Meet Ms. Pakman

In my neverending quest to find the coolest Se Ri stuff, I often find myself surfing around the Korean sections of the internet, where few westerners have trod. On just such a day, I happened upon a peculiar page: it featured a cartoon likeness, definitely Se Ri, hugging Happy. Intrigued, I ventured further and discovered the neatest thing: Se Ri had been featured in her own videogame in her homeland!

If you need any proof that Koreans are just cooler than we are, you need look no further than this game. Imagine for a second you are tasked with making a videogame about one of your country's very biggest professional athletes, a superstar among superstars. I bet your natural inclination would be to make a game about the star's sport. For instance, can you imagine making a game about Tiger Woods which was NOT a golf simulation?

Well, it might be YOUR natural inclination, but the folks in Korea know that, if you want cool, you anime it up and put in lots of explosions. And that's exactly what the people at WizardSoft did with this game. They turned Se Ri into a character you could imagine buddying up with Speed Racer, and put her in a world populated with cute cartoon nasties that only respond to a driver upside the head or a general whupping. Yes, that's right, Se Ri Pak, action adventure heroine and all around manga cutie. I can dig it!

The game is called Nae Cheengoo Pak Se Ri, which means 'My Friend Se Ri Pak'. And as you can imagine, it was a hassle and a half to get a copy of it. I called my father in law. His brother has friends in Seoul who ordered the game for me, then sent it to him, and he in turn sent it to me. Thanks Uncle Ed! But getting the game was only part of the challenge. Installing it turned out to be fun, too, because whenever a warning dialog came up, it was naturally in Korean, not exactly a language I skate around in with ease. And sometimes, the dialogs used a font that my computer did not have, so even a Korean would be lost trying to read the garbage text that resulted.

It did in fact take me a while to get it working, but get it working I did. You see, one thing you may not know about ye olde Editor is that I do not write Seoul Sisters for a living. No, I make my daily manna as, get this, a computer game designer and programmer! So the idea of a Se Ri Pak game is particularly interesting to me. I couldn't wait to test my skills!