It’s time to talk about the karaoke.

Recently, I celebrated my twenty-[cough]-nth birthday. Because I am a hopeless dork, this event was celebrated, in part, with the purchase of this game, which is known to some as “Karaoke Revolution 3,” and known to others as “The Greatest Game Ever Created In The Known History Of Pixelated Entertainment.” I cannot adequately explain. To explain is, in its very essence, to cheapen. Let me try and explain.

I’ll tell it in pictures.

Let me start with a flashback.

Pam and I met and fell in love damn near five years ago during a wild night at a karaoke bar, when my hair was at a very confusing point in its history…

…when I was known to be able to rile up the crowd…

So, back in January, Pam discovered the existence of said game for the PS2, and immediately knew it was going to change all of our lives.

Now, my desire to have access to a karaoke-related video game derives entirely from my dorky love of singing, and not at all from a cool-ass, hipster love of video games. Pamie and Stee have a storied and successful history with video games, particularly those of the drive-a-car-into-a-crowd-of-hos, skateboard-down-a-ramp-into-a-river-of-rubbing-alcohol, kill-the-other-guy-in-the-cage-match-by-taking-him-down-with-a-level variety. I, on the other hand, have not had much experience with video games, short of getting high and playing Tetris in college, and, before that, wasting much of my tween years in front of my Commodore 64 playing a variety of games (though, primarily, just this one) and listening to the collected works of The Police on tape, over and over and over and over again. And people wonder how I never developed the social skills required for dating.

After never advancing past Intellivision (what? Exactly), I sort of fell off the video game map for a couple of years. I still enjoy them, though I am woefully bad at pretty much all of them: when I play Grand Theft Auto with Pam and Stee, my lame sense of direction causes me to get lost all around San Andreas (no, I’m not kidding), and, well, I’ve never developed much of a taste for hos. Wing and Glark kill at every game, and when I’m at their house, I find it exceedingly hard to play any game, what with one of my hands always deeply immersed in yet another bag of their chips. Thanks, guys.

So, January. Pam calls the Best Buy in Burbank to find out if they have the game. I hear one half of the conversation. It goes something like this:

“Hi, do you have a PS2 game called Karaoke Revolution?”

“Yes, I’ll hold.”

“Dan, I think they think I’m a total — oh, hey, you’re back.”

“Just the third one?”

“Yes.”

“And how many microphones does that come with?”

“But you can do a two player game, right?”

“Oh, okay.”

“Wait, what?”

“So, you mean like Madonna?”

“Can you hold that for us?”

“Sigh. Fine. We’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

Run. RUN! Off to Burbank we went.

The game comes with a microphone, but since KR3 has a duet feature, we had to buy another mic as well for the two-player action, so we selected the headphone one that allows for hands-free karaoke fun (“So, you mean like Madonna?”). We opened it up. We found the beer. We invited everyone over. We were very excited.

This story is too big to tell in one entry.

Today: Introduction.
Tomorrow: Choose a character.
Part III: Song selection. [part A, part B, part C]
Part IV: Competition versus playing together.
Part V: “L.”
Part VI: A pirate named Salty Pete

Yes. I really need six installments to talk about a video game. Why do you ask?