In a fit of wanting to rid myself of superfluous crap and to, hopefully, make a little extra cash while I’m at it, I decided this weekend to sell my Nintendo Wii. Some years ago, I was working the night shift at Walmart in a small, farming town with a population of approximately 3,500. If you’re familiar with these kinds of towns, nights are a pretty dead time. I’m the kind of person who operates best when maintaining a consistent sleep schedule, which meant that on my nights off, I was still up all night, essentially alone in a ghost town. To combat the boredom and the loneliness on these nights, I first bought an Xbox 360, then I bought the Wii.
These days, I have plenty of obligations and other activities to fill my time, and I rarely play video games anymore. I literally had to clean the dust off my Wii before I took pictures and packed it back into its box. I intend to keep the Xbox, since it has uses beyond just gaming, but I did go through some of the Xbox games I accumulated to weed out the ones I don’t touch anymore. Among those games, I found this one:
It had been so long since I even touched this game that I had completely forgotten whose image graced the front of the case. But there he is — less than one month after his death, I find myself awkwardly haunted by the ghost of Roy Halladay. If you think about it, it’s an unfortunate display of the commercialization of the sport and its athletes. On the other hand, you might argue that it’s a testament to Roy Halladay’s performance as a pitcher that he was so good his image could sell video games.
A part of me felt hesitant to post this game for sale. It almost feels, I don’t know, inappropriate or “too soon” to do such a thing. On the other hand, the whole purpose of getting “rid of superfluous crap” is to, well, get rid of it, and I have no intentions of ever playing this game again. So in spite of my reservations, the game has been listed. Roy Halladay can go haunt someone else for a bit.