There’s something about spirited competition leading up to an unscripted conclusion – be it the Red Sox at the best baseball park in the nation, Fenway (ideally spanking the Yankees), fantasy football, ding dong ditch, beer pong or Boggle – that makes me purely happy. Ideally, climactic moments are everywhere, almost like being on a wooden roller coaster with unforeseen dips and loops.
I associate games with being a teenager, since many a night I would either look forward to, or surrender to (since at one point all I wanted to do was drive and be a rebel teenager) playing namely Scrabble, Boggle and Skip Bo with the ‘rents. And I got good. Oh I got real good.
Looking back, the training for my word game stamina stemmed from asking my mother what a word meant, since she would simply respond, “Look it up.” At first I was peevish about this, wanting the quick answer; but then I grew to love the process of letting one wondering lead to another, finding answers on my own.
Thus, the etymological foundation was laid, and Scrabble and Boggle competitions began to rank right up there with Spoons. (I always got my sister with things she didn’t see coming like spoonfuls of black pepper.) Pure adrenaline is how I would describe the feeling when she implicitly waved her white flag while running to the sink to rinse away the powder from her tongue.
And that’s what I wanted to feel for Big Kahuna Words, Reflexive.com’s dynamic, Boggle-esque word search with the goal of finding the longest word in each, timed round. The potential for big and obscure words got better with each one; but basically it seemed like it had beat me just by pissing me off. You see, in order to win I had to ignore all the small yet meaty words that shouldn’t be overlooked simply based on their size, in order to go fishing for that obnoxious Big Kahuna. And to me that means it fell flat…like a fool for words’ gold, promising intellectual intensity but causing distraction. And then I asked myself as my disbelief was suspended, who wouldn’t be distracted on the islands of Hawaii and Polynesia where the games take place?
The graphics were très cool and went perfectly with the groove sounds I accompanied them with, Boards of Canada (obvious plug for a band I really don’t know much about except for the fact that they’re from Canada and really spiced up my Big Kahuna trial.)
My friend Dan who also played the game, said it reminded him of the oldie but goodie, “Super Text Twist.” Actually (and I myself didn’t get the reference to the former Nickelodeon show), he said, “Big Kahuna is like Super Text Twist, Legends of the Hidden Temple style.”
We enthusiastically played the exciting Super Text Twist that possessed a much more comfortable format reminiscent of sitting at the dining room table biting my nails over finding the most colorful words with my Mom or cousin Mitzi. In the end, it beat Big Kahuna because the result was my face in the dictionary looking up interesting words it didn’t catch in its search like pyre, deign, and riata.
So go use a riata to catch the competition. And to gain an edge, learn all you possibly can.
Flower Child
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