Go Chuck Yourself

Relive on DS and Wii the best birthday parties you ever attended

If you’re over 18, single and without offspring, trips to Chuck E. Cheese can be dicey. Parents think you’re creepy and, besides, the thrill of making Pop A Shot competitors cry just doesn’t seem fair when they’re only four, five or “this many” years old. So where are grown boys and gals to go to play video and carnival games, slurp grease-hemorrhaging pizza and worship at the altar of the world’s greatest animatronic rodent? Their own living rooms!

Out today on Nintendo DS (and next weekend on Wii) is Chuck E. Cheese’s Party Games, a collection of digitized distractions from the house that worthless paper prize tickets built. Starring Chuck and his other cyborg furball friends, the games include skee ball, Whack-A-Munch, arcade video games and shooting hoops. Just like real life, high scores are rewarded with tickets that are redeemable for spectacularly crappy toys, such as a kazoo, a squirt gun, a whistle or a foam finger.

And, get this: In your video-game-land visits to Chuck E. Cheese, you can play mini games that have you actually making the pizzas instead of just passively shellac-ing your arteries with them. Ultimately, the game is a great substitute for the brick and mortar Chuck E. Cheese experience save one glaring omission—in this version you can’t free a brown trout into the ball crawl and blame it on your little brother.

Forward to a Buddy Invite a Buddy