Lately I’ve been noticing an increased use of the phrase, “X on acid,” to describe a game that’s a little weird. It’s sort of become a lazy catch-all employed in situations where one title resembles another, with a wacky, unexpected twist that’s sort of hard to describe. Considering that the neurochemical effect of acid makes games terrifying, I’m going to assume that none of the people who say that have ever tried the drug themselves. That’s why I’d like to take some time out of my incredibly busy schedule to tell all you psychedelic wordsmiths what acid actually does, and why we need to collectively bury that phrase in the coffin of 1960’s exuberance along with free love, world peace and the customized BMW van.

I was born in the late 80’s. The golden age of rock was over, phones had cords and you couldn’t go into a residential home without tripping over a creepy-ass Teddy Ruxpin doll. It also meant I had to sit through a decade-and-a-half of sad tweakers and shitty slides with pills on them, because in 1981 Nancy Reagan decided that drugs were way too cool for school and kicked the entire justice department’s granny panties into high gear. She and her catatonic husband put the kibosh on the burgeoning party scene with the ‘expertly’ crafted Just Say No campaign, a campaign that involved most of my teachers snickering in the back of the room while some fat guy told us we were all going to die.

Conservative radio’s explosion in popularity during the late 90’s didn’t make it any easier on us. In Sacramento we had Armstrong and Getty, two middle-aged white dudes who I will always remember for the phrase, “You ran over the hooker and stole her money back,” during an eight-week-long tirade over violence in video games.

“Did you even play Grand Theft Auto?” one caller asked.

“No, and I’m never going to,” answered bald guy. He might have been Getty.

My custodial parents bought most of what they were told through TV and radio, so thanks to the Reagan legacy, asshole Armstrong and asshole Getty, I was locked out of nearly every fun experience you could have in a flat, suburbanite hellhole whose mascot was eaten to death when panning for gold was still a growth industry. If the average family had helicopter parents, mine were a pair of black hawks that fired heat-seeking tiger sharks. As a result, I spent most of my time alone in my room, whose door I couldn’t close all the way because the frame was warped. It was awesome.

Nobody who had been paying attention was surprised when I dipped into psychedelics, or at least that I was missing from my house for three to five days at a time. A bunch of squares told me they were bad for two decades. Why not try them? Psilocybin, salvia, mescaline when and if I could get it, that one time I smoked DMT and decided it was better if the world wasn’t full of pulsating yellow tubes – none compared to my love affair with lysergic acid diethylamide, also known as good old LSD.

Acid and I had a lot of great times together, but when I started pairing my drugs with my gaming, it seemed like a poor choice due to the compound’s penchant for making everything overwhelming and horrible. Keeping track of a complex inventory or multiple enemies was completely out of the question, as was anything with violence, death, a storyline, a soundtrack, voice acting or buttons. It smacked of a bad trip waiting to happen, so I tried to avoid it.

Then it hit me.

Katamari. Namco’s golden child was already stuffed with space rainbows and Japanese electropop, and the controls were simple enough that the god awful hand-eye coordination of a day trip probably wouldn’t get in the way. It seemed like a perfect match. So we got a group together, popped open some bags of organic cheese crunchies from the local hippie mart and began our journey into the solar system. Great plan, right? Wrong.

Here is a short list of reasons why this was the worst idea ever:

1. LSD is a Schedule I drug in the United States. Distribution and possession thereof is a federal felony punishable by sitting in a smelly municipal courtroom while a dude with some sort of skin condition talks to himself about Star Trek. Then your lawyer walks in, wearing a pink velour jogging suit, and you’re all like, “I am so fucked.” So by choosing to ingest it before legally able to rent a car, I was already off to a great start in life.

2. Universal Collapse Syndrome. Heard of it? It’s like a panic attack multiplied by a colossal swarm of bees. Without getting too deep into chemical neuroscience, your substance-addled brain tricks you into believing that all of creation is disintegrating around you, an infinite sea of suffocating darkness slowly closing in until nothing remains but the grinning maw of the abyss. It sucks, and it’s brought on by a combination of stress and space imagery. Kind of like the stress of a timed level with a tangible goal, or the space imagery of a fucking space game.

3. Let’s pretend that one minute you’re playing with alphabet blocks, and the next you’re translating a Dead Sea scroll from Aramaic to Romansh. Acid makes everything seem like that, confusing and muddling what should be easy tasks by overloading your senses to the point where you can barely form sentences. Going to the store? Bringing peace to the Middle East. Pouring a glass of milk? Climbing Mount Everest in the spring of 1996. Likewise, playing a video game, any video game, rapidly degrades as your mind fails to process more than a couple points of interest in a thirty-foot radius of your body, turning an average console power hour into slack-jawed staring as everyone involved tries to figure out whether or not the television is breathing.

Having established why our badly planned trip was a proverbial walk into Mordor, I should also point out that Beautiful Katamari is a horrible acid game. The amount of screen noise can rapidly overwhelm your average druggie space cadet’s fried mental defenses, and the game’s reliance on building muscle memory to beat every stage can send already confused players into the fetal position to sobs of “I can’t handle this anymore!” Popular culture may broadcast a drug that revels in rainbows and zany cartoon imagery, but the actual, factual substance has very specific mental boundaries that, once breached, will parade all over your day like a pissed-off legion of Persian Immortals.

Once we were up and frying (roughly one hour), it was only a matter of minutes before somebody went, “I have no idea what’s happening right now.” Neither did the rest of us, and we dropped the controller in exchange for an ill-advised trip to the local Urban Outfitters, making sure not to turn off our console in case the game got upset with us. One friend decided to drive, combining the excitement of vivid daylight hallucinations with the challenge of not wrapping a used AMC Gremlin around a tree. As we waited for her to trade an ugly scarf for some sort of jumbled combination of consonants that kind of sounded like the words “pantsuit,” another friend made a note that gosh golly, there sure were a lot of police cars out today. Because that friend is an asshole.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am not down with the police. I’ve spent more than one prolonged evening in a jail cell, walking laps in what amounted to a steel coffin with a toilet while I waited for a bondsman who smelled like turkey subs to take waaaaay too much of my freedom money. The cops I’ve dealt with were never nice, never used discretion and seemed really into breaking my shit before dragging me off to the tombs. Having a six-foot-three biology student transform a city full of tourist traffic into a sea of squad cars before my eyes was probably the last thing I ever wanted to happen that day, but since acid is a drug of profound suggestion, she basically became Kazaam in a cat sweater.

Focusing on the tiled cement outside as I waited for our chauffer to finish whatever the hell she was now doing, I considered the benefits of rolling a multicolored ball through a field of roses as they bended gently in the breeze. I started seeing fewer Crown Vics and more crappy minivans. Fewer cops and more street kids with bongos. Slowly but surely, Katamari was grounding me back to reality. I told the sidewalk as much.

“What if she never comes back?” whispered asshole friend.

Like I mentioned before, acid is a drug of profound suggestion. My dad used to tell me this story about how he and my mom ruined a Grateful Dead concert by yelling, “Not the drum solo!” right before a ten-minute drum solo, inducing some sort of primordial fight or flight reflex in a stadium of four thousand mid-trip boomers. Twenty years before that, the CIA had launched Project MKUltra with the goal of brainwashing people using psychedelic research chemicals, noting the power of manipulation was multiplied exponentially when test subjects were seeing smells.

Panic set in. The sunny facades of Pacific Avenue’s tourist traps leaned forward into the street, framing my vision as it tightened on the distant intersection I would have to make it to in order to get back to the safety of the living room. Though was that even the right way? And where would I go from there? The notion that I could be left out here until collected by the local sheriff was too much to fully comprehend, so I did what I thought was best: broke into a dead sprint towards the car, leaping in front of a moving station wagon as I desperately tried to shimmy in through the open passenger side window.

It got bad from there.

The point of this story is twofold. One, I like to party. Hard. Two, when anybody says that a game is like something on acid, they are wrong on a deeply entrenched level, mostly stemming from a pop culture that likes to paint LSD in wacky shack rainbow vision and a series of scare campaigns that wrongly informed two generations of kids on the dangers of substance abuse. The reality of acid is that, like any other drug, it’s meant to fuck with your body’s natural chemical output and alter your consciousness for 1-13 hours for both spiritual exploration and naked body painting. We need to stop deploying that kind of language as shorthand for conceptually odd titles, lest we lose focus of what it actually represents: really stupid decision making, followed shortly thereafter by a six-hour marathon of Disney’s Fantasia.

It’s like seeing an orchestra…on acid.