Bubble Guinea Pop

(Gavin helped me write this entry :)

After a nonsensical intro in which an ill-defined ‘bad guy’ seems threatening (doesn’t actually DO anything threatening, mind you, just seems threatening) to some zoo animals, a couple of maverick guinea pigs decide to save the animals with serpents, bubble gum and bossa nova.

I’m sorry, WHAT?

It’s an online computer game, whose title is that of this blog entry. You can find it here. Gavin discovered it the other day on the computer at school. The object is to launch guinea pigs from the jaws of pendulum-like hanging snakes toward waiting zoo animals. When the guinea pigs come to a complete rest, they immediately blow a huge bubble-gum bubble which bursts, covering the targeted animal in pink, sticky goo which, supposedly, makes it so that vaguely threatening guy’s “powers” don’t work on them. You know, for their own good. In the sage words of Gavin: “It’s stupid.”

But it’s pretty darn fun, too. Each very short level requires you to click on a snake or two to release a bubble-blowing rodent at just the right time to have the proper trajectory so it lands close enough to the animal in peril to sufficiently coat it with pink goo. With every passing level, the layout of the ‘board’ is more complex, requiring advance planning as to when to release the pig, how to use other pigs and/or objects on the board to push the pig closer to its target and, in some cases, blow up bricks or pieces of wood (with bubble gum—because that makes sense) before being able to complete the task. In some screens, there are portals from one part of the board to another. In another screen, there’s a little machine that, when you launch your pigs into it, it divides the guinea pig into four smaller piglets (each of which is capable of blowing enough of a bubble to save a zoo animal). Gavin calls this the “guinea pig grinder.” Kind of a gross image, no?

He finished up to level 31 (out of 57) this morning before I had to literally threaten him to within an inch of his life in order to disengage him so he could head for the school bus. The really sad part is that we’re supposedly under a technology ban (for the kids) until further notice. But Gavin really wanted to show me this game he’d discovered and all of his attempts to explain it to me made absolutely no sense (and is there any wonder why that might be???) So I let him show me and was instantly sucked into a ridiculously silly morass of bubble gum, snakes, fuzzy rodents, assorted zoo animals, whirly portals, moving parts and mechanical switches all accompanied by a maddening synthesized overly-cheerful bossa nova.

And I think my life is crazy? My life has nothing on Bubble Guinea Pop.