Robert Warzycha to Hone Coaching Skills with Classic 90s Video Game

By 季书恒

(May 16, 2009) With Columbus's current 1-2-5 record the worst in the East going into Sunday's must-wi..something game against LA, head coach Robert Warzycha has resolved to "embrace the latest and fastest virtual-reality technology that HSG is willing to shill out the cash for," thereby settling on an "IBM-compatible" CD-ROM or a Super Nintendo "cart" from the mid-nineties.

While the options abound, Warzycha has one title he feels "captures the moment" of where the Crew is now, and where they're headed in the weeks to come:

No, not Fifa '98. No, not Tony Meola's Sidekick Soccer. No, not even Battletoads. Warzycha has decided that the best computer-simulated approximation of the conditions his team currently find themselves in is SSI and Dreamforge Intertainment's 1994 classic... Menzoberranzan!

(Foul had its money on Myst, as he just seemed to show up somewhere, with no idea who he was, where he was, what he was supposed to do, or even if he was really playing a game that could be won.)

Menzoberranzan, as MLS fans who didn't have sex in high school will recall, is a classic AD&D PC game, set in the Forgotten Realms. The eponymous subterannean city, home to the drow, also known as the drow, is located deep, deep within the bowels of the earth—far below even FC Dallas in the overall standings.

"People keep describing the Crew as 'First to Worst'," said Columbus Crew Technical Director Brian Bliss. "What they forget is that the Crew's number one aspiration is to be massive. If we can reach the true center of the earth, then we, while technically weightless ourselves, will acquire the entire mass of the earth! Mwa hwa hwa! Plus 'future considerations'! Which, um, er... well, acquiring the entire mass of the earth is making out pretty good, yeah?"

Foul consulted The Algebraist, which was about as useful as those 'future considerations', then consulted a physicist who, um, "doesn't think it works like that."

The Crew, however, remain optimistic, trying to shoot the moon and digging themselves in deeper.

"We haven't hit bottom yet!" Warzycha told Foul reporters. "We can always go deeper! Just as soon as I find someone to screw a new lightbulb into my flashlight. I've been stumbling around in the dark all season long, and it's getting kinda scary."

"It is scary," said Bliss. "For you! The Crew aren't afraid of drow, or driders—okay, okay: drow or drow or driders—or T-Rexes or Ascended Masters or nothin'! Why, just last week we beat Kansas City, and they're Wizards!"

When it was pointed out that the Wizards' namesake was really just a man behind a curtain, Bliss replied, "But the Tin Man really got his heart, right?" and Warzycha mumbled: "Typical HSG penny pinching... would it kill them to drill a hole in a wall?"

Warzycha then went back to his game, remarking that while Menzoberranzan's environments might look ludicrously out of date by today's standards, they were cutting ege in their day, and are still a great place in which to immerse yourself, even if it takes you 12 years to actually win the whole thing.

Much, indeed, like Crew Stadium.