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Saturday, March 21, 2009
Video BowlingWith no PBA on TV last Sunday and a house full of guests, I snuck into my office and dug out my old Sony Playstation
to enjoy a few games of Brunswick Circuit Pro Bowling. After picking up on a saved game that I'd left off probably more
than eight years ago, I found myself trying to figure out where I'd been playing and what ball I was throwing. Unfortunately
for me, computer Randy Pedersen and Mark Roth drubbed me for a couple games until I finally came up with something resembling
a decent ball reaction. Lucky for me, I'd set up the tournament to be a 42-game marathon and I'd already built a 900-plus
pin lead eight years ago, so a couple 160's didn't do much damage. Computer Chris Barnes must've been PO'd
that he drew me as soon as I got lined up and went 258 at him (and that wasn't even in the TV finals...Steve Jaros got
a nice 279 in his grille for that one).
As I was playing, I got to thinking about all of the past bowling video
games I've ever played and which ones were the best and why. The first was on the old Atari 2600 system. In that one,
a stick man threw a roundish-looking ball horizontally between two lines at ten little squares representing pins. The problem
with the game was that there was only one way to strike consistently because the pins, once they got going in a certain direction,
would not deflect and simply continued on a straight line until out of play. There were also no sideboards, so once a pin
was off the deck, forget about it. The most reliable way to strike was to thrust the joystick toward the pocket at the last
possible second so that the ball sent the headpin on a 45 degree angle into the 2, 4, and 7, the 3-pin into the 6 and 10 with
the ball taking out the 5, 8 and 9. Stone 8's were very common in this game and a good player could average somewhere
in the 220's with a lot of practice.
I never actually owned an Atari 2600, so my first real bowling video game
was the Intellivision system's PBA Bowling. The game featured Dick Weber on the cover, but it probably should've been
Earl Anthony because anyone who ever played that game will remember that the left side was more walled than China. While a
200-plus average was respectable for a righty, all you had to do on the left side was stand all the way left (or to the top
since the approach and lane were displayed from the side), aim just inside of the left gutter and then hook the bejesus out
of it. The ball would come in so sharply that it'd take out the 1, 2, 5 and 9 (and sometimes even the 10 pin). The pins
that the ball hit were also usually thrown sideways, so anything that dared to stand would almost always be taken out by any
number of messengers. My favorite strike was the one where you accidentally aimed too far left and, to compensate, put extra
hook on it. The ball would then dip 90 percent into the gutter, before miraculously hooking out at the last second, breaking
at almost a 90 degree angle toward the pocket before just tickling the headpin and taking out the 2, 3, 5, 6, 9 and 10. Sometimes,
the headpin would wiggle for a couple seconds and end up standing, leaving you with the always cool stone 1-pin. On this game,
I averaged in the 260s or 270s as a lefty and probably had more 300s than Robert Mushtare's has in practice with no one
watching.
There was a dark period in my personal bowling video game history between Intellivision's PBA Bowling
and the aforementioned Brunswick Circuit Pro Bowling, which is probably the biggest reason I got fairly decent at real bowling.
But by the time the latter had come out, I was pretty much retired from competitive bowling (I mean the real form, not the
pixel-land version) and about to get married, which usually puts a serious cramp on your video game time (or in some cases,
increases it exponentially in inverse proportion to the quality of one's marriage). But I still found time to master BCPB
and instead of getting my butt kicked by the legion of Brunswick staffers on Tour in the mid/late-90's in the flesh, I
kicked their butts mercilessly on my 32" Sony Trinitron TV.
The realism of the pin carry on BCPB was drool-worthy
for a hard-core bowling-phile like me, and the fact that you could slow-mo replay and relive that stone-8 over and over and
over must've been like what went through Barry Asher's mind that eventually led to his inability to start his approach.
(if you've never seen this, its something to behold...sometimes, he even needs someone to push him to get started...of
course, he still averages over 240 in league and probably would've won 30-plus titles if he'd stayed out on Tour,
although I'm not sure Roth would've pushed him to start if he were bowling him on TV). You could also set up the tournaments
in this game to be as long or as short as you wanted them. The only drawback was that the lanes never changed (kind of like
during the plastic era, except with better carry), so once you got locked in it was lights out. One other nitpick was that
the computer opponents always played the lanes the same, even when the condition was different (kind of like they do on the
modern day Tour except, in the latter case, that actually works).
By the time the Wii console came out on the market
I had two kids, so under the guise of buying it for them, I convinced my wife that it'd be a good idea. The Wii Sports
version of bowling was probably the best ever in terms of realistic pin carry. The two cons of this game were that the lanes
are set up flat, so throwing a hook isn't much of an advantage (you could make up for the loss in entry angle by moving
all the way to the gutter and pointing it into the pocket, which exponentially increased repeatability and allowed me to go
from around a 200 average hooking it to a 250 throwing it straight), and that there is really no competitive structure to
follow. The weeble-wobble cartoon characters with no hands also look pretty silly (I mean how are you supposed to bank the
gutter with no hands?)
I also own Brunswick's recent attempt at a bowling video game for the Wii console. This
one incorporates elements of the old Circuit Pro Bowling game (and even takes it a step further by allowing the lanes to break
down over the course of competition), but does not quite live up to the physics capabilities (throwing is not synched up to
your actual delivery and the pin carry looks OK but doesn't quite occur naturally) of the more cartoonish Wii sports version,
which is kind of a shame. In the end, my all-time fave is still Playstation's BCPB. I'm aware that there are other
bowling video games out there, and I'm always searching for the perfect one. If any of you have suggestions, feel free
to let me know your favorite so I can check it out! Until then, I'll be inflating my ego beating up on Walter Ray Williams
Jr. during his prime. (Hey, I also totally own Tiger Woods in the virtual world too, so WRW shouldn't feel too bad.)
See you next week!
Click here to check out an interview with Jason Thomas about his book "Livin' The Dream: How to Get What You Want, Find True
Meaning and Save the World by Bowling!" To purchase a copy of the book, click here.
Click here to check out "Jason's TV Recap - Uncensored" on PBA.com.
To check out the latest episode of The
Bowling Show >>> Click Here
See you next week!
Jason Thomas,
jason@jasonthomasbowling.com
2:33 pm edt
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LIVIN' THE DREAM:
How
to get what you want, find true meaning and save the world by bowling!
AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR
Q:
What is the book about?
A: The book is about how the valuable
lessons I learned through my lifelong involvement in bowling saved my life and transformed me from an unhappy cynic into a
blissfully happy optimist.
Q: What made you decide to write it?
A: I had been out of the bowling industry for about two years and I had hit a very low point in my attitude about
life. Through the help of a family member, I was able to rediscover the important lessons about success, spirituality and
connecting with others. I was so excited about this transformation that I decided to write a book that attempts to detail
the metamorphosis while outlining the important lessons I remembered.
Q: How is this
book different from other self-help books?
A: The book is different in a number
of ways. First, I am a very unlikely person to have written a self-help book. If you had known me before I'd written the book,
you'd know precisely what I mean. But that fact alone reveals how strongly I felt about writing it, because I knew that if
I could change for the better, then I felt anyone could do it and that there was a good chance that I could help a lot of
people by describing the process and arranging the pieces in a way that could be easily understood.
The
other key point of difference is the way the book is arranged. The story is structured into three parts, The Method, Some
Cool Tricks and For the Hard-Core Cynics, each of which contain the important lessons I wanted to share. Every chapter is
also broken up with a narrative of my personal story, told for the purpose of detailing my amazing attitude transformation.
It begins with the extremely low point when others felt the need to reach out to help me to remember the important things
in life and goes on to detail the many people that helped me to learn the most important life lessons, including: my childhood
friend Robert Smith, my father (a former President of Disneyland International), PBA Chairman Chris Peters and former PBA
CEO Steve Miller.
Q: Is the book as funny as your blogs?
A: Yes! But there is also a serious side too.
Q: How is your book different from
something like The Secret?
A: My book is similar to The Secret
in that it proposes a method for success, but it is different in a number of ways. First, it is a bit more practical when
it comes to outlining the method for achieving success. The Secret comes very close to describing a similar method
for success in its "Ask, Believe, Receive" mantra. In my book, the first two of these elements ("Ask"
and "Believe") are integral (although I call them "Dream" and "Self-Belief"), but I believe
there has to be some proactive work done to achieve the goal. I call it hard work (which turns a lot of people off, of course)
but to use the model of The Secret, you would simply replace the word "Receive" with "Retrieve."
The best part of all this (and the good news for the folks who don't want to have to work hard) is that once you decide on
what you want and then you begin to believe you can get it, the work is no longer hard, but becomes a fun activity that fills
your days with joy and purpose.
Second, my book spends a significant amount of time discussing
how to deal with your success once you've attained it (and that conducting yourself in this manner before
you reach your goals will actually help you get there even faster). Probably the best way to describe my
book is that it's a cross between The Secret and the late Randy Pausch's book, The Last Lecture.
But I also quote a number of more research-driven books like Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, Sam Harris' The
End of Faith and Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate to help me make my point.
Q: Do you have to be a bowler to like this book?
A: Absolutely
not! Bowling obviously plays a major role (although it really serves more as the setting rather than as the primary focal
point) because of my involvement with the sport my whole life. But the lessons bowling taught me are lessons I could have
learned if I had chosen to be a golfer or a doctor or a writer (oops, I guess that one's a bad example now). My hope is that
the book will find its way into the hands of people who don't bowl and that these people will come away with a new appreciation
for bowlers and the sport of bowling.
Q: What is your goal with the book?
A: That is a simple one. To help as many people as possible to experience the gift of embracing an optimistic way
of life and to help them reap its many rewards. 
