What seems to be the latest trend in fifteen year-olds who either can't get a date or who get dates that are even more fucking nerdy than they are, is Yu-Gi-Oh! Yu-Gi-Oh! is a collectable* card game in which players summon monsters to defeat their opponent with. This is not to be confused with Pokémon, which was the same exact fucking thing. The only difference seems to be that in Yu-Gi-Oh! you can place traps and cast spells, whereas in Pokémon, you could "evolve" into a bigger, more powerful geek.
In Yu-Gi-Oh! the object of the game seems to be to use all of the aforementioned cards to reduce your opponents "life points" to zero, thus signaling that you win the game. Differentiating this game from Magic: The Gathering or any other card game is that this one has it's own TV show! Sure, so did Pokémon, but Yu-Gi-Oh!'s show is different! Whereas Pokémon was a cutesy, silly and overly simplistic storyline which revolved around the game mechanics, Yu-Gi-Oh! is nothing more than the game mechanics themselves.
NOTHING MORE.
The show is literally nothing more than a fucking half-hour commercial explaining how to play the game and why you should run out and buy the expansion set right now, and change your name to Yu-Gi and bleach your hair and wear a dog collar and carry your cards around wherever you go and oh, by the way, kill your parents and steal their credit cards and buy every Yu-Gi-Oh! product imaginable, including Halloween costumes, action figures, videotapes, DVD's, books, condoms, chewing gum, cd-roms and Yu-Gi-Oh! brand marital aids.
I am forced to endure this show's theme song on nearly a daily basis, which consists of little more than some asshole spouting off the title character?s name, and shouting "duel" while stammering like a kid with cerebral paulsy. It has not fared well with me, as the next time I hear it begin, I may go completely apeshit and run through my neighborhood with an axe swinging at people and screaming "Blue Eyes White Dragon!"
I really, really hate this game.
A few weeks ago I bore witness to more nerdiness than is witnessed at a typical game of Dungeons and Dragons. My brother Dudeman held a Yu-Gi-Oh! tournament at my house. The usual suspects showed up- his friends who have nothing better to do on a Saturday afternoon than compete in this idiocy for the chance to garner even more cards to be an even bigger geek with. That's right, the prize for the winner was, you guessed it, more fucking cards. The group actually took the winner out and bought him six packs of cards, which, I am told by Dudeman, amounts to something like 45 cards. These new cards he will use to win the next tournament, thus taking these suckers for even more cash and cards.
To get back to my point, don't play this game. If you feed into this shit, you are only serving to fan the flames of the latest trends and fads that the Japanese bombard us with in order to distract us from the fact that they could have easily colonized the solar system by now while our greatest technological achievement in the past decade was the Big Mouth Billy Bass.
*If a game description contains the word "collectable," it's so they can tack 25% more onto the price tag.