. I stopped at the mall first where I poked into the EB Games storefront. I slunk to the back of the store past all of the sales they care about to the section labeled “Games for Windows,” which I guess is what the kids are calling computer games now. The games were on a rack and a half of space squeezed between eight racks of used PS2 games and 6 racks of used XBox games.

Sure enough there was a copy there, ratty and dusty with a torn cover and a “new” label. The section was so depressing that it made me a little angry that EB was intentionally pushing PC gaming out of their store. The final straw came when I noticed that near the PC games there was a used copy of God of War 2 for sale at the bargain price of $50.00. If you haven’t looked recently, a new copy of GoW2 retails for $49.95. First off, who the hell sells a copy of God of War 2 less than two months after its release? Communist sympathizers, that’s who. Second, EB buys their used games for something like five or ten bucks, which puts forty dollars of pure profit into their hands for almost zero effort. They should close their stores out and just give all their employees knives. That way they can just rob the game developers straight out and skip paying rent.

I thought to myself, “Fuck these guys, I’m OUWT!” At least, I thought I thought that. The pimply wage slave stocking the shelves gave me a dirty look, so I may have said it out loud. I strode out of the store with a hearty “And the horse you rode in on!” and bid the place fucking adieu.

There was a CompUSA near my next errand, so I thought I’d patronize a store who was less interested in pillaging developer profits. It turns out the store was closing and they were literally selling the furniture, so they didn’t have any games left. Well, they did have 10 copies of “Left Behind,” which was a master stroke of irony and made me LOL.

Denied once again I felt I needed refreshment, so I took a meal at the local In-And-Out Burger, which I learned today was California’s first drive through. I sat next to a fragile old man wearing a Pearl Harbor Survivors Association jacket. I thought about all the crazy things he must have survived: the Pearl harbor attack, the campaign in the pacific, and the great carrier wars. Of course, while I was thinking about all the things he survived, he started to choke on his burger. I panicked a bit; if I gave him the Heimlich I would probably crush his osteoporitic rib cage. The headlines flashed before my eyes, “Kamikaze Survivor Killed by Cheeseburger, Enthusiastic First-Aid.” Luckily Glenn (as his embroidery led me to believe) coughed it up and I wasn’t forced to break him. I guess he can add “Double-Double” to the list of things he’s survived.

My last resort was Steve’s nemesis: Best Buy. On the way over I got cut off by a dude driving a pimped Jetta with black enamel dubs. I would have been more angry if it wasn’t for the fact that this dude was driving a car that the federal trade commission has declared a chick-mobile, and that he thought that fancy rims would somehow make it less so.

Best Buy was, well, Best Buy. The store was huge as always and the staff nearly impotent, but they did have one copy of Railroads. They also had a guy there buying a PS3, which was hot. The Microsoftians would have you believe that no such thing has ever happened, so to see it in action felt like seeing a bigfoot disappearing into the treeline.

I guess the moral of this story is that EB Games sucks, CompUSA is closed, Glenn is alive, and I know for a fact that people buy PS3’s. Way to go, Sunday.