Insert coin

Nowadays the video game industry makes more money than the movies, or at least that the's conventional wisdom (read: I'm too lazy to research this claim right now). So it's hardly surprising that mainstream media outlets cover games more and more.

I'm not always superattentive to this coverage, but I think The Onion has a great thing in its weekly "Games of Our Lives" column, penned by former child actor Wil Wheaton. Every week Wheaton, 33, picks some forgotten gaming classic from the golden age (two weeks ago it was Phoenix, a personal favorite of mine) and riffs on it nostalgically. He also riffs ironically; he is a Gen-Xer, after all. It's the perfect way for The Onion to get greying Xers like myself to linger a while on the games page, which I otherwise would probably skip. My interest is not stirred, at the moment anyway, by articles like (in this week's Onion) a comparison of new baseball games for GameCube, Playstation 2 and Xbox. That's just me.

About that Phoenix column: is it just coincidence that Wheaton's costar in Stand By Me was River Phoenix?