Last year, my girlfriend took me to Disney World. In between the rides and and trips to the frozen-confection stands, we were having a lot of fun analyzing the boiled-over, caked-on mess of a melting pot there. Our first observation: Americans are lazy.
Hey, we're no mall walkers. It's already too much work for us to get off the couch and grab EA Sports Active off the shelf. But when we see motorized tourists knocking over four-year old pedestrians with their rented scooters, only to get up and walk around just fine when they've reached their buffet...well, we gotta give them some crap.
During our observations, we randomly started comparing the different types of tourists to different types of video game characters. What's the correlation? You got us, but here's a visual report from Mickey Mouse's homeworld.
The aforementioned motorized tourist:
Reminded us a lot of the first boss from Smash TV:
Some girls dressed to kill, not to walk around gigantic theme parks:
Reminded us a lot of gaming females who also don't know how dress functionally (see also Soul Calibur, Dead or Alive):
We saw a lot of these, naturally:
Crying and screaming uncontrollably, sorta like Baby Mario, when he gets separated from his ride:
Occasionally, little kids would escape their captors and wander off on their own:
Reminded us of wandering monsters from RPGs:
This one's a stretch, but toward the evening, all those crying babies and wandering monsters would slowly run out of juice:
Sorta like these little guys when they take naps in between shifts of killing Master Chief.
Or maybe that picture is more akin to this thing from Silent Hill: Homecoming:
Speaking of Halo, we saw a lot of color-coordinated families:
If only I could've caught the above family standing next to another one in blue. Then we'd have this:
But in the end, despite being surrounded by small monsters and slothfulness, we still had an amazing time. That had a lot to do with the friendly "cast members" at Disney:
Like NPC villagers in most RPGs, they just want to make sure you're having a good time.
Comments (9)
I never saw the wealth of corollaries between Disney World and video games, though, but damn -- some of these are freakishly accurate (the Smash TV guy is amazing). There was, though, always something about the guided, hotspot-triggered jaunt through the haunted mansion that reminded me of a Half Life-style FPS...
Visiting Disney actually reminded me at one time of point 'n click adventure games. Trapped for two hours in a line for a ride, would I be able to make it through in time to catch the monorail out to Epcot? Or could I sneak through with a bottle of water, a Mickey Mouse ears, and a twisty straw? And two words that my copy of the map to the Magic Kingdom needed: Quick Travel.
Finding the best spot to sit at for Illuminations was also something of an adventure. Altair wouldn't have had a problem with the crowds, either.
As for the staff, I'm not sure about Disneyland's, but some Disneyworld employee dressed as Timon stole my hat and ran off with it. I had to hunt him down and rip off his tail, then pin it to his head (kidding about the last part).