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"Watch Your Asteroids, Bitch!" I've long been a proponent of not learning an absolute damn thing while in school. As far as I'm concerned, you fucking kids today know too much. In fact, if it were up to me, I'd have all school teachers nationwide replaced with mute blonde strippers, the hot lunch program would revert to supervised Windex drinking contests, and any child who showed a glimmer of intelligence would be forced to watch hours of mind-numbing anime, in the hopes of dumbing his ass up a bit. It may sound like I really do hate the concept of education, and well, I guess I do. I wasn't always this way, though. Back in junior high, I was quite the smart little fucker. I loved the astronomy unit of science class, and found myself obsessed with space. More particularly, all the shit in space that had the potential to kill the people of earth. That's right. Even at such a young age, the seeds of my never ending bitterness, not unlike that never ending pasta bowl deal at the Olive Garden, were taking root. You know, if the pasta they served at the Olive Garden was bitter, and liked reading up on ways that space debris could sneak in to your house at night and murder you while you were sleeping. I know it's a pretty loose analogy, but just deal with it. I'm trying my best to tie this article together in a coherent fashion. Anyway, peer pressure and my thousand dollar a day cocaine habit destroyed my interest in learning about the vast universe that surrounds our retarded blue planet, so that by the time I graduated from high school, the only knowledge I retained was a handful of facts about man's best friend: gonorrhea. Fast forward several years, to about a week ago. I was sitting in front of the televison, flipping through the channels, in my constant effort to find a rerun of The Simpsons, or pornography, or something, when I accidently stumbled across a documentary about asteroids. Something about that poorly animated boulder careening towards a pitiful mockup of our planet reawakened my long-hidden interest in deadly space rocks. So much so, that I actually stopped and watched for a whole fifteen minutes, before changing the channel again. Let's get something straight. There were no naked women, high powered machine guns, ninjas, or clever quips delivered by one Homer J. Simpson, in this documentary. There was nothing on display but a whole lot of geeky thirty-something year old men, cheerfully sharing their common beliefs that asteroids are fucking cool, and that they are going to obliterate our world sometime within the next hundred thousand years or so. And yet, I couldn't help but watch. It was like I was back in science class, except without the one kid that got caught smoking a cigarette he lit with a bunsen burner. Now that I've matured slightly, I'm not quite as stoked to hear that asteroids are going to wipe out human civilization, as I once was. I fail to believe that all hope is lost, however. Scientists have already established several theoretical methods for deflecting and/or destroying the holy fuck out of any space boulder that's on a collision course with our planet, thereby allowing us to wipe out our species at our leisure. In an effort to help temporarily save the world, I feel that it's my duty to point out a few more sources of inspiration those scientists could draw from. Namely, three video games that have had a direct impact on my childhood.
When god damn alien sons of bitches took over our planet, a group of scientists designed and constructed a prototype combat ship that they dubbed Solar Striker. I guess they figured with a name like that, the alien invaders would have to piss their space suits, and then retreat back to their home planet. I never found out what happened for sure though, because that game was fucking hard, and I used up all the batteries in my Gameboy about nine years ago. Regardless, I figure that the ship could work against an asteroid almost as well as it could against the aforementioned aliens. Especially if you got the quadruple shot powerup on the second level.
Actually, this probably wouldn't do any good against a planet killing super asteroid. I just wanted to mention that this game was even more difficult than Solar Striker, but only because it was programmed by crazy Japanese guys who taught the game's AI how to think for itself, and cheat profusely.
Do I even have to spell it out for you? I personally must've spent a thousand hours navigating that hyper-futuristic triangle into just the right angle, in order to successfully shoot little white dots at outlines that barely resembled the game's namesake. And that was when I had to contend with the heart-pounding fear that one knows, only when they're being forced to cruise through entire fields of asteroids. So there you have it. It seems that the only logical answer to the war against threatening asteroids would be to build a roughly triangular prototype combat ship that we could call the "Balloon Kid". Armed with state of the art white dots, and a pilot with unshakeable courage in the face of death, the human race could overcome even the most asteroidy of asteroids. Either way, it's about time I bring this article to a close, because I've wasted far too much of my day on it. Just remember to, in the words of Alf, the humorous sitcom alien/harbinger of cosmic doom, "Watch your asteroids, bitch!" Editor's Note: Alf, in fact, never said anything remotely similar to "Watch your asteroids, bitch". That phrase comes to you courtesy of Jasie when he's had a bit too much to drink, and needs a title for his newest article.
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