#do you guys remember in mario 64 where you have to run around this guy a whole bunch

[thoodleoo]

looks at u with my phoenician glass eye bead

[blazehedgehog]

What was the internet fandom's reaction to Sonic Adventure 2 back in the early 2000s?

I can only speak to my personal perspective, which is that most of the people I know really liked it, but a select few of us (yes, including me) were upset because something was lost in the transition from SA1 to SA2.

Sonic Adventure is a much clearer continuation of the Sonic 3 storyline. Sonic Adventure 2 is, too, but it hides that fact maybe a little too well. Sonic Adventure 2 is also a lot more streamlined than Sonic Adventure -- no adventure fields, and each character's traits are much more pronounced. They feel much more specialized. Sonic is only good at running (through levels that were basically just Speed Highway on repeat). Knuckles is only good at hunting. Tails is only good at shooting. Things like that.

There was also a pretty significant debate over the story and characters. There was a large argument where our side proposed that Sonic Adventure 2 felt "soulless." It leaned a lot more heavily on science fiction and anime tropes.

I specifically remember comparing Shadow the Hedgehog to a trope you often see in characters like Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII. The tortured science experiment reflecting on the nature of their own existence. Rouge, too, was a generically sexy jewel thief.

Compared to Sonic Adventure's grand finale of The Angel Island Saga, it lacked the depth and impact of something like Perfect Chaos and Tikal. Sonic Adventure felt more like a Sonic game should, whereas Sonic Adventure 2 was something new, different, and decidedly more flavorless. Less a story than a collection of stereotypes and gimmicks.

Two things I remember very clearly during the long, ongoing debates this game spawned were specific replies to something a friend of mine said in response to me being utterly unfair to Sonic Adventure 2:

"So now you don't like playing it? Weren't you the guy who spent over 4 solid hours playing just City Escape in The Trial on the first day you had it?"

Which was in response to me complaining about how much more narrow and linear the stages were for Sonic now, and how that was inferior to Sonic Adventure's more evenly-paced level design. To further the point, I'd even paid money for the Sonic Adventure 2 Trial, ordering it for like $5 off of Ebay so I wouldn't have to spend full price on Phantasy Star Online. May have actually been the first thing I ever bought on Ebay.

"And who said you get to decide what Sonic the Hedgehog is? At least they're not just copying Super Mario 64 like everyone else."

Proving that perhaps some things never change with me, I guess. I had used the "Sonic Adventure 2 is soulless" argument to suggest it did not feel like a Sonic game anymore.

In retrospect, these were some pretty knock-down, drag-out arguments. I'm still friends with some (maybe even most) of those people, and I remember the context of some of these things getting pretty heated in ways I'd never dream of nowadays.

For the safety of my well being, I would like to point out that I have obviously come around on Sonic Adventure 2 more since those days. I would still consider my feelings "complicated", but I can, and do, enjoy the game much more now than I used to.

I'd, uh, "finished" school (in a matter of speaking) by the time Sonic Adventure 2 came out, so I don't really have any nuanced view on how the game was received in the real world, outside of the two main friend groups I was hanging with at the time. I think by the time previews were coming out and the cast kept getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger, there was some sneering -- Sonic's spotlight being "too crowded" was a major concern back then, and Sonic Adventure 2 only made it worse.

I was just talking about this with a friend, but Penny-Arcade used to do this Game of the Year thing called the "We're Right Awards." And for 2001 that year, Gabe gave Sonic Adventure 2 an award:

"Best Sonic Game Where You Do Not Play As Sonic"

I suppose it's fallen out of favor now, but there used to be a memetic shorthand for this and it was called "Sonic's Shitty Friends." Everybody called them that. When pressed, they'd say Tails and Knuckles were fine, but beyond that, the wider world at large didn't want to have anything to do with Amy, or Big, or Shadow, or Rouge, or Gamma, or Omega, or Vector, or Charmy, or Espio, or Cream, or Silver, or Blaze, so on and so forth. You get the idea.

Though it was a problem in Sonic Adventure, it really started to catalyze in Sonic Adventure 2. Every game people would complain about it, and every game the cast would just get bigger. Three playable characters. Six. Twelve.

And specifically for Sonic Adventure 2, most tended to agree that only really Sonic and Shadow were fun. The mechs were slow and clumsy, and the hunting stages were deliberately made significantly more tedious.

Then there was us, also saying the game simply felt soulless. It lacked the heart of Sonic Adventure, trading it for edgelord science fiction. A game that was, at one point, maybe even supposed to have swearing in it. A Sonic game! With swearing! It boggles the mind.

[tanakavox]

Look into the mutiverse chapter 4

Thanks again to ExiledDarkness for writing the charcters reaction for this chapter. Please go check out his stuff. And if your wondering where Qrow came from, We forgot to add a scene for Qrow and didn't feel like going back.

This chapter is based of the Youtuber SomecallmeJohnny and his review of Super Mario 64. I had to cut it short because my laptod was acting up again and google docs was acting wonky, parts of the fic getting erased. Rest assure for the Somecallmejohnny fans, I won't just do his reviews. I have plans to do Super gaming bros reaction as well. And for those who don't know Johnny, go check him! Enjoy the reaction.

The screen lights up again and shows Jaune wearing a cap and hoodie and sitting on a bright red couch. He had a bit of stubble on his face and he was currently holding a controller in his hand as he turned on a device known as the N64.

"Oh? Jaune looks good with stubble." Blake comments. Everyone looks at Jaune and then back to the one on the screen. They all nodded in agreement.

"It's a go time! Super Mario 64!" He said in a high pitched voice with a bad accent.

The Jaune on the screen sighed seemingly tired. "Lady and Gents welcome back to the Super Mario marathon, And just like with Ocarina of time, this is a game that haunted me during the N64 lifetime. Jaune looked the the N64 sitting on his dresser and continued. "It was like the console itself was actively mocking me like: "Hey Jauney? How about you ditch that playstation and try me out instead?" The blonde's eyes lit up in anger. "Well I didn't have a job in 1996 you sensitive prick!" Jaune snapped at the console.

Everyone blinked at the sudden anger. Ruby turned towards JNPR and asked, "Are you okay Jaune?"

Jaune, still frozen from the sudden burst of anger from his other self, snaps back to reality and nods at the question. "Yeah, I think I understand what's happening here. But I'll stay quiet until I know for sure."

Jaune turned toward the screen and went on like nothing happened. "Last time I gave Mario attention, I was focused on what made the Italian "Plumber—"" He said with quotation marks. "—the video game icon he is today. Now we're gonna do it again only in 3d."

Jaune turned to his audience and smiled. "You guys ready for another Super Mario marathon?"

"Aha!" Jaune says as he slammed his closed fist on his hand. "This is me doing video games!"

Ren paused at hearing this information. "Then that explains the sudden burst of anger then." Nora and Jaune nod while the rest of the audience looks on confusedly.

RWBY look at each other before Yang hesitantly asks, "So why did he get so angry?"

Jaune laughs before scratching the back of his head. "I like video games but I hate it when I can't progress further into the game. Sometimes I get really into it, I guess."

"Here we go, Super Mario 64, the 64 being figureded to the console and not the 64 game in the series, Mario's first 3d game, and a launch title for the N64. It was highly praised and hailed as the 3d version of what Super Mario bros on the NES did for platemors at the time, Mario 64 did the same. But I came into the 64 train late, So I don't have what you call: Super Mario 64 memories. In fact my first 3d Mario game was the next game we'll be looking at: Super Mario Sunshine on the GameCube. Jaune's expression darkened as he smiled hurmlousy. "But that can wait. Oh it can wait." The tone of his voice was bitter and venomous.

Everyone laughed now knowing the context of Jaune's anger towards video games.

"Alright booting the game up and the first thing you see is Mario's head. You know to really hammer in that this is Mario's first 3d adventure. You can even fuck around with the face a bit but it doesn't really effect the game it's just there for fun.

We're also greeted by Mario's new voice, provided by Charles Margent. Shockingly this isn't his debut as the Jumpman, that was in Mario Fundamental, a Pc game released a year before. Pretty sure no one heard of it before someone did a document on it.

"This idea of a floating Mario head, perhaps more infamously in Mario teaches typing two. A floating deformed head pop on the screen.

"Hey? Are you ready for Mario type?" It asked.

"Mother of God." Jaune deadpan in horror.

"Despite the new voice, Mario doesn't speak much. It's mostly hiyas woohoos throughout the game. And he only speaks a full phase when he completes a goal or he falls asleep on the job. It shows the red clad mario on the ground sleeping.

"Ha spatgai, Ha ravioli." The plumber mutters in his sleep.

Nora drools over the names of food. They sound pretty good right now.

"Charles as Mario is so absorbed into my head I can't imagine anyone else doing the role. It's not like the acting is amazing or anything, he's been voicing Mario for nearly 20 years at this point. If Charles stepped out of the role for any reason, the next guy would just try to simulate Charles' voice.

"It's weird that way," Ren piped up, "No matter what happens people are going to remember the original no matter how much the new one tries to be the old one.

"Hear hear ninja boy" Qrow cheered a bit and took a swig of his beer.

"Okay nearly forgot that I was looking at a video game, Sorry about that. Well let's look at that plot shall we?"

"I'm curious to hear about the kind of story this game might have," Ozpin said as he crosses his legs.

"Boswer kidnaps Princess Peach, Mario must go save her, now that didn't take long now did it?"

Ozpin blinked and sat back in his seat, a bit disappointed.

"I'll let it slide this time since they probably wanted to keep it safe for the first game in 3d. Hell, the menu theme is the main theme for the series."

Qrow snorts. "Fair enough. I guess you can't expect these guys to be that ballsy."

The entire game is set in Peach's castle. Boswer has taken the power star, which I believe gives the castle power? Jaune shrugged. I dunno what they do, it's not really explain and getting more powerstar allows you to get into more levels, and that's the name of the game here. Bowser had set up routine courses in painting.

"The courses tend to varies but nothing here gets too crazy like other Mario games. It's not until late game you go to more odd place like in a clocktower or riding rainbow.

"The game's openness is the first thing you'll take note of in Mario 64. You can start a mission with a hint on what to do,but there is nothing stopping you from just doing a different mission and grabbing the star despite not being the mission you clicked on.

There are a handful of expectations like racing against against Koopa the quick who not gonna show up unless you chose his mission, but most of the time you can go at it on your own pace. Eh, I didn't wanna fight King Bo-mb yet, I want free the chain chomp and get the star there. I could take down King twop, or I could do a well place jump and get this unrelated power star. And that's where a lot of Mario's replay value comes in, not just getting the power star but how you get them.

"Oh, this game sounds fun! I should get it if we ever get out of here." Nora exclaimed.

"With what money Nora?" Jaune asked. Nora looked at Jaune with a wide smile. "No." Jaune deadpan. Nora pouted at his response and turned to Ren with a wide smile.

"No Nora. And do not ask Weiss either." Ren said with his eyes still on the screen and Nora pouted again.

Peach's castle acts as a hub world, the place you're exploring and using to get to other stages to get more power stars. But in order to duke it out with Bowser, you need to get a certain amount of power stars to access the level. As a guy who doesn't care for hub worlds I don't mind Peach's castle. The levels aren't too far apart and there are things you can do in the castle that can help you increase your star count. Like a secret race track that gives you two stars if you're fast enough, or an underwater level that contains an easy to get star. It challenges you in a way that makes it still feel like a Mario game.

"It sounds pretty easy at first glance, but I can understand how annoying it can become if you mess up at least once or twice." Jaune says. Ruby, Nora, and even Ren nod in agreement.

The biggest change to the formula was the jump to 3d, like with Ocarina of Time. He still has to break boxes, stomp on enemies, the works but this game gave the man a few extra moves to go along with the change to 3d. The analog stick is used to move Mario, the further you tilled it the faster he moves, instead of the run button we knew from the past game. Mario still has the jumps he's famous for, but pressing the jump button can allow Mario to reach the heights he's never seen until this game without a power up. He can crouch and crawl but I've only used this a total of once. But you standstill and jump you can do a backflip, and if you crouch and run you can do a long jump which I love using so much and because you can do some real fancy shit with it, and it makes Mario move faster to boot. If you snap the anlong back and jump he can do a somersault and if you jump towards a wall, Mario can wall jump as well.

Nora makes a face at the detailed review. "All these moves and stuff sound annoying. Why can't games be as simple like they are now?!"

Ren sighs and begins to explain but Qrow cuts in. "It's because of games like these were like test models that you get to play the good quality games you have now. I remember playing Soaring Ninja back when he was literally unplayable and useless. Now look at him!"

Ruby and Yang gasp, Soaring Ninja was unplayable?

"I wouldn't be surprised if this move came from the gameboy version of Donkey kong. That remake has a fucklord of levels and a handstand jump for Mario. He still takes damage if he falls too far, so he's just a pale imitation. Jaune had Mario wall jump a wall to prove a point. "The Mario I know could fall from any height and take no dam-" Jaune cut himself off his eyes widening when he heard Mario grunt in pain and his health go down a bit. "WHAT THE FUCK! He took damage from a large height! Mario! What's the meaning of this?" He asked in bewilderment, looking at the floating Mario head from earlier."

"Oh nice computer you have here. Can I have it?" the Mario head asked

"No!" Jaune exclaimed.

Everyone's eyes widened at the scene. Ozpin checked his mug with scrutiny to see if he was still drinking the right drink. Looked normal enough.

"Peach's castle has 120 power stars in the castle, but you only need 70 of them to beat the game." Jaune had a strained smile on his face as he continued. But where the fun in just getting 70 power star and beating the game that way, it not like getting all the star is that time com- for fuck sakes yes it is!"

"Let's just get one thing clear, I fucking depise the 100 coin misson. It's as simple as it sounds, grab 100 coins and then grab the star that appears over your head. Lather rinse repeat, for all 15 courses. In a game that usually has you go to once place and grab the star, collecting these coins brings the game to grueling crawl. Mario 64 doesn't have a checkpoint system. It doesn't bother me much. The levels are usually small and with Mario's new moves getting the Power star is not only comartable, it's also pretty fucking fun. And then their these." That venomous tone from before came back. The screen showcased the blue coins that have appeared throughout most of the video so far.

"Aw it's one of those games! The type that needs you to waste your time actually going through all of what the game has planned for you before you get to the final boss! What a rip off!" Qrow exclaims, tossing his hands in the air. Jaune agrees, crossing his arms and trying not to join in on the rage.

"No amount of looking of cute puppies. can cotain the amount of rage i have when I fuck up these mission with a impeferct jump or when a enemey hits me from behind. It's not always a painful process, but sucks so hard cause the coins are either place so far part or because they're so goddamn scarce! "Gotta kill those enemies before the coins blink away and scatter when they spawn. These blue coins are 5 regular coin a piece but you gotta get them before they blink away and you only got one shot! Was there area I didnt search, an enemy I skipped, I did I fuck up somewhere since I only have 64 coins after look around what feels like for fucking ever?!

"And try not get the last coin in a dangerous area or impossible to backtrack to. The star will always appear right above Mario's head, so make sure it's a safe locati-GODDAMN!"

The star had appeared in a caged area that Mario couldn't reach.

Everyone laughed at the other Jaune's misery. The Arf viewing the screen feels relieved that he himself isn't on the receiving end. Or was he?

"Couldn't just tell the star to come to you Mario?" Jaune asked the Mario head on his computer.

"When a moon hits your eye, like a big pizza pie, that's amore!" Mario began to sing and Jaune facepalm when he didn't get answered. "When an eel lunges out…

"UNGAI?!" Jaune jumping up. A eel appeared and let out a roar and Jaune wasn't in his chair anymore, It being left spinning by how fast he booked it.

"That's amore!" Mario finished singing and chuckled. Get it? Amore eel? I said funny.

"Fuck you!" Jaune said from somewhere in the house.

All the immature audience members fell out of their seats in laughter while the more mature chuckled at the scene.

At the end of the day, I really shouldn't be going for all the Power star, and that's more of a technical issue, but I'm gonna bitch anyway. But despite the age, this game is still a treat to play even today. This has been Somecallmejohnny, and you guys have a Good Day.

Nora stretches and yawns. "Well, that was a nice one. Funny too! I wonder what's next?"

The end

[pinnochiro]

pinn reviews - final fantasy xv

a long ramble about final fantasy fifteen that sort of looks like a review, as written by someone who finished the game fifteen minutes ago and needs to get these words out of his head. spoilers inbound.

i'm a pretty big fan of video games. i don't know what my first was, but it was probably either banjo and kazooie or mario kart 64, at my cousin's house when i was very small. i think that video games as a medium are so interesting, since the fact that video games are inherently interactive changes the way that they tell any story. it's a shame that despite loving video games so much, i'm absolutely terrible at them.

i'm absolute dogshit at video games. whenever i boot up something new, i always play on easy mode because. i'm that bad. unfortunately, this means that a lot of video games are simply. impossible for me to beat. that's fine, as at the moment i live with my good friend lizz, who is certifiably Good at Video Games, and so we've been playing video games together for a little bit now. typically this means that she will actually play the majority of the game while i sit with her and watch, but occasionally i'll have a go, but she'll end up with the controller as soon as a boss fight or puzzle or a mechanic i just can't seem to grasp shows up. we recently played through the entirety of the kingdom hearts series together, and this was an absolute blast of a time. i'm glad to say that i adore kingdom hearts now, and it's become one of my hyperfixations, which you might be able to tell from my icon. but we'd finished the kingdom hearts series, and we were left to move onto something else. we'd also played final fantasy 7 remake, so in my wisdom, i suggested that we play another final fantasy game.

we looked through the ff games that were already purchased on our consoles thanks to lizz's uncle, and eventually, we decided that we should play. all of them. however to start, we were going to play final fantasy xv, 15, and work our way backwards through the mainline, single-player games.

i'd heard that xv wasn't very good, but honestly, i was still quite curious. one person who i'd been following on twitter for years was pretty obsessed with the main party members, to the point where i knew their names and what-not even though i didn't have much of an idea what the game itself was about. i remember watching a video by supereyepatchwolf a few years ago about how the game sucked, but i couldn't remember much of the details, and i knew, based on my obsession with kingdom hearts, that xv had started as a different game called final fantasy versus xiiv. i don't know all the details about versus thirteen, but i do know that it was originally helmed by the creator of my beloved kingdom hearts, mr tetsuya nomura, and that after many years, the vast majority of the game was thrown out, nomura wasn't in charge any more, and the whole thing was rewritten and reworked, which sounds like a fairly rough development cycle. but so what, i don't care about gameplay. i want to play the video game with those cute guys that i see fanart of on twitter, and lizz seemed happy enough to play through it with me.

and so we started final fantasy xv. i've been told that since the game was practically dead on arrival, they threw in a bunch of new content and reworked a lot of the early game before i got my hands on it. so my gameplay started with a scene of the four guys fighting some demon dude on fire and they're all old and grotty. whatever, that cutscene ends and we're put into a combat tutorial. that's over and we're on the road in what looks to be central america, pushing a car.

our four leading lads are noctis, the prince of the lucis empire, his best friend prompto, his bodyguard, gladio, and his chef and other things, ignis. i do quite like the main four members of the party in xv. prompto is quite easily my favourite, voiced by robbie daymond of goro akechi fame and with a bunch of fun little animations and quips that make him very likeable. he gets extremely excited at the idea of riding chocobos and has what i considered the best scene of the game, where he and noctis meet on a motel rooftop and discuss prompto's imposter syndrome, since he's only part of noctis' official retinue as his best friend. noctis is a fairly typical main protagonist, he's in love with a woman he hasn't seen in eight years and needs to go marry her or something, i don't care. gladio is a tough macho man with a mullet who wears leather jackets and wields a greatsword, and is apparently only 22, which is at least 10 years younger than i assumed. ignis is a strategist and chef, who takes on the most authoritative role and constantly tells noctis to not drive his car at night. i was not a fan of ignis at the start, but he grew on me, especially with how hard the game hit me with his personal arc. the four boys are off, driving to noctis' wedding in a different country across the desert when their car breaks down. we then run into the first issue of the game.

cindy is a mechanic. she also has her ass and tits out constantly, like your sleazy uncle's shirt with a naked woman was instead semi-alive as a video game person. she fixes your car and acts fairly sexual and it's just like. why do we have to do this. aren't we over overtly sexualised women in video games who have no reason for the way they dress other than the character designer was horny? whatever, i like women as much as the next guy, but cindy's design just. makes me feel so uncomfortable.

anyways you get to do a little driving around with the boys, until you stay the night before catching the boat to your fiance. overnight, you find out that noctis' kingdom has been basically destroyed by an invading empire called niflheim, and practically everyone noctis knows, including his father, are dead. you learn that noctis and his bride to be are also assumed dead, with noctis hearing his own death announcement on the radio. the game has a bunch of added cutscenes that are actually footage from the three-hour-long prequel movie that came out after the game, are extremely hard to follow and honestly i had no idea what i was looking at. anyways, noctis' family is dead, so it's time to do some hunting sidequests.

that brings us to the combat, i suppose. rather than the turn-based or even active turn-based combat that the series is known for, xv opts for more modern action rpg-styled combat. i was, naturally, terrible at this, but i managed to get around it with the fact that. it is almost impossible to die in this video game, provided you have enough items. the game allows you so much time to heal yourself that there's practically no way to have your entire party wipe unless you're doing absolutely terrible, and even then, your party members will probably try and heal you themselves before that happens. lizz tells me that the combat is boring, you just push the same button over and over and then you win. i do appreciate that, for someone like me who is terrible at reading enemy movements, there is a giant button that pops up on screen that tells you when to push the block button, but even then i was prone to fucking it up. whether that's the bad game design or my terrible gaming abilities is up to you to decide. anyways, the game is fairly easy but has annoying combat, your teammates limit breaks will only land about 50% of the time (or never, if you are gladio) and i was still bad at it, so i didn't have all that much fun.

instead of an active levelling system, the game will only tally your character's level ups when you either make camp or visit a hotel. camping is, in my opinion, the only saving grace of this game. each time you make camp, you get to see the characters doing fun little camping activities together and just hanging out, ignis will cook up a new meal in a dramatic fashion and everyone will compliment him and eat it off their coleman's branded plates, it's just very fun. you also get to see what pictures prompto has taken, which is one of my favourite gameplay features. prompto's passion is photography, and while i support him in this wholeheartedly, his picture taking skills are, quite frankly, awful. the game will randomly take shots while you're on the move, which leaves you with a delightful selection of awkward poses, characters hidden behind bushes, pictures taken while someone is half-dead in combat, and snaps where the natural lighting absolutely makes it impossible to tell what's going on. it's hilarious and going through prompto's collection of photos each night is honestly the best part of the game. we managed to wind up with a few shots that, even despite being scripted events, turned out absolutely terrible, and i will cherish those forever.

anyways, since noctis' father and fiance are dead, that leaves him the king of lucis. the only important person to make it out of the capital alive tells you to drive to the middle of nowhere, where he randomly springs on you. hey. go into a bunch of these dungeons and absorb a bunch of swords, this is your destiny as king and how you will defeat the empire. noctis goes, uh, alright i guess, and you're set loose again to wander around for a bit collecting the 'royal arms'. this plot point wasn't explained well but hey, whatever, we're collecting the glowy swords and that's fine.

you're introduced at some point to ardyn, the main antagonist. he's old, kind of groady and wears a fedora. he's a dick to you and talks about his automobeeel. apparently my friend miri thinks he's hot, she is wrong.

i can't remember what happens specifically but you're told that your fiance is still alive and in fantasy venice, and she's talking to the gods on your behalf to borrow their powers. there's a mission where you follow some purple trees that are electric, and you do that i guess. i enjoyed riding the chocobos around, but couldn't care much for the plot at this point. ardyn leads you to a volcano, where you fight a giant lava god. he tries to step on you and i, a denizen of the internet and with an active fear of foot fetishists, was extremely uncomfortable. noctis becomes friends with foot man and a lightning god who lived in those trees, and ardyn steals your car.

very upset by this, noctis and his gang risk everything to sneak into a military base and steal it back. because this is a video game, this works out fine.

there's a little mining city which is all about Girl Power, because all the Women run the Mining Industry like Girl Bosses, and you hang around there for a bit. because all the women are so Empowered, they wear bikinis all the time with overalls over the top. gladio decides he needs to fuck off for a bit, i have no idea what he does since i haven't played the dlc, and then he comes back with another scar. you hang out with his sixteen year old sister, who has a crush on the engaged and 20-year old noctis, and then you drive her to a lighthouse. when she's in your party, she can't really fight, but she gets a pink chocobo and i thought that was very cute. we turned out own chocobo white and lizz named him 'jones' after a mount she has in ffxiv.

eventually, you have a long boat ride over to fantasy venice. this is the part where the game stops being 'fun with a few issues in combat and a rushed and poorly told story.' the open world, which was a main feature with a bunch of little areas to find where noctis can fish, little hunting sidequests and random photo spots where prompto takes touristy photos, is now gone, and it will not return for the entire rest of the game. you can 'go back in time', but the open world was the most enjoyable part of the game, and it kind of really sucks that the main story doesn't let you have any more freedom like that.

after arriving in fantasy venice, you have a talk with fantasy hillary clinton and beg her to let your girlfriend summon a god into the middle of her city. hillary agrees, and you don't get to meet up with your fiance, because even if the game is constantly telling you how much noctis loves her, there is. barely any interactions between the two in the entire game. from what i can tell, they met when noctis was a child and they haven't seen each other in ten years but are still fantasy dog pen-pals. noctis marrying her was supposed to make an alliance or something like that, but her brother has betrayed her to the army. noctis' girlfriend is also an oracle, which means she can heal people, i guess? everyone talks about how important she is and she's constantly telling people that she needs to use her powers to help noctis but she's practically a non-entity.

as can be expected of most female love interests in a game primarily focused on men, noctis' fiance is killed while summoning a god for noctis to befriend. noct gets very mad about this, and turns super saiyan and kills the god back, but his girlfriend is dead and that's super sad you guys. there's a beautiful prerendered cutscene where she says goodbye to noctis but since we barely know her, and we've only been told over and over that they're in love without anything to actually well, show this, it didn't have much of an impact. fantasy venice is destroyed, and ignis is blinded while trying to help calm the giant raging god.

iggy's blindness and how the game makes you account for this and grow to care for him was one of the highlights, in my opinion, as well as crushingly depressing. while i'm not disabled and have no right to say if this was 'good disabled representation' or anything like that, i believe that the game handles it decently enough. the group falls apart as noctis is upset about his girlfriend, gladio is extremely mad that noctis won't care for ignis, and prompto just wants everyone to get along. there's a mission where gladio constantly yells at you passive aggressive things to noctis about how he's a cunt for running, which is obnoxious, but the character arc itself is fairly strong. when you make camp, ignis can't cook anymore, so everyone eats cup noodles in a depressing ass cutscene. ignis remains in your party for the rest of the game despite his disability, and he doesn't magically regain his sight like other fantasy media would do, which at the very least i think is good. i'm not sure what the opinion of actual disabled people is of the character, considering how often disabled characters are either turned into misery porn to make the abled audience be glad that isn't them and if ignis' arc falls into this trap, but i hope that it wasn't handled too poorly, as that would just be another terrible mark in this game's list of bad moves.

the characters eventually make it to the evil empire's capital, which is abandoned and filled with daemons. the characters learn that ardyn is super evil and taught the king of the empire how to turn humans into daemons, which has now happened to the entire city. the 'magitek suits', presumed to be enchanted armour that fights as the empire's infantry, actually house the souls of the human-turned daemons. honestly i like this as a plot point but the game handles it pretty terribly. there could have been more lead up to this, the explanation is pretty lacking, and prompto's Big Plot Twist is. terribly handled. turns out that prompto was born in the empire and was going to be one of those empty soldier daemons, but he was rescued by people belonging to noctis' empire. not that the game tells you that. instead, prompto goes 'turns out i'm one of ... them' and Does Not Elaborate. The game doesn't tell you shit, not about prompto's past, not about how he feels about this, not about how anyone else feels about this either because the other party members just go 'oh that sucks, good thing you're not evil' and the scene ends. robbie daymond tries so hard to sell these terrible, terrible lines, and it almost entirely fails, i'm so sorry prompto. fortunately because i'm a nosy ass, i read prompto's wikia page and knew the plot twist ahead of time, because i don't think i would have even registered it if i didn't.

anyways everyone in the evil empire is dead and ardyn starts talking about how he's immortal and an ancient king of noctis' country but the gods thought he sucked because he's too evil. i missed most of this because the cats got the zoomies and were dashing across the couch right in the middle of his speech so i can't tell you anything else. noctis tries to get a big magic crystal to fight him and instead. gets schlorped inside.

TEN YEARS LATER

yes then ten years actually pass while noctis is asleep. the game shows this by switching the head on noctis' character model to have a beard, but that's it, no changes in animations or whatever. the sky is permanently night and only one human civilisation remains, the rest destroyed by daemons. as a plot point, this ends up feeling. extremely worthless. why was noctis asleep for ten whole goddamn years? so we can wake up and go 'damn it sucks out here'. but it's barely even a like, incentive to fix everything, because you have a long talk with a former child you were friends with where he talks about how humanity is still going fine and everyone's okay and the world has moved on without you. it feels. pointless. when you meet up with your party members, they are exactly as you left them, only with slightly different character models. there is no change in the voice performance, the character's movements or how they talk to show that they've been without you for ten years. they barely mention it. i'm just. so confused as to why they decided that a ten year timeskip was the way to go? since nothing really changes, couldn't you have made it like, two years? one year? six months?? have the characters react a little more? something??? at least if it was only a year or so i wouldn't have to deal with the fact that noctis looks like norman reedus with his shitty facial hair now.

anyways after that there's a bunch of long and boring boss fights. you fight some dead kings for some reason, your party members get a little bit to talk about how cool they are and how much they love noctis, and then you meet up with ardyn. there's another boring boss fight and god this was only a few hours ago but it's already gone from my head. you summon the gods and the old kings to beat the shit out of him after you both go super saiyan again? there's incredible music but it feels barely earned and just kind of eh. anyways, noctis dies, which was the price of using the crystal of light or whatever the fuck. his ghost marries his fiance's ghost finally, and they smile as they look at one of prompto's pictures. you can pick any picture you want to go here, and then the credits roll, showing all of the pictures you saved of prompto's shots. showing me all the pictures at the end is honestly lovely, but it really only served to remind me of how much more fun the game was in the first half. and that's the end, of final fantasy xv.

so what did i think of the story? it's terribly cobbled together and struggles to get you to feel anything and play out all the plot beats. you feel awful for the countless employees who spent years working on the beautiful cutscenes only to have them be in this game, which sucks and the story barely gets through. there were parts that i enjoyed, mostly the thing about the daemons being people, but honestly the rest of it is a mess. it's hard to follow at the best of times and just awkward and terribly written at the worst. the ending is cheap, and it doesn't feel like you've actually accomplished anything. i left that game feeling numb and empty, sad that i'd wasted so much time to end up with such a colossal failure of a conclusion.

i had fun with the game when it was my four little guys running around doing sidequests and camping together. after the midway point of the game, there's none of that, and you're bogged down into a plot that just pushes you from point a to point b and boring overlong bossfight to boring overlong bossfight. the character moments between your party are a lot of fun, but the second you hit fantasy venice, everything is pretty much on rails and you can't do anything except what the game tells you explicitly to do.

should you play this game? no lol. if anything i've mentioned about the story interests you, you'll be better off watching a lore video or reading the wiki. if you do want to play it after all that, just don't proceed after the myrthril refining quest, it's pretty much all downhill from there. will i play the dlc? unlikely, i think lizz and i will just watch a cutscene movie of those.

this game left me feeling empty and numb and not in a fun way. i wanted, so, so hard to like this game, and it all crashed around me in a beautifully overproduced and confusingly written cascade. i love you prompto, but even your cute little freckly face and terrible photography can't save this trainwreck of a game.

tl;dr - final fantasy xv sucks. i hope that 13, our next ff game, will be better.

[journeyman-vance]

World of Light and Why it Worries Me

So Super Smash Bros Ultimate has revealed World of Light as its Adventure mode. Because of this, I’d like to take the time to touch on Adventure Modes across the Smash Bros timeline. Smash 64 all the way up to Smash Ultimate. Most of the focus will likely end up on Subspace Emissary considering it was the lengthiest Adventure Mode in the series to date. If my ramblings don’t bore you, read on!

So the Super Smash Bros series began on the Nintendo 64 or N64 for short. While this opened the door to the beauty of a platform fighter combining all of Nintendo’s characters in fun and interesting ways, it came viewed through a kind of garbage lens. I will always be the first to say without fear of consequence that the N64 looked, and played more often than not, kind of like trash. Everything’s blocky and pointy, physics are weird, and all because of hardware limitations. The adventure mode in this game suffers because of it.

In Smash 64, fully titled simply Super Smash Bros and shortened for a less confusing overall statement, the Adventure mode is called as it is. It’s an Adventure mode, big whoop. The stages are all loosely based on the fighters with the only memorable one being the F-Zero stage on the track. The rest is merely fighting and other minor modes. Race to the Finish isn’t even all that great! All in all, it gets somewhere around a 5/10 for trying and being passable.

Super Smash Bros Melee was a great step forward in almost all areas and it shows today based solely upon the love that’s still showered upon it. The Adventure Mode is equally good! The stages are not only based off the fighters, but give you certain objectives based on the fighters too! Get to the flagpole in a Mario themed sidescroller, Find the TriForce inside a Legend of Zelda dungeon, Escape up the chute in a Metroid style Escape sequence! It’s great! 9/10, great effort.

Then.. Oh boy... Super Smash Bros Brawl came out on the Wii. What a mess. The action is slow, the game doesn’t look that great, you could slap an early 2000′s era brown filter on it and no one would probably bat an eye! They actively took out characters from previous entries! Dr. Mario, how I missed you in those days. Because of this, at first, I hated Subspace Emissary. Looking back on it now, I’ve basically reversed that opinion with everyone else... But it still does things that I hate!

Now, I understand that the story does more with the fighters themselves. They’re expressive, they have goals and dreams, the bad guys are actively bad guys.. But that’s where I see the greatness end! Tell me, real honest like.. WHERE ARE WE!? Last I checked, an Emissary is a title that a person has and Subspace is probably that place that the black holes open up into! So we’re not in the Subspace Emissary. We are literally set in generic-land. Any character that is placed in a remotely symbolic setting is hardly connected at all! Pit? Uh.. Cloud land. Ice Climbers? Some mountain somewhere! Diddy Kong? NAMELESS JUNGLE! Why are these characters here and what purpose do they serve in existing in these places?

Now, you can argue that Smash Bros always takes place in the Imagination of toys trying to reach the real world like Sakurai said.. But it doesn’t hold up in Subplot Employee. The end fight is against Tabuu who’s trying to turn the fighters into nothing more than useless trophies for.. Some reason. There are those people who theorize that Tabuu is just Sakurai begging to put down the Smash Bros series so it doesn’t kill him, but I don’t see it. It’s a fight for survival in a generic setting against an invading force. They do get points for making up a big roster of interesting looking enemies though. 4/10 Not enough symbolism. If I want to give reasons to why my characters are fighting each other or exploring spaces, I’ll either make it up myself or go play Smash Run respectively.

Speaking of, Smash 4 or Super Smash Bros for 3DS and Super Smash Bros for WiiU are each their own little dumpster fire when it comes to this topic. Neither of them even have Adventure Mode! The closest you get is specific difficulties of Classic Mode because Master Hand turns into a cloud of mosquitoes or something at the end. Instead we get Smash Run, 7/10 for being plenty of fun despite having no story, and Smash board game, 3/10. Smash board game is so boring and plain that I even forgot its name. I’ve played it maximum 5 times, 3 if I’m remembering incorrectly. It’s got three maps, but they’re all boring. The characters have no personality, the whole thing is just a bit bland, honestly it’s a good thing the rest of the game is so good. I’ve played hours of Smash 4 and I love it. This is the sole reason to get a WiiU. Once Smash Ultimate comes out, it’ll probably fade into obscurity.

Speaking of Super Smash Bros Ultimate, or Smash Ultimate for short, I’m worried. Sure, some of trailer footage looks to be based around some of the games the fighters are from, but I’m not sure. There was a lava area with what looked like a New Super Mario Bros U sorta vibe to the pathways. There was a ruins sort of location that could be either Kid Icarus or Legend of Zelda or, hell, even Fire Emblem themed. The cinematic that showed World of Light to begin with is freaking beautiful and I love it.. But it doesn’t tell me enough! Could Sakurai be bluffing and deliberately hiding the story from us? I don’t care, someone PLEASE give me Simon Belmont to play as! I want to whip some fools SO BADLY! December 7th cannot come fast enough.

If the numbers in the ratings seem a little arbitrary, that’s because they are. This is an opinion piece, don’t think about it too hard, okay?

[ahntravels]

Day два.

Day 2. Woke up and completely forgot I was in St. Petersburg for a moment. My bed at home is  a queen, and the bed at this hotel is for a tiny person (in fact, I think my bed at ND was larger...) Anyway, I rolled over as per usual, and completely rolled off the bed. 

I never would have thought, in my wildest dreams, I would one day wake up in Russia. Here’s to just pulling the trigger and making it happen. 

Today, as mentioned yesterday, is Hermitage day. I didn’t know what exactly to expect, except all blogs mentioned to a) buy your ticket in advance (online) and b) get there early. The museum opens at 10, and I had planned on getting there at 10, except halfway through the 20 minute walk I realized I forgot my wallet and visa so I had to go walk back to the hotel and then walk back again, basically adding another 30 minutes to my trip. I arrived around 10:30.

I will say, walking up to the Winter Palace (Hermitage) was surreal. It’s HUGE. 

Below is the arch you walk through which reveals the mammoth Palace

I’ve seen Buckingham Palace in London and Versailles in Paris. I will say that they are NOTHING compared to the Hermitage Museum in terms of shear size. It’s kind of crazy that those arches completely conceal the Palace until you start to walk through it. Then you see like...part of the Palace, but it’s not until you walk through the arch that there is this instantaneous reveal. Included in the reveal is the shock of just seeing the Palace in full + the huge size of it spanning your vision across the X-axis + all the blue sky and empty space that just silences you for a moment. 

SIDE NOTE: For whatever stupid, immature reason, every time I think of the “reveal”, I think of that scene from Mario 64 when you’re running towards a photo of the Princess and it turns out to be Bowser. No, I’m not drunk, don’t ask me why I think of these things at the most random times. And yes, I did spend 15 minutes searching for this photo collage. 

Anyway. I am sure the Winter Palace is GORGEOUS during winter. The acoustics of the space when it’s covered in snow must be like...next level. I’m sure St. Petersburg during the winter is amazing. 

If you want a history lesson on the Hermitage, the Hermitage website has a great timeline. Again, as with the other blogs, I’m not going to be going into detail about images of the place or the history of the pieces exhibited. So many other blogs have done it so much better and I’m not going to butcher that. I’ll just mention a few things that stuck out to me, and you can Google around and figure it out.

I will say that if you do visit, I can offer a couple of tips you may want to follow.

1) The map. The map is confusing but not. You’ll just find yourself getting annoyed because, when you know where you are going, the gaggle of tourists and tourist groups will spin you around and suddenly you forget which way is which. Because the museum is HUGE (I saw maybe 1/8th of the museum in 4-5 hours?) you have to prioritize what to see. Keep in mind that, as time elapses, the museum becomes more and more inundated with the dreaded tourist groups, basically making your chances of getting a clear photo of anything nill. 

2) Tourists (a.k.a. the “Boos”). See the map below. The Hermitage has 3 floors. Below is a floor plan of probably the most popular floor, thanks to Mr. da Vinci and many of the decorative palace rooms (amongst other exhibits):

The good thing is that the map kind of pulls out the most famous exhibits and shows you what room they are in. This makes your job of figuring out where you need to go to cross out those items from your bucket list easy. The bad part: The enemy (a.k.a. tourists groups a.k.a. “boos”) also know where these pieces are and are racing as well to find them. The good news: the boos are with tourist groups and have to wait until the tour guide guides them to the room with the exhibit. So, you have time to beat them to it and snag the photo if you are quick. 

Just like in Mario, as time progresses and you aren’t being proactive, more and more of these guys are going to flood the Museum and follow you and clog up the exhibits. So, how do you win? I suggest getting to the museum first thing, then IMMEDIATELY source those famous exhibits, get your photos, then start at the beginning. Most of the tourists are going to be spending a large portion of their time taking photos of the great hall, which leaves you time to sneak past. Case in point:

The line to da Vinci. It was actually way worse a bit earlier when I came around again. I managed to get there early enough and snagged a decent photo:

In general, just like Versailles, the rooms are huge and ornate and absolutely beautiful. I was standing by a window, looking out into the courtyard from what was probably a ballroom in the palace, and thought to myself who else, years ago, was gazing forlornly (or with happiness, or deep in thought) out this same window.

I think that is the most magical part about these palace museums: people LIVED here. People also died here, were executed, fell in love, gave birth, went mad. And when you see relics of those like ridiculous looking Russian uniforms or weird trinkets from decades past, you have to remember that, no, these weren’t fashioned after film props, but film props fashioned after the real living thing. And the real living thing from 100+ years ago is right in front of you. 

It’s pretty spectacular. 

Oh, so this was exciting: The were having a temporary exhibit, and it was REMBRANDT!! Mike! I’m sure you have seen most of these because they sourced the pieces from the Leiden collection...maybe you have seen some of these at the Frick?

Anyway, there was NO PHOTOGRAPHY so I couldn’t really snag photos of pieces specifically. 

I did find myself in a Jean-Baptiste while lost in the French wing:

I didn’t and couldn’t wander the halls for the full 4-5 hours straight. I took a couple of breaks, grabbing a coffee at the cafe for 15 minutes before trying again. I do suggest you break up your visit to the Hermitage into two days; it really is the only way to not feel like your brain is going to explode. 

Afterwards, I took a walk outside by the water behind the Palace. 

Gratuitous selfie. That’ll be two hundred rubles. 

At this point, I had about 2.5 hours to kill before I needed to make my way to the Mariinsky Theater for the performance. So, I did what anyone should do, and that is wander around and picked up a snack to munch on (sorry, no photo of munchies).

There were people painting on the lawn, and I meant to come back and scope out the progress, but became distracted so I didn’t. I did manage to view a live performance (there are performers EVERYWHERE) and I’ll have to post in a separate blog entry because I still can’t figure out how to take the video from my phone and stick it here. 

I stopped at a progressive burger joint (in terms of menu options) for my “snack” (I didn’t eat breakfast despite my large leftovers still sitting in the refrigerator) and ate one of these guys sans burger sauce:

It’s essentially a falafal burger with cucumbers and halved grape tomatoes inside. The bun was my least favorite part (larger in circumference than the patty, which drives me INSANE) so I ditched it angrily. The bun and the burger should be the same size, and the patty should be thicker than each half of the bun. If the top bun is thicker than the patty, the bun is trash. BESIDES THAT ISSUE, the patty was actually really flavorful, and the veggies were (surprise!) slightly pickled. I wasn’t a huge fan of the background of dill I tasted, but that’s fine. The lunch hit the spot and I felt alive again. 

I know, call me a hypocrite for yelling about wasting food and here I am ditching a perfectly good bun. Well, arguably it wasn’t perfectly good, but I did take a bite and decided I much preferred the insides. Whatever. To quote Trump, “Who cares, we won!”

ASHLEY SIDE NOTE: It’s actually been great being overseas, because I have been shielded from all the US politics. However, I did catch a headline today and I mistakenly checked out Trump’s interview and wow...glad I am over here.

Eventually, I made my way to the theater via Uber (there is no Lyft here, and taxis are a little...shady. And slow. And expensive). I will have to comment on Russian driving (or, driving in Russia):

1) It’s nuts. Nuttier than cabbies and NYC driving. Nuttier than driving in France. Probably not nuttier than driving in Vietnam or other places where you are competing with scooters and cars, but it’s still pretty nutty.

2) However, I noticed that they do one thing correctly and without anger that we don’t do in America, and that is merging. In Russia, they utilize the “zipper merge” technique quite patiently and diligently, which, after taking 3 Ubers and cursing under my breath at the “assholes” who merged at the last minute, I realized that this was common and drivers didn’t sweat it. 

“Those apparently rude drivers are putting more of the roadway to use and thus helping speed things along, in much the same way water flows faster through a funnel than through a straw.”

3) There is no bus lane or real lanes in general (I mean, there are lines painted in the road but people disregard them) and cars are just weaving in and out, trying to avoid buses, bikers, etc. And everyone drives stick, so it can get a little rough at times.

Anyway, I manged to get to the theater at the nick of time (traffic is TERRIBLE) and had decent balcony seating:

The Mariiinsky Theater isn’t huge, but the acoustics are really good. The ballet itself was really interesting. Interesting in the sense that this performance, in terms of skill, seemed to be this mix of gracefulness and like...cirque du soleil. I haven’t seen many ballets, but the ones I have seen did not showcase these magnificent bouts of exaggerated athleticism as performed by these dancers (i.e. 360 degree turns ad infinitum, Labron Jamesesque slam dunk vertical leaps, etc). Don’t get me wrong; these dancers are incredible and it was fun to watch them exhibit their unrelenting strength. However, I felt, where the narrative fell short, the shock and awe carried it through.

 I have to be honest and say that I’m not the type to sit through a long, dry opera or ballet, so Le Corsaire broke through any of that fear and was much appreciated. Given we are in the world of #metoo, the plot didn’t really adhere to the moral standard (the narrative is much about the selling of women as slaves, that people of the Middle Eastern ethnicity is less than smart, etc). Yeah, not the best message. However, despite the immature and possibly offensive plot, the artistry was really good...the backgrounds and costumes were beautiful, and the music was moving. I really liked the duo in Act II...I believe it’s the Adagio, but I will have to go back through the soundtrack to figure it out. 

Afterwards, I ate a really light and late dinner and came back to the hotel where I am writing this. It’s past midnight, and I am officially 63 years old!*

Tomorrow, I think i will visit the Faberge museum, then the Anna Akhamatova Museum, then a food market called  the Kuznechny Market where I will try to buy some caviar, THEN bday dinner, then I need to hit the hay because I have a 6AM train out of Russia and into Estonia. I am really feeling sad that my stay in Russia is ending, but excited to see two more countries. 

Until tomorrow!

*I told the waiter today was my birthday, and he said, “Congratulations”. What a curious response. I suppose living is a task, and becoming a year older is like a life promotion.  

[radramblog]

Retro Games WTB

So for reference, this and the last two posts were written on the same night. We went from serious discussion about sensitive and graphic material in media, to silliness about shooty mans, to this. The thing is, I’m going away on a weekend camping trip (Melbourne got delayed again but at least getting to go on this is a silver lining?), and when this post goes up (assuming I figure out how to schedule it right) is the one day where I’m just never at home. The Saturday of a weekend trip. I don’t know if the place is going to have cell signal, and I’m not letting that of all things get in the way of me posting more bullshit.

It’s been a long night.

I was originally going to do, like, a tierlist thing, but staring at the list of these was just depressing. Motherfuckers put Homestuck in the Video Games section multiple times, and I had to stare at the fact that someone went out of their way to make a FNAF shipping tier list. And lots of people played it. Fuck, man.

I don’t know if me talking about a bunch of games I want to buy is actually more interesting, but I’ll be damned if I can’t do that easily and for a lot of words. Plus, it’ll force me to actually come up with a complete list.

(editors note this is ridiculously absurdly long and it has no images it’s just 2.5K words of jack shit and me tiredly trying to make jokes about old games you probably haven’t heard of you’ve been waaaarned)

N64

The prospect of collecting all the N64 games I want is somewhat daunting, especially considering my region-based issues. But I’ve made some solid progress since that one time I talked about my collection (and I cannot be fucked dragging that post up at the moment). I’ve acquired Banjo-Kazooie and a Kirby 64 cart that I sure didn’t know was coming in fucking box.

Anyway. I’d like to pick up Smash 64 at some point, if only for the novelty of it. I’ve played it, like, once? And that was a very long time ago, the first time I ever played an N64 (possibly the only time I even touched a controller before I bought my own), and I wasn’t as mediocre to functional at Smash as I am now. 64 is kind of a whole different animal, though- no competitively viable maps by modern standards and the engine is fucky- every character combos so well that they run 5-stock matches instead of 3.

(From this point on, I’m literally looking at a Wikipedia list of games and picking ones to comment on, so it’s alphabetical)

Banjo-Tooie would be nice, I suppose, but I’ve barely played the first one- let’s maybe do that before I start thinking sequels. I didn’t realise until I actually picked up the game that Kazooie is like, a massive asshole? Extremely rude? Apparently that’s their character trait and I just didn’t know. Banjo seems like such a cool bloke, why does he hang out with them?

Even though I’d never be able to play it, the Australian version of Beetle Adventure Racing actually replaces the titular cars with Holdens, which is fucking hilarious and I need to see it.

I’ve heard a lot about Conker’s Bad Fur Day, that it’s basically Banjo/DK but M rated. I…don’t imagine it’s aged particularly well. Man, remember when he showed up for Project Spark, though? Yeah, me neither.

Donkey Kong 64 is another classic, and I’m sure it’s really good. I have managed to pick up an Expansion Pak, so there’s half the cost of it gone, too. I’ve never actually finished any of the Country games, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t play like one, so. I also never watched the HBomberguy charity marathon, so I am pure and unspoiled as to the grisly details of this jungle bash.

On the one hand, Goldeneye is arguably one of the most iconic FPS games of all time. On the other, it’s not aged particularly well, and I don’t have a cadre of people to hang around being nostalgic for it, because we’re all either younger than this game or barely out-age it. I hope someone reading this feels old now. (sorry)

Even as a Pokemon fanatic, I’m not buying Hey You, Pikachu. That game barely worked with people in the USA, imagine that shitty microphone trying to decipher my accent on fucking N64 hardware. Also it’s pretty lame even if you can get it to work, so.

Majora’s Mask is currently my White Whale, because I want nothing more than to play that game. I’ve heard so much, it sounds and looks so fucking incredible, and as I said I have the Expansion Pak now so I can actually run it. One day, man, one day. Once again I should probably finish Ocarina of Time first, but like, I know I’m going to play this one, so.

I guess Mario Kart 64 would be worth picking up, apparently it’s one of the better ones. I reckon if people showed up to play fucking Beetle Adventure Racing before knowing the game was actually really good, they’ll show up for Mario Kart. I’d rather buy 64 than 8, frankly.

I could barely get any interest in my bootleg-ass copy of Mario Party 3, I’m not going to spend stupid money on the other ones.

Oh, apparently Mega Man Legends came out on the 64 as well? I thought that was just on the Playstation. I mean, people really seem to like that sub-series, but then people also liked Star Force, so I don’t know if I can trust the Mega Man fandom on anything. (MMBN legacy collection when, Capcom)

Yo so there was a Neon Genesis Evangelion game for the N64, and apparently it’s a fighting game? Japan-only, of course, but my console can run those anyway. And like, that sounds funny and cool, I’ll punch Sachiel to death, why the fuck not? Who needs a progressive knife. Congratulations joke.

God Paper Mario is so fucking expensive god damnit

Perfect Dark rounds out the trio of “hey I have the expansion pak now”, but I know substantially less about it. So, maybe?

The Pokemon games I’m missing (and care about) are Snap, Puzzle League, and Stadium 2. I’ll consider Snap if I can find a cheap copy, as I know it’s pretty limited (and the new one just came out), Puzzle League is probably meh, and Stadium 2 sounds fun but I’d need to then buy a GSC cart to get the most out of it and they aren’t cheap. Unless I get a Japanese one, but apparently, they’re only compatible with Japanese Stadium 2 (er, Stadium GS), so I’d have to double down on illegibility.

Oh fuck, right, Star Fox. Man I thought I was going to get away with just talking about Star Wars here (I’ve already got the good ones), but I forgot about fuckin Star Fox 64, aka The Good One. Shit I gotta get that don’t I? Fuck me. At least searching for one will be slightly easier because the PAL version has a different name.

Oh, and Yoshi’s Story looks like a trip and I don’t know if that’s a good thing. Like, this just looks worse than Yoshi’s Island if I’m being honest.

 GBA

I haven’t actually talked about by GBA collection on here have I? TL;DR- it’s a console I’m very nostalgic for, but my collection is lacking because all the carts in Malaysia were bootlegs.

Jesus there’s so many more GBA games than N64 ones. Like, in general, not just on this list.

Advance Wars is a solid maybe, because the carts are super fucking expensive, I’ve never played the series, and the remaster is coming soon. But apparently they’re good? Big shrug energy.

Wow, they made two whole Banjo games for the GBA. Both of these look like shit, though, so fuck it. No wonder I never hear anyone talk about them.

Boktai is an interesting series I’d like to maybe give a shot. It’s a JRPG made by fucking Hideo Kojima, where the cartridge had a light sensor in it to encourage you to play outside by buffing the main character. Which was an interesting choice on the notably not backlit GBA. It also has crossover stuff with something we’ll get into later.

I’ve played Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow to death, and as a result I’d love to pick up a copy of it’s GBA prequel, Aria of Sorrow- it’s apparently almost just as good. I’ve not heard much about the other two GBA Castlevanias, but they’re apparently similarly excellent- a stark comparison to the mediocre to bad N64 ones.

If someone buys me a cartridge of Crazy Frog Racer I will play it and that is a fucking promise.

There are like three whole Fire Emblem games on the GBA, though only two came out in English. I actually have a bootleg of one of them. It’s another one of those ones that are unreasonably expensive because it didn’t sell well and they didn’t make that many as a result, though. So probably not worth getting a real one unless I fall super head over heels for the series- I don’t see that happening soon.

Oh right, Golden Sun. Another JRPG franchise for the GBA. There were a lot of those, huh? Anyway there’s like no way this guy is getting into Smash, don’t get your hopes up.

Harvest Moon is basically Stardew Valley, but older. Two games of it came out on the GBA, and I’m probably not about to commit to buying one of those rather than Stardew. And that game has yet to successfully appeal to me, soooooooo

I have a bootleg of Kirby and the Amazing Mirror, and that’s one of the ones where it probably doesn’t matter at all that it’s a bootleg, so I’m satisfied with it. Don’t have Nightmare in Dream Land, which I’ve played before on emulator and wouldn’t mind retrying, so maybe. I’ve never been massive on remakes if the original is viable, but I don’t have an NES so I’m sure not buying Kirby’s Adventure.

There are two Zelda games on GBA- a port of A Link to the Past which I have, and Minish Cap which I don’t. Minish Cap is very expensive!!! Aah!!!

Yo they ported The Lost Vikings to GBA? Wack. I guess Blizzard gets a shoe in this console’s door, then.

Yeah okay so there are like a million Mario games here, huh. Superstar Saga was the first Mario and Luigi game, and the one of those I’ve played (Partners in Time) was good enough that I’d bite for the original. Or I’d just go buy Bowser’s Inside Story. Mario Kart and Golf on the GBA don’t appeal super hard, and I’ve played Mario Pinball Land (long before that Alpharad Deluxe series), to the point where I don’t feel the need to actually buy it.

Speaking of Alpharad, I played Mario Party Advance on one of my Malaysian Bootlegs long, long before he made that video reminding people it existed. That game actually kind of fucks, for what it’s worth, and since my copy can’t save, I’d consider buying a real one. Assuming that Alpha’s video didn’t lead to a mass buyout or price spike.

Okay, so Mega Man Battle Network is kind of the big one on this list- definitely the White Whale so far, since to my understanding the series had extremely limited release in Australia. I do have a Japanese copy of 4 (Blue Moon) that I picked up because it was like 5 bucks, but A. 4 is godawful relative to the others and B. it’s a JRPG and I can’t read Japanese. But I would Do Things to get copies of 2, 3, or 6. Not so much 1 (because it’s not great), or 5 because I’ve nearly 100%’d the DS version on my flashcart.

Seriously, I’ve considered writing multiple blog posts on this series, I think it’s a super underrated gem. It’s an eSport on GBA for fucks sake! It’s also the series that crossed over with Boktai from earlier- apparently Kojima’s kid was a huge fan, so he got in touch to get some cross-promo content going. Funny how that works.

It’s not like they’re ever going to release Mother 3 anyway. Y’all aren’t even going to let me pay for this game, so you can’t complain if I buy a Chinese bootleg with the fan translation on it. I paid five whole bucks, and if they released it in English for real, I’d easily drop more on it. It’s a 10/10 game.

Oh alright, there’s Pokemon. I’m actually 4/7 on the GBA Pokemon games, which is pretty good considering the price just keeps going up and up. I’ve actually considered making a Living Dex solely in Gen 3- however that would either require all the ones I don’t have (save Pinball) a Gamecube with Colosseum/XD (which I have thought about), or maybe both. A long-term project, for sure, but one I’d enjoy doing.

Apparently the Sonic GBA games are pretty good, save for the infamous remake of the first Sonic game- Sonic Genesis. That is, however, the only one of them I’ve actually played. And for a long time was the only Sonic game I’d ever played. Great first impression, huh? The Marble Zone OST unironically slaps, though.

Yeah okay so there’s like over a hundred games still on this list and I care about, like, none of them. Except maybe some of the Wario games and Yu-Gi-Oh games- and I know some of the latter are complete and utter garbage. Like, I’ve played The Sacred Cards, and that game is genuine shite. I’ve still only played one Yu-Gi-Oh game I’ve liked.

I guess I can close off this wall of text by saying I want to get a GBA flashcart so I can run romhacks on console, but there’s a bunch of different types and it doesn’t seem like anyone can agree on which one is the best, so I guess I’m in limbo a bit on that one. Still, it’s worth a look at some point- I’ve gotten so much mileage out of my DS one after all.

And that’s a full-ass list. Perhaps a little daunting, but something like this is a long-term project, and there’s plenty of time to adjust, or make trades rather than buy, et cetera. I don’t ever expect to like, complete a collection, but I’m happy getting things bit by bit.

Anyway it’s like 2AM now I need to be up in 5 hours oops if I’m late then sorry james lmao except you won’t possibly be able to read this until Saturday and it’ll be too late then ha HA

[fusonzai]

Reconciliation through writing 1: Chuck Norris, my dad, me.

I was ten and it was a Saturday night at my Grandma’s house. My dad, my grandma and I were gathered around the TV killing time. We’d been living at my grandma’s for a while now as our new house was being built. Mum had gone to bed and I was waiting for my Dad to remember my bedtime. An ad came on for this average looking cop show, however the lead; a bearded All American looking man, sure knew how to fight. Being a kid and not wanting to go bed, any tv show seemed appealing, round house kicks or not.

My Dad also seemed to know a lot about this actor. We waited for the show to start as my dad told me all about how this was the toughest guy in Hollywood. He’d always beat up the bad guy and save the day, your 80’s ‘women wanted him, men wanted to be him’ archetype. This man would many years later spawn one of the earlier internet memes, but for now the internet was relatively dormant. The man was Chuck Norris, the show was ‘Walker, Texas Ranger’, and it was the catalyst of one of my fondest memories of time with my Dad.

(I reckon this movie still holds up)

I don’t know how to state this in any other way but, looking back on it all, my dad probably didn’t want to have a child. He had a not so conventional childhood and had never met his biological parents. I have these childhood memories of simply just not seeing him much. I remember missed birthdays and business trips. It would feel weird to see him home on a weeknight or before I went to school in the morning. He wasn’t absent per se but he was never quite there. Even when he was, it often felt forced, not straight out rejection but just relative reluctance.

What do you do when someone pulls away? You try even harder to bring them back. I wanted desperately to find a common thread with my Dad. My friends all seemed to get on much better with theirs. Why? Why not me? A child searching for shared interests with their parent seems crazy because it is. I’m entirely sure my Dad was also trying, in his own way to find those interests with me. I was my Mum’s child, I didn’t like sports and I had few friends. I could see how forming a relationship with a boy so attached to the other parent could be hard. So, what did we do? We played Mario Kart on the Nintendo 64. He was DK and I was Bowser. This game gave me a really nice couple of years with Dad, we’d play together a couple of nights a week when he was home. Then when he wasn’t, I’d try and get the fastest laps on all of the courses, and he’d wait till I was asleep to then in turn beat all my records. I remember one day when Mum and I went out on the weekend and I came home to see that Dad held the record on every single lap of every single course in the game.

It went on like this until the N64 reached its life cycle and my dad didn’t quite have the time or ability to master the new Gamecube version of MarioKart. I think this is why a few years later, watching Walker on the couch that night was so important.

One episode was all it took, I was hooked on this show. So was Dad. He tracked down the first season on DVD and we immediately went through all of it. Then began the Chuck Norris pilgrimage. Chuck Norris starred in a long string of films from the 70’s to the 90’s. Attempting to capitalise on the Bruce Lee pioneered martial arts film genre, American moviemakers had set their eyes on Norris. He was the villain in Bruce Lee’s ‘Way Of The Dragon’ and he was going to be their new star, bringing martial arts films to the West. These movies were comfort viewing, you knew what was going to happen, they all involved him beating up bad guys. There was never a plot twist or a disappointing ending. Chuck always got his guy, and got the girl. It felt as though my Dad was showing me this action star from when he was my age and sharing some of his experiences growing up. While at the same time, we were often watching movies neither of us had ever seen, having new experiences together.

Finding old Chuck Norris movies wasn’t as simple as it is now. Blockbuster still existed and DVD’s were in mass production. We’d search for rentals, then at JB Hifi and then online for international sellers. It felt like I had a purpose (however small it was) accompanying my dad to to JB Hifi, searching through every section for films we hadn’t seen, and then politely asking the staff to see if other stores nearby had any. Then whenever we got our hands on a new one, be that a lucky find or an online parcel being delivered months later, we’d watch it on a Saturday night. I got to spend time with my Dad, I felt like he wanted to spend time with me and I was frankly over the moon when he’d make that time.

(The adrenaline rush from just watching the roundhouse is amazing)

Eventually though, we ran out of movies.

I began high school, started distancing myself from my parents and by the time they divorced when I was 15, I had fooled myself into thinking I didn’t care. The first time I saw my Dad after he moved out, we went and saw an action film. It felt fine, he made me feel like divorce was this normal adult thing that happens and that everything would go back to normal. Of course, that wasn’t really the case. Two adults who had spent the better part of 20 years together ending a relationship isn’t something trivial. Having a child who is right in the middle of high school doesn’t make it any less trivial. It turned out that saying everything was fine, when it wasn’t, would only lead to problems later down the line.

Post-divorce, I was unconsciously looking for father figures. I’d want approval and praise from male teachers, I’d try extra hard in those classes to get good marks, to try and impress. Being at an all boys school, it seemed I wasn’t the only one searching for a substitute. The male sports teachers always had this flock of boys around them during yard duty, talking about fantasy football or whatever the running joke was at the time. I don’t want to say we were lacking father figures, maybe we were just lacking more examples of how to act as men. Having your father as a guide helps, but ultimately, you’re an amalgamation of everything around you, watching how others act and mimicking their behaviour.

In my early twenties I thought I finally understood the divorce and had decided at that time that I despised my dad for what had happened. Maybe I thought it was cool? In reality it was easier than accepting the fact that he was a flawed human, just like everyone else. That adoration I’d had as a child morphed into bottled resentment. I couldn’t condone his actions and I also couldn’t relate or understand them. During this time, I was afraid of two things, one: becoming just like him, and two: how I could not relate to this man even though I shared half my DNA with him. I just couldn’t comprehend what had happened with the divorce and how I was related to the man I saw as the aggravator of it.

I went from seeing him once a week, to once a month, to about once a year. He’d try. He’d try as best he could. I’d ignore emails for months because I could. Sometimes he’d call and I’d make up some sorry excuse.

It went on like this for a few years. Fortunately, I grew up a bit more and we’d get lunch. My girlfriend encouraged me to make the most of my time with him. She came with me to dinners and gave me the strength I needed to get over my own insecurities when it came to visiting. I’d have dinner with him, my uncles and his new partner. It could feel a bit forced but the good intentions were there and I’m grateful for it. However, they never felt like the kinds of interactions you should have with one of your parents. There was a familiarity in our conversations but they were always very surface level. We’d reminiscence and circle around familiar topics as opposed to having meaningful conversations. I still couldn’t reconcile what had happened and I still couldn’t relate. It turns out the first two years living abroad would really help me with this.

I’d always held the ideology that if two people loved each other they could always make it work. If one party didn’t want to make it work, then they clearly didn’t love the other. A naive ideology, but I was 25 and in the first serious relationship of my life. A relationship that had spent almost 2 years with an ocean between it. Flights back and forth started making the pain of the distance between visits only more evident. I loved this person but I didn’t want to keep dating like this. It’s hard to say what you want when you know how bad it will hurt the other person. Months of hesitation, failed attempts, and pondering if I should just endure through it helped me understand my Dad a bit better. I understood on a minor level how two people who love each other could end something. I also understood how easy (albeit cowardly) it was to do nothing about such a thing. Just hoping it would work itself out.

(Some translations: 浮気 is infidelity and 遠距離 is long distance, also Im in the green)

The break-up, the gaping space where the other person was and the struggle to find your individuality after being together so long. Experiences felt by all, experiences felt by me, experiences felt by my Dad. The shared experience of building yourself back up gave me an unexpected link to my Dad. I understood his actions post-divorce more clearly and began to realise that we were more similar than we were different. Just because I didn’t initially realise them when I was younger, didn’t mean that the similarities weren’t there. Throughout these six months or so of hardship, solitude and self-improvement, I reconciled long held grudges and found empathy where I once thought there was none. Even though I did this all alone, thousands of kilometres away, I was finally in a good place with my dad.

Then, in 2019 I saw my Dad get married for the second time in his life.

He booked me a flight home for the event. My life is going incredibly well. My job feels more grown up and, for the first time, I can see my career laid out in front of me. I had also found a partner who I was completely enamoured with. I’m excited to tell my dad how well it’s all going and he’s happy to hear it. We have lunch before the wedding, and everything feels like it’s come together. We’re both on cloud nine in our own way, him with his new wife to be and upcoming honeymoon, me with my dream job and finally a partner I could see my future with.

(My girlfriend said she preferred the vest)

The wedding day arrives and even now it still feels surreal. I can count my Dad’s family on one hand, including me. His wife on the other hand had more family than I’ve ever known, and I’d met approximately none of them up until this day. At the reception guests would ask “and what’s your relationship to the couple?”

“I’m his son.”

“Are you the groom’s nephew?”

“I’m his son.”

Unfamiliar faces cement the realisation that my Dad had found a new family, one that I’m understandably not a part of. There was a brief moment of shock but I came to accept it. Just as I had created a new life for myself as I got older and the people around me came and went, my dad had done exactly the same. Life isn’t meant to be stagnant and I can’t be angry at my Dad for trying to find a place to belong when I was doing the exact same thing he was. We were both still figuring it out as we went. I was truly happy for him; he had found someone that made him happy, and for the first time in years he actually looked happy too. While it took time to process the whole day, I’m glad I was able to go and be in the right frame of mind to cherish the occasion. It felt like a loop closing. I felt like we had finally reached some mutual understanding where I was able to go to his wedding and be okay. I couldn’t write this piece from anywhere other than a place of love and contentment.

Being there not only for the peaks but also for the troughs; that’s what family is for, right?

After the wedding we began keeping better contact, I spoke to him more about life events and we stayed better connected than we ever had before.

I emailed him just the other day. I’m currently quitting my job and the pandemic means I don’t know if I can get home with the price of flights. I sent him a chaotic jumble of words disguised as a sentence. He just replied:

“You are only an email and an online transaction away,“ with a smiley face emoticon of all things.

Suddenly it feels like it’s all going to be okay.

I am safe, I am supported, I am loved. He’s never stopped me from falling but he’s always helped me get back up afterwards.

I spent so many years expecting him to live up to an ideal I had created from what I saw around me. While it was understandable as a child, even as an adult I still saw him as that ideal as opposed to a person. It was only when I was able to accept him as that and not some impossible standard that I think our relationship improved. He only ever needed to be what he could be, he wasn’t anybody else’s father and I wasn’t anybody else’s son. He knows that I feel safe calling on him when I need advice and I know that he’ll listen and support me no matter what.

And that’s just it. Having that makes up for everything else. Knowing that someone is there in that capacity, knowing that that someone is my father, is more than enough. I’m looking forward to a time where we can watch Chuck Norris movies together again.

(The Big Day, 2019)

[octannibal-blake]

Halloween party with the gang! Bellamy and Clarke aren't exactly friends, but he/she can't deny she/he looks great in her/his costume this year...

aw thanks for the prompt, kat! lmao this got sooo long and i apologize ahead of time. i’m not sure if this is what you intended but this is where i ended up – i may have watched how i met your mother and the slutty pumpkin episode before this so…i blame that. anyways, i hope it’s enjoyable!

and so, we meet again

2013

It is onHalloween night that Bellamy decides he’s moved in to the worst apartmentcomplex ever. He’s sitting on his couch, perfectly content to write his essayin peace and drink shitty beer. He hates this stupid holiday, always has, andwould rather pretend that it’s just another day. Instead, he hears a knock onhis window and turns around defensively, poised to break the glass bottle overthe intruder’s head. Turns out, it’s just a pirate. Or his neighbor, dressed asa pirate, rather.

“Someone’sjumpy,” Nathan Miller comments, holding his hand (one actual hand, and one fakehook) up in surrender, “Chill, dude.”

He setsthe bottle down on the table with a deep breath, “Do you make it a habit toenter other people’s apartments unannounced?”

Miller shrugs,“Isn’t that kind of the point of sharing a fire escape?”

Bellamyrolls his eyes. He only moved into this apartment over the summer. His sisterjust began her first semester of college at NYU and he has been finishing hisMaster’s degree at Columbia (honestly, thank God both of them are smart becausethey couldn’t just afford this kind of education on their own). They decided torent an apartment in the city, thanks to a heft amount of help from theirgrandparents and working full time at the pub in the basement. The day theymoved in, they met their neighbors. Nathan Miller, the broody full-timemechanic and his boyfriend, Monty. The IT guy. That’s how Miller introducedhim, anyways.

“Let’sgo,” Miller gestures and begins to move back out the window. Bellamy doesn’tfollow. He might like his neighbors, and sure they’ve had a few nights inplaying Mario Kart on the 64, but now he comes in dressed as a pirate and justtells Bellamy to follow him? Sounds sketchy.

“Where?”

Millerstops and turns around dramatically and holds up his hook hand, “Costume party.On the roof. It’s an annual thing. Everybody in the building goes.”

“Nothanks,” he responds.

Tenminutes later he’s on the damn roof, music blaring out of someone’s ownpersonal amp and chatter filling the empty space. It’s a very well put togetherparty and it does seem like everyone in the building is in attendance – heshouldn’t be surprised. It’s a cheap complex close to college campus. Brokecollege students fill most of the rooms and this is very much the kind ofthings college kids would do. Unless you’re Bellamy, because fuck Halloween.

He sipsfrom his drink stoically, rolling his eyes at some of the costumes. Some ofthem are pretty typical – he’s seen multiple Avenger’s costumes. Plenty of sexynurses (which, he is absolutely not opposed to). He isn’t the kind of guy todress up, though. It’s just lucky that he happened to be wearing a t-shirt thatsays “costume” when Miller basically drug him from his apartment.

“Nicecostume,” a voice enters into his dramatic reverie. Next to him, a blondeprincess is filling her cup with the shitty vodka punch. She adjusts her tiaraas it begins to fall off her head and looks up at him with a smirk. She makesno movement to leave, just leans against the table and gives him a solid onceover. Apparently, she does not appreciate his t-shirt and jeans.

“Not intocostume parties?” she asks.

He shrugs,“Not into Halloween.”

This makesher roll her eyes at him, “Wow, you’re one of those people.”

One of thosepeople? He glares at her for a moment, “If one of those people means notwanting to contribute to a stupid holiday, then yeah, I am.”

“What’snot to like! Free candy. An excuse to dress up. Big parties?” the Princessseems to very much into Halloween, her costume speaking volumes. And she soundslike he had been personally attacking her when he said he didn’t like it. He’sentitled to an opinion.

“Overpriced candy, expensive outfits you only wear once, and not to mention some ofthose outfits appropriate multiple cultures and are thinly veiled racism,” hepoints out. He’s put a lot of thought into this over the years. Everythingabout Halloween is annoying and overrated.

“Wow,” shebreathes out, clearly surprised by his passionate answer, “You really have alot of feelings about this.”

“I’m justa realist,” he shrugs again, “This punch is terrible.”

“I canagree with that,” she says before making a show of chugging her own cup, “Butit tastes better the drunker you are.”

He getsanother cup. The Princess makes no show of going away to enjoy the dance flooror the free candy offered. Instead she remains at the drink table with him and somehow,they end up talking about extremely…intense topics. She’s in nursing schooland apparently, hates every minute of it. He tells her about failing his lastexam because he was working too many hours at the bar. It becomes a bitpessimistic at times. She decides to change the subject before he does.

“I knowit’s a mask,” she says after spotting a ridiculous Barack Obama costume, “Butit feels wrong to dress up as the President. Like they’re trying to insulthim.”

“Would yousay the same if someone came dressed as George Bush?” he asks, and not evenbecause he disagrees with her. But mostly because she looks really cute the wayher cheeks are flushed and her hands a flailing around trying to explain ethicsto him.

“I wouldprobably feel differently about that,” she points to the Obama mask wearingoffender, “If it wasn’t a white person.”

He liftshis cup to her, “Touché.”

He decideshe likes this Princess, even if she is a Halloween supporter. She’s got spunk.She��s feisty and she’s making the party somewhat bearable. Yet, somehow, onlyan hour has passed at the drink table before her phone goes off.

“I gottarun,” she says downing the rest of her drink and tossing the cup in the trash,“But thanks for entertaining me. Do you still hate Halloween?”

“That’snot changing,” he responds immediately. She only grins at that.

“Oh, Ithink it will.”

*

2014

He findsthat he really likes his apartment. Miller becomes one of his closest friend, asort of friendship he hadn’t experienced in a long time. Not since Raven Reyesdecided to go be an engineer at some prestigious college on the coast. Heenjoys having Miller around and even Monty has made an effort to includeBellamy in his D&D group. It’s not something he thought he would enjoy butactually, he loves it. Octavia stays pretty busy with school and hasn’t beenhome much, so he’s been forced to occupy his time with other things. Nerdythings, as his sister called them. He doesn’t really care. He feels like he’sfinding a home at this place.

They go tothe rooftop again for Halloween this year and he isn’t forced this time. Millerand Monty go as two video game characters he’s never heard of, which is verythem, and he keeps his costume. Miller rolls his eyes at the familiar oranget-shirt but doesn’t make him change. That’s a true friend. When they arrive,there are a few more people than last year and there seems to be two speakersinstead of one. They’re trying to make it a bit more exciting, according toMonty, but Bellamy thinks it’s just right.

He mightbe down to party, he still hates this holiday and probably will until the dayhe dies. Seriously, what was the fucking point of it? He leaves his friends tograb a drink and though he remembers how disgusting the punch was last year, hestill pours himself a cup. Yep, just as disgusting.

“Niceoutfit,” is how it starts once again. He turns to find the princess once againpouring herself a drink. It takes him a moment to recognize her, she’s got abrown wig twisted on the side of her head. Princess Leia. How original.

“I couldsay the same to you,” he comments with a scoff. She moves next to him, thewhole things feeling very much like a routine between the two of them despitebeing strangers. He hadn’t seen her since last Halloween. He figured she musthave moved on with her life, whatever that may be. Apparently, she just makes appearancesat the Halloween party.

“PrincessLeia is a badass,” she defends, and the spell begins again. He isn’t sure whatit is about her. She has a way of making him feel as though they’re old friendscatching up – she updates him a nursing school and he tells her about finishingundergrad and completing his Master’s. She tells him about wanting to be anartist but being pressured into nursing. He tells her about raising his sister.It’s all pretty fucking ridiculous considering he doesn’t even know her name.

“You wannadance?” she asks during a comfortable silence between them. Normally, he wouldsay no. But he finds himself nodding and following her to the dance floor.

“You a fanof Halloween yet?” she asks as he twirls her around to the sounds of MonsterMash.

“Hell no,”he responds, “You’ll have to try a little harder, Princess.”

She smirksat that, “Did you not get to trick or treat as a kid?”

He dipsher and she giggles, “Not really. Not a great neighborhood for getting candy.Might end up with a bag of meth instead.”

He doesn’tmean to get all serious. He’s just being honest. His mom worked hard to providefor them but they didn’t grow up in a great area. Not the kind of place to hangout and play baseball outside or anything. He’s okay with that. But she giveshim a pitying look and he lets go of her hand.

“I didn’tsay it to make you feel bad for me,” he grumbles defensively, and he’ssurprised when she gives him a soft smile.

“Oh, Idon’t,” she reassures him and he can’t help but feel a bit confused. Shesmiles, “I just think it’s all the more reason for you to give Halloween achance now that you’re older.”

Hechuckles at that, “You’re awfully determined.”

“This ismy favorite holiday.”

“We allhave our flaws,” he responds, and she gives him a playful shove and he grabsher hand. For a moment things are silent and he feels a magnetic pull towardsher. Something about her intrigues him and okay, she’s beautiful with herexpressive blue eyes and soft smile. Just as his lips brush against hers, herphone rings. She jumps back and stares at the screen, something changing in herface. She looks almost…sad.

“I have totake this,” she says apologetically. Before he can question her any further,she disappears.

Shedoesn’t come back.

*

2015

He findshimself choosing to celebrate Halloween, or rather, choosing to celebrate onbehalf of someone else. Gina, his girlfriend, had been adamant about doingsomething fun for the holiday. She likes dressing up and having a good time andhell, he doesn’t want to be the one to stop her. So, rather than go out andspend money he doesn’t have at some bar, he figured the rooftop party would bejust the place.

It’s moreof a spectacle this year. Some of the residents of the complex created acommittee to help spruce it up and when he arrives, it’s a vast difference fromthe past small soirees. There are lights strung up around the roof top, morepatio furniture had been added. There’s a DJ (though it’s just Monty’s friendJasper who also plays D&D on Wednesdays). There also seems to be morepeople, but this has it’s perks. Instead of cheap beer and shitty punch thereis more variety at the drink table. There are bottles and bottles of liquorfollowed by liters of soft drinks. Part of him thinks having a table to mixyour own drinks is an awful idea, but he plans on standing guard at the drinktable, anyway.

“Let’sdance!” Gina pleads with him when they arrive. The music is loud and pop-y andthe dance floor is littered with awful costumes and awkward people. He wouldrather stab out his eyes.

“Mybrother doesn’t dance,” Octavia says from behind them and when he turns around,he’s ready to have an aneurysm. She’s wearing an intricate bathing suit topwith a long, green sequined skirt. She has scales painted on her face. Afucking mermaid.

“When didyou pierce your belly button?” is all he can say, hating the silver piece ofjewelry currently dangling from her navel. She’s an adult, he knows that, butit’s still his baby sister and Jesus, isn’t she cold?!

“Come on,Gina,” Octavia rolls her eyes and pulls his girlfriend to the dance floor. Hestomps his way to the drink table because, yeah, it’s going to be a long night.

He decidesto start off with a Jack and Coke, because the old legends say drinking beerfirst thing is the sure way to get sick. And, okay, he’s tested that theorybefore and it is definitely accurate. He takes his spot next to the drink tableand tries to take a drink, unsuccessfully, when his ears nearly fall of hishead. Stupid costume.

“Niceoutfit,”

He turns automatically to have his suspicionsconfirmed. The Princess stands before him, pouring her drink and grinning athim like an idiot as she takes in his costume. Gina had really insisted ondressing up for this and honestly, he really wants to make her happy becauseshe’s a cool chick and he likes her a lot. So when she suggested they go asbugs bunny and Lola bunny, he wasn’t really against it. He likes Space Jam andit’s a simple costume. So he let her order a pair of bunny ears for him and lethe glue a tail to a pair of his old basketball shorts. He’s a good boyfriend.

He’s aboutto bite out a “thanks” when he notices what she’s wearing. There is no wig. Notiara. Instead her blonde hair is all natural, cut just below the chin and hereffort in a costume minimal this year. His jaw snaps shut when he reads theorange t-shirt she’s wearing. It reads, “Costume”.

“Veryfunny,” he deadpans, and it only causes her to grin in triumph.

“Thanks,”she laughs, “For the inspiration, I mean. I’m someone who hates Halloween.”

“Yeah,” herolls his eyes, “I got that.”

“Youshould be flattered,” she says as though it’s obvious, “I couldn’t have donethis without you.”

“Thanksfor the credit.”

It’sstrange how they fall into an easy conversation after that, like last year theyhadn’t been about to make out on the dance floor and she hadn’t justdisappeared. He had thought about her for weeks after that, tempted to try andfind her one way or the other. But then he met Gina and he pushed all thoughtsof the Princess away from his mind. Until now, as she stands before him in acostume influenced by his dry humor and pessimism. He can’t help but feel alittle flattered, after all.

She askshim about his year and he tells her all the fine details, issues in hisdepartment at school and getting offered to study abroad for a semester. That’ssomething he hadn’t even told Gina but with her, it comes out like it’s no bigdeal. She congratulates him on the opportunity and tells him about her ownexperience – she’s a nurse and got the opportunity to go to the Caribbean tohelp in the aftermath of a natural disaster. Talking to her makes him feel likehe’s talking to a figment of his imagination. It’s easy to get lost and that’s prettydamn scary.

He doesn’teven notice when Gina comes up behind him.

“Bell?”she asks warily, looking between him and the Princess uncomfortably. He givesher a reassuring smile.

“Hey,” heputs an arm around her and she melts into him immediately, “I was just talkingabout you.”

Mostlyabout how scared he is to tell her about being away for three months, butstill. He doesn’t want her to feel neglected or anything. He likes her. A lot.

“You wannaget out of here?” Gina asks leaning into him, her breath hot on his neck. Helooks over her head for a moment to at least say goodbye to the Princess, maybeeven get her name because now she knows a little too much about him. But she’sgone already, having slipped away as Gina rolled into them. He turns hisattention back to his girlfriend and gives her soft kiss.

“Sure.”

*

2016

“I cameall the way here to go to this stupid rooftop party, so you’re going to takeme!”

RavenReyes is a lot of things. A spitfire, for one, ready to kick any and everyone’sass at any given moment. She’s also demanding, something he learned early on intheir friendship to deal with. Except today. Because he’s really not in thefucking mood.

“Go withOctavia,” he mutters under his breath, clicking into the next episode of NewGirl without a second thought. It’s once again his least favorite holiday andhe had a really shitty day at work. It’s his first semester as a teacher at thehigh school and the kids were extra rambunctious today. He’s got one hell of aheadache.

“Bellamy,get your ass up and let’s go,” she yanks the remote from his hand and begins topull on his arms, “You can wear your stupid ironic t-shirt for all I care,we’re going.”

He findshimself on the roof again. It’s been a year of ups and downs for him. Hestudied abroad in Greece, which has to be the highlight because it is probablythe second best experience of his life (the first being when he held his babysister for the first time – he’s a sap and he doesn’t care). He graduated withhis Master’s in history and had just begun his first teaching gig. On thedownside, Octavia moved in with her boyfriend, Lincoln, and he had to paydouble the rent for almost three months before finding a new roommate. His nameis John Murphy and he’s almost positive he’s a sociopath, but a cool sociopathonce you get to know him. Gina also broke up with him about three weeks beforehe left for his trip. Long distance wasn’t really her thing. He doesn’t blameher.

Ravendecided to come visit him for the first time in two years, mostly because sheand her boyfriend just broke up and she needed time away. But also because shemissed him and he had been in a foul mood for the past few months and neededcheering up.

He makeshis way to the drink table and takes up his usual post after introducing Ravento all the regulars. When he introduces her to Luna, his downstairs neighbor,well, it’s all over from there. He doesn’t see Raven again that night. Butthat’s not the part that bothers him. He spends over an hour at the drink tableand she never shows. The princess who copied his costume and who learned hisdeepest secrets before his fucking name. He thought maybe this would become athing. Like maybe she’s supposed to show up and talk him through his crisisevery Halloween. It’s a stupid expectation. Hell, he’s not even positive she’sreal.

Hefinishes four drinks before giving up and going home. Fuck Halloween.

2017

“Pleasewear it!”

He staresat the offending garment like he’s hoping to burn a hole through it,“Absolutely not.”

“You’lllook so hot!”

“Ew,please don’t ever say that again.”

Ravenhuffs at her roommate. He’s being stubborn, he knows that, but she knows how hefeels about costumes and she’s trying to force him to be part of a groupcostume which is just…it’s fucking cheesy.

“Please!”she begs, adjusting her own pink jackets as she pulls her hands together in aplea, “Even Murphy is doing it! Emori!”

She wantshim to dress up as one of the guys from Grease, leather jacket, hair gel, andtight pants. It’s a bit over the top if you ask him. He hates it. He shouldhave known this is how things would go when she moved in – what Raven wants,Raven gets. After last year, she decided to move to New York to be closer toher friends. She’d never admit it, but he also thinks it has something to dowith Luna. The two aren’t official by any means, but they spend a lot of timetogether. Raven says she isn’t into labels, so whatever, but he knows the girlcares about her.

“I don’tremember ever saying I would be a part of this, you just signed me up,” hepoints out. She had brought it to him as soon as he got home from work. She didhappen to catch him a good day, mostly because there were no students at work(it was an in-service day which meant he had a quiet classroom all to hisself).  But going as the cast of Greaseis a sure way of bringing his good mood down.

“We’re alldoing it,” she argues again, “Besides, this is going to be the biggest partyyet! Miller is proposing to Monty!”

He knowsthis. Miller has already been to his apartment to freak out on numerousoccasions. They’ve been dating for almost seven years but only recently hasmarriage been legalized in all fifty states and they feel comfortable enough todo it. He’s happy for them and they honestly make him believe that love doesexist – they’re a good match and he knows how happy Monty makes him.

“I’m notdoing it.”

Thirtyminutes later, he finds himself on the fucking roof again with the leatherjacket slung over his shoulders. Raven can be very persuasive. They’re standingin the group and he realizes how much thought Raven really did put into this.Everyone is here and dressed up – Murphy and Emori, Octavia and Lincoln, Millerand Monty. Hell, even Luna came dressed as a Pink Lady.

“Where thehell is Clarke?” Raven hisses to Luna when she arrives. He has no idea whoClarke is, but Raven has already made more friends in her short time here thanhe has since he moved in. So, no surprises there.

“She’salways late, you know that,” Luna rolls her eyes, “She’ll be here.”

“Yo,Danny,” Raven calls and it takes him a moment to realize she’s talking to him,“Go grab me a beer.”

“I’m sorry,are you incapable?” he snaps and runs a hand through his hair, only for hisfingers to get stuck in the hair gel.

She flipshim the finger and he shuffles over to the table. Not because she told him too,he was already going to come here. He’ll just be nice and grab her a beer whilehe’s over here. Because he’s polite. And definitely not because she told himto. He reaches into the cooler to dig around for his favorite – he’s stickingto beer tonight. He has to teach in the morning.

He feels afamiliar pull and knows she’s there before she speaks.

“Wow,” shesays as he stands up, the buckles of his jacket clanking together, “Niceoutfit.”

He turnsslowly and before he can control it, his jaw opens slightly. It’s the Princess,alright, except she isn’t a princess at all. She’s dressed in a tight blackbody suit, and it’s clinging to every luscious curve of her body, paired with aleather jacket eerily similar to his own. He’s seen Grease enough time torecognize a Sandy when he sees one. He practically chokes on air. He looks overhis head to see the others watching him and Raven is looking extremely smugwhich makes him think she had something to do with this. He has no idea how shecould know, or how she could possibly be involved. But if anybody could figureit out, it’s her.

“I’mLuna’s roommate,” she seems to read his mind and she extends her hand with ahalf-smile, “Clarke Griffin.”

“Youweren’t here last year,” he says stupidly. He should introduce himself.Compliment her outfit because, damn. But all he can think about is that shewasn’t here last year.

She dropsher hand and glances down at her feet sheepishly, “I was working. New nursesalways have to work holidays.”

“Oh,” heresponds and still can’t figure out what to say. She’s been living in thisbuilding the whole time and he never once ran into her? She never tried to findhim despite their almost hook up two three years ago? Holy shit this has beengoing on that long?

“I guessthis is as weird for you as it is for me?” she asks, “I can leave, if you want.I know we’ve kind of been like…weirdly intimate but don’t really know eachother? And, honestly, I gave up when you showed up with a girlfriend but nowyou’re here and Raven said you’re single and you look really hot in thatcostume…”

It’s thisprecise moment that his brain actually decides to function and he laughs,watching as this girl he’s been dancing around for four years on the same dayrambles away about their strange relationship and admittedly having a crush onhim, similar to the way he’s felt about her. She’s been sort of his own littletradition – like every Halloween he goes to the roof to talk to this mysteriousgirl about all the things he was afraid to admit outloud to everyone else. Andshe’s fucking real and standing in front of him in a matching costume because,surpise, she actually knows his friends and lives two floors below him. Whatare the fucking odds.

He’shaving a hard time processing it all and wants to claim insanity when he slidesa hand into her thick curls and surges forward to kiss her. She stiffens and hepulls away, heart pounding in his chest and feeling completely disoriented.

“Shit,that was weird,” he panics, “I’m Bellamy. But you probably already know thatand…God, I’m sorry.”

She laughsthen, sweet and shy as her eyes search his own frantic ones, “No offense,Bellamy, but we’ve been talking for four years. Aren’t you tired?”

Shedoesn’t need to ask twice. He kisses her again and faintly hears the PinkLadies and the T-birds in the background hooting and hollering in theirapproval. It’s bizarre. But Halloween is a bizarre holiday and honestly, hemight not hate it so much after all.

[antiques-for-geeks]

Games of Christmas Past : Goldeneye 007

Rare / 1997 / Originally £59.99 / Nintendo 64

As the sun sets on this strangest of years and a cold wind blows through an empty AfG towers this Christmas, the team cast their thoughts back to Christmas Days past, when your rich Uncle used to come round in the afternoon with your cousins and their latest full priced games that you couldn’t play because they had an Atari ST in 1987 and you were still pretty pleased with your Spectrum +2 bought last summer thankyouverymuch.

So once again, we’re looking back at the games we did get to play on Christmas Day. The good, the bad, the ugly, the over-priced, the cheap and the ones purchased by Grandma because the nice man in the shop said it was the one that all the kids were playing.

First for this year, Pop...

Now effortlessly installed as the most fondly remembered and critically lauded Bond game ever, the world needs another piece about Goldeneye like a donkey needs a second pisser... but I’ve been asked to write about a game that holds strong seasonal memories. There’s simply no way to avoid this bald fact: Goldeneye was simply the best gaming Christmas present I ever got.

So... I’m going to write about it... and some lucky donkey is going to empty its bladder in record time.

About the best thing about being newly employed in the late 90’s was having my own money to spend on whatever gaming rubbish I saw fit. I bought a Tiger ‘Game.com’, Satan's own handheld system. Why? Because it was there! (in the Argos catalog, that is). 

So when I wandered into a branch of HMV and saw an N64 demo pod with the first level of Goldeneye ready to play I knew straight away that my number one seasonal priority was to be able to take it home.

The first level lays it all out. I stealthily approach a guard tower, taking out a few unfortunate soldiers on the way. Up top is a sniper rifle... plenty of time to get a bead on the forehead of a distant and totally oblivious soldier. He has no idea what’s coming. My finger tightens on the N64’s trigger button. He’s thinking about how cold it is... how much he misses his family... how soon his commission is coming to an end… to be back in his wife’s warm embrace... borscht for dinner tonight.

BANG! His head snaps back and he crumples to the ground… ‘Hey! That’s sick!’ opines some random guy watching over my shoulder. But I can hear it in his voice. He knows, just as I know. This game is awesome.

I gifted myself a few games on Christmas day along with the console. I’m sure Mario 64 was one of them, and I’m sure I loved that too, but that year the holiday season belonged to Bond.

I’d played some first person shooters before, but those had all been riffs on the ‘Doom’ formula, with a corresponding feeling that you were floating through the levels, somehow disconnected. Goldeneye put you right in the film, dealing with changing objectives and with the ever-present possibility of sneaking up on enemies and dealing with them silently. Many levels were designed around the film’s sets before shooting was even complete, and they benefit greatly from feeling more like real places.

And so much fun could be had just experiencing this world! Somewhat shamefully, Tim and I would play the second level set inside a well guarded Russian lab with our own rogue objective: the scientist cull. What this involved was simply finding all the white coated lab personnel and gunning them down in the most extreme (and satisfying) ways possible. The detail that made this particularly fun was how well their biological whites showed up the inevitable blood stains, like some kind of terrible alternative universe Persil advert.

Sorry, this lab is over populated. I’m sure you understand.

This was a game that could be enjoyed as a quick blast on the easier levels, but provided a genuinely rewarding structure for extended play on the harder difficulties. The bad guys were tougher, requiring you avoid combat where possible and to master the precise aiming controls to take them out with head shots. Additionally, the mission objectives were extended with interesting additional tasks, taking in much more of the level. As icing on the cake, beating the game on higher difficulties unlocks a couple of extra levels, which are both well worth seeing - especially the ‘Aztec’ level from Moonraker where you get to face-off against fan favorite bad guy Jaws.

I suppose I should at least mention the groundbreaking multi-player element. The N64 supported 4 players, and 4 player couch co-op would no doubt have been awesome if I’d had 4 controllers, a decent sized TV and 4 people to play against. The few times I managed to rustle up an extra to battle against were good fun, if imbalanced, because I never got to play anyone else who actually owned the game. Single player was where I spent 99% of my time.

Apparently many of the team that put Goldeneye together hadn’t worked on a major game before, allowing them to build it unshackled by the past. In many ways this sounds like a game that came good because of dogged determination and a series of lucky accidents. It certainly shifted the goalposts for what was expected of a first person shooter for console generations of games to come. The way games develop over time often appears to be a series of big bangs, followed by copies, iterations and enhancements. Goldeneye is definitely one of those seismic bangs, a huge success that other developers wanted a piece of.

Rare did it all again, and technically better with the release of Perfect Dark a couple of years later, and though I loved that game too, for me it didn’t have quite the same bombshell impact.

I guess this is the point where we should address the elephant in the room. Goldeneye, like so many games from its console generation hasn’t actually aged very gracefully. The graphics were certainly pretty great for the time, with a long view distance and excellent character animation. They really do look hopelessly primitive in 2020 though, and the controls feel slow and clunky. Not to mention that the N64 controller, so ahead of its time in the 90′s feels like an alien object  to a modern player used to iteration after iteration of 2 stick gamepads for the last 20 years. It’s a real shame that licensing issues have prevented a cleaned up re-release (we’ll ignore the 2010 effort by Activision; it’s a characterless shadow next to the real thing).

So why does this game make me think of Christmas? Is it because many of the levels in Goldeneye are appealingly wintry? Maybe because a Bond film was an ever present pleasure for terrestrial TV viewers at yuletide in the UK?

Nope. This game basically lets you commit murder on a massive scale, again and again and again (oh, and those poor innocent scientists!) That hardly qualifies it as festive entertainment. It's probably just because a new console and a great game to go with it has been a staple requirement for so many of my Christmases. This was one of the greatest of all.

Score card

Presentation 9/10

The bond atmosphere is presented almost perfectly, from the iconic ‘gun barrel’ opening onwards.

Originality 9/10

Like nothing else released before, Goldeneye set a high bar that wasn’t matched anywhere during the N64′s lifespan... except by its ‘sequel’ Prefect Dark.

Graphics 8/10

Somewhat colourless, but very solid. The frame rate is acceptable for the time. The digitized faces of the guards looked great back then, but slightly ridiculous today. Animation, particularly the way enemies react to being blasted, is exceptional.

Hookability 9/10

The dam level is the prefect opener, giving you a chance to see what the game is all about. Play it on the ‘Agent’ (easy) difficulty and you can have a good time without having to be a dead eye with the manual aim controls. No game let you snipe an enemy from half way across the level before this one. Once you had, you were in for the long haul... or morally outraged.

Sound 9/10

Perfect music for a bond game, and a great accompaniment to the action. Gunshots, screams and other spot effects all enhance the action. No bad voice acting to spoil the effect.

Lastability 9/10

Loads of varied levels, each with new, interesting objectives when played on higher difficulty levels. Because the mechanics of the game were so good, it was fun just to pick your favorite level and just mess around or prefect your run. Then there’s the multiplayer...

Value for Money 8/10

£60 was an awful lot of money, but there aren’t many games that got more playtime.

Overall 9/10

One of the all-time greats, I can’t bring myself to mark it down just because the passage of time has been so unkind.

[prompt-master]

So, Maybe I Need You

@saltyalienmilk asked: Fam, you should write a fanfiction where Michael calls Jeremy jemmy (*｀･へ･´*)

Anon asked: Boyf riends fic idea that Jeremy and Micheal are hanging out in Micheals basement, playing video games or getting high or smth, and jere playfully calls Micheal a loser, bla bla. Michael has a small panic attack bla bla jere tries to help… basically it ends in fluff. Your really good at balancing fluff and angst so I decided to ask you, ur awesome! Bye.

Remember guys if it’s not ok you can ask for a redo! I’m sorry this isn’t the best quality but I hope you like it!! Let’s get into it:

“Dude, my man, my best bro of twelve years, are you ready?”

“Michael I was born ready.”

“Ready for what? Masturbating?”

“Michael!!”

The best feeling in the world had to be when Jeremy and Michael slipped back into their normal friendship again. Both of them never thought it’d happen, especially now that they aren’t each other’s only friend anymore. Somehow though, after a few weeks of effort, they managed to bring back a routine just like the old days. And boy, were they happy to be back in the basement again, chilling on two bean bags while Michael sets up the Nintendo 64.

Honestly this night couldn’t get any better. Jeremy had passed his final exams with way higher scores than expected, he hadn’t heard from the SQUIP in a long time, and his dad hung out with him right before he left for Michael’s. Michael had gotten a free slushee, found a sweet deal on some old retro games, and was becoming less awkward with the new friend group. To top it all off they had a bowl of party mix, a bunch of candies, and two rolled up blunts for later. It was going to be the greatest night since ever.

Michael plopped down on the bean bag next to Jeremy, leaning back and craning his neck to give the taller one a giant goofy smile.

Jeremy laughed at that, “so what game are playing?”

“What do you think, Jemmy?”

“Mario kar- I’m sorry what?”

When Jeremy turned to face Michael he saw the boy sitting there with a mischievous smirk, one that pushed his cheeks up to his eyes. His eyes held a glint that said “you heard me, boy”. See Jeremy was used to random nicknames by the other, there was even a phase where Michael had called him “Jerry baby” jokingly. Michael gave him better pet names than any girlfriend he’d ever had, and he had like…two! But…

“Jemmy? That’s a new one. Sounds like jelly.”

“It’s cute! Like you-!” The second that came out of Michael’s mouth he seemed to regret it. He instantly lost eye contact as Michael’s eyes darted around the room, his face a shade of red to rival his signature hoodie.

“Michael you think a lot of things are cute.”

“Do you not like it? I’m hurt! I give you quality names to be called by and this is how you treat me?” He held a hand to his forehead, swaying back dramatically.

Jeremy just rolled his eyes, playing around with the control as he tossed a Swedish fish into his mouth. He started to play the game, he as Luigi and Michael as Peach, then Michael picked rainbow road.

“Why do you do this to me?”

“Cause your my friend, Jemmy!”

Jeremy nearly drove right off the track, “Oh my god”

“Oh is something wrong Jemmy ? Jemmy, Jemmy, Jemmy!”

Unsurprisingly? Jeremy completely lost. There was something about that nickname and the whole way Michael said it that left his stomach with this fluttering tingle. Kinda like on those elevator drop roller coasters, you know, when they drop you. His face heated up and it was almost like…whenever Christine talked to him. Weird. Either way it was distracting and he’d lost.

Jeremy groaned as Michael swallowed up his victory and rolled in it. He took a big swig of sprite as Michael tossed his fists up and ranted about how he would always be the number one gamer.

“Ready to get your ass whooped again, nerd?” Michael smirked at him, excitement coursing through him as he happily played with the controller, ready to go.

Jeremy laughed, unable to say no to that determined face and the way Michael stuck his tongue out, “I’m the underdog now and by like, movie law, I have to win.”

“Yeah well does your movie law work with this?” Michael moved the joy key, and with a press of a button rainbow road was selected again. Dammit.

“Wha-! Dammit Michael! You’re the worst, oh my god!” Jeremy said it with a lighthearted laugh, not noticing the way Michael’s shoulders went tense. It wasn’t the first time Jeremy had said something like that of course, they tease each other like that all the time. But…now was after the SQUIP.

Jeremy prepared himself to dish out a full on beating, leaning over in his chair like a hunch back, with a way too confident smirk.

“Hey…hey Jemmy.”

“Don’t you dare start-”

“I gotta present for you, Jerm.”

“What is-”

Suddenly he was hit right off the map from a green shell, launched by no other than princess peach.

“Oh my god you’re such a nerd what the heck!” He laughed, getting right back into the swing of things once he was on track again. Michael felt his hands twitch with hesitation again, but he ignored the feeling in his gut and kept going. He had a title to uphold after all.

But then it happened again. Jeremy was behind him and Michael was too smart to just let the boy pass him, and without any tools to help him, he simply blocked Jeremy’s path.

“Cmon get out of my way loser!”

That was the last straw for the restricted beating in his heart. It broke down the bars and started rampaging like an angry gorilla in a zoo.

He felt bad, he really did. He knew he had a dependency issue and he knew that it wasn’t healthy to be so dependent on one man but…god he couldn’t help but think back to that night. Jeremy might abandon him again, leave him behind like the undeserving loser he was. No, no Jeremy didn’t mean it like that, he was being too clingy and looking to deep into it. Michael ran off the track, but when he was put back he didn’t drive. He sat there as the same music repeated itself, not realizing when it had paused. Not realizing when Jeremy had a hand on his shoulder.

“Woah, woah, Michael! …are you ok?”

Michael felt hot shame running through him. Yeah sorry man no big deal I just can’t live with the thought of you being an asshole and leaving me again. He pulled his hood up and over his head, his hands shielding his face, “yeah…yeah I’m fine. I’m sorry. I’m fine, really.”

He heard a small shuffle, and he saw the tips of Jeremy’s converse moving to face him. Jeremy must have gotten out of the bean bag and was now bent down in front of him. Jeremy wasn’t the best at comforting people, he was awkward and sweaty. But right now he’d damn well do his best for someone like Michael.

Michael felt the hand on his shoulder give a light squeeze, it was oddly grounding, “Michael…you can tell me what’s wrong, like, I’m here? I guess. Get it? Heere?”

Michael couldn’t help but chuckle, knowing Jeremy was only making those jokes to cheer him up. He took a shaky breath, focusing on the hand through the anxious fuzz in his mind. He brought a hand from his face and placed it on top of Jeremy’s.

“It’s stupid..”

“Well, not if it did this to you.”

Michael took a deep breath through his nose, the floor suddenly being the most interesting thing to look at, “I just…you know…I don’t…”

Michael’s voice wavered as little wet spots started to form on the ground, “I don’t want to lose you again.”

There was a harsh silence, one that would have convinced Michael that Jeremy had left if it wasn’t for the hand on his shoulder. He just focused on the little tear stains building up in the floor, making little splashes. He really fucked up this time. He should just keep his damn mouth shut-

A warm embrace distracted him from his thoughts, shielding him from both the world and his own thoughts. Michael quickly wrapped his own arms around Jeremy, taking in the sweet scent of blueberries, vanilla, and cigarettes from hanging out with Rich. For just a second everything felt fine.

“I’m not going anywhere, ok Michael? The SQUIP is gone…he’s gone and I- I don’t wanna lose you either”

Michael nodded, trying to stop the tears from making a wet spot on Jeremy’s shoulder with no success.

“I need you.”

“I need you too, Jemmy.”

[earthbounddreamers]

Ask meme - Scarlet

Here’s all 100 questions from that ask meme for @atrue-whovian cause he’s insane This one is for Scarlet James is next Have fun I’m on mobile so I can’t put it under a cut rip

—

1. What do they smell like? She usually smells of masculine deodorant (that feminine stuff is bullshit and expensive) and/or sweat.

2. What is their voice like? Her voice is somewhat feminine but mostly deep, very intimidating and loud.

3. What is their biggest motivator? She wants to make sure all her friends - who are now family - are safe and happy.

4. What is their most embarrassing memory? When she thought she was flirting with a gay girl but she was actually straight and was suuuper embarrassed when she tried to ask her on a date.

5. How do they deal with/react to pain? Usually she just swears loudly, takes a deep breath, applies pressure for a moment, then controls it with harsh breathing to channel her pain. If it needs treatment she applies first aid while swearing the entire time. If adrenaline is high and she’s in danger she doesn’t consciously react, and though her body might flinch she doesn’t even feel it.

6. What do they like to wear? Baggy masculine clothes most of the time, band merch and sweat pants, sometimes jeans but they’re always torn. Other times she wears tight fitting workout clothes or just a tank top and shorts to show off the guns.

7. Which of their relationships have impacted them most positively? Sam was the first person to make her start exploring herself, give a second thought to the things running through her head. Sam helped start her healing process, even if it was a little slow. While all her relationships have helped in different ways, Sam really started it all.

8. What’s the weirdest thing they’ve ever eaten? Once when she was high someone caught a grasshopper and cooked it over the fire - cooked being a generous word - and she ate it without hesitation. Don’t do drugs kids.

9. Describe the way that they sleep. Sprawled out, snoring loudly, usually with an arm wrapped around Sam.

10. What is their favorite food/kind of food? She loves hamburgers with all the toppings you can fit on it. Five Guys, Burger Factory, that kinda thing is her shit. She loves going to fast food joints and ordering the craziest combinations.

11. What do they feel most insecure about? Her abilities in anything really. She hates herself the moment she can’t do something. Even if it’s something small like playing a stupid Mario Party minigame she needs to be able to do it.

12. How do they like to dress? Masculine and functional, looking good and ready to kick ass.

13. How do they react to feelings of guilt? Beats herself up infinitely, hates herself and never really talks about it until someone convinces her to and then they can hopefully comfort her.

14. How do they react to/deal with betrayal? Initially wants to kill them. Then wants to beat the shit out of them. Eventually like, four years later, gets over it.

15. What is their greatest achievement? Breaking out if the institution and making it home safe, that was badass and awesome.

16. What are they like when they’ve gotten too little sleep? Irritable and cranky. Throws back coffee and energy drinks to help stay awake until she eventually crashes and passes out.

17. What are they like when they’re drunk? Depressed, nostalgic for better times. She cries a lot and apologizes for everything ever. A sad sight to see, really.

18. What kind of music do they enjoy? Hard rock and heavy metal. She wants to feel the bass in her bones and rock the fuck out. Has a soft spot for a few softer bands but usually refuses to admit it.

19. Are they right or left handed? She was born like technically left handed, but due to the missing finger she quickly took to using her right hand.

20. Fears? Scared of losing people. Scared of disappointing her friends. Scared of becoming like her parents. Scared of hurting those she loves.

21. Favorite kind of weather? Windy and somewhat sunny, but not too bright. She loves the rain too.

22. Favorite color? Red, which was probably obvious.

23. Do they collect anything? She tends to keep bottle caps around, accumulating a pile in her room until Sam inevitably recycles them all and she has to start anew.

24. Do they prefer either hot or cold weather more? Cool but not cold weather.

25. What is their eye color? Pale blue like iceberg water.

26. What is their race/ethnicity? White, specifically white trash by birth.

27. Hair color? Dark brown, likes to dye it red.

28. Are they happy where they are currently? Living with Sam and Max in a decent apartment with a decent job, she’s happy.

29. Are they a morning person? Not in the least. She’s basically a zombie before 11am.

30. Sunrise or sunset? Sunset, she likes knowing darkness is right around the corner.

31. Are they more messy or more organized? Messy, everything has it’s place - wherever it happens to be dropped.

32. Pet peeves? When people follow rules like it’s the law - even when it’s literally the law. See: Refusing to jaywalk Taking off hats in restaurants Never walking on the road even when it’s 2am and nobody else is awake jesus christ live a little dude

33. Do they own any objects of significant personal importance? She still has this little bracelet Sam gave her when they were like 12. It’s made of silver and has a little S engraved in it. She refuses to admit she still has it.

34. Least favorite food? She can’t stand salad. Why would you eat leaves?

35. Least favorite color? Orange. Never did care much for it.

36. Least favorite smell? Like 99% of perfumes, they just smell like chemicals to her.

37. When was the last time they cried? Last week she had a nightmare and some traumatic memories came back and she couldn’t help but cry.

38. Were they with anybody the last time they cried? She woke Sam up without meaning to and they comforted her.

39. Tell us about one of the times they got injured? She and Max were playing chicken, running straight at each other until someone bailed out. Nobody bailed out. She got her forehead cut open and Max got a huge bruise on his cheek.

40. Do they have any scars? Jesus does she ever. Scar across her left cheek, left ear reconstructed from skin grafts, scars up and down her arms and thighs from self harm, leg amputated above right knee, scars on her stomach from when her mother attacked her, burn marks across her back, and she’s missing her left index finger from a birth defect. We call her Scar for a reason.

41. Do they struggle with any mental health issues? Major depression and anger issues, as well as other shit left over from emotional and physical abuse. She’s pretty broken. On antidepressants but they aren’t quite enough, she’s doing her best.

42. Do they have any bad habits? Drinks too much (working on it though), used to smoke weed too much, leaves in the middle of the night without warning and worries everyone to death.

43. Why might someone dislike them? Lots of reasons. Resting bitch face, defensive and rude, she’s very loud and refuses to apologize for who she is

44. Why might someone love them? She has a lot to talk about. She’s intensely loyal and will protect you with her life. Once you realize what she’s working to fight through, she’s trying her hardest to be a good person. She’s a fight worth fighting for.

45. Do they believe in ghosts? She believes that if someone dies in a bullshit way they’ll stick around until they’re satisfied.

46. Is there anyone they would trust with their lives? Any four of her best friends. Sam, Max, James, and Simon alike she’d trust with her life.

47. Are they romantically interested in anyone? She loves Sam.

48. Are they dating/married to anyone? Sam is her gorgeous partner and she loves her very much.

49. Do they like surprises? She would if she could be awake enough to enjoy them. When she stays up for an all nighter she loves watching the sunrise.

50. When is their birthday? August 18th, summer child.

51. How do they usually celebrate their birthday? Used to drink the night away, now gets friends together to eat cake and junk food and watch good-bad movies

52. Do they have any family? Parents are long gone. This gang of misfits is her new family. A bunch of brothers and a beautiful partner.

53. Are they close to their family? Biological family no, she wants nothing to do with them. Her new family definitely.

54. What is their MBTI type? I’d say ISTP, the Virtuoso. I think it suits her well.

55. What is their zodiac sign? She’s a Leo but can literally never remember her sign.

56. What Hogwarts House would they be in? Gryffindor, like the cliche kicking down the door Gryffindor.

57. What D&D alignment are they? Chaotic neutral-good. She wants to be good, but only when it concerns her or her friends.

58. Do they ever have nightmares? If so, what about? The infinite amount of hit that has happened to her still haunts her every week or two, usually waking her up in the middle of the night.

59. What are their views on death? Pretends not to care, actually scared of what might be waiting.

60. What is something that they’re sure to laugh at? Any stupid joke for pun. Like what’s a fish without an eye? Her favourite joke.

61. When bored, how do they pass time? She works out, drinks, gets high, or just sleeps. She’ll also cuddle with Sam then fall asleep.

62. Do they enjoy being outside? Yeah, she loves the outdoors. She’ll get cranky if it’s too hot though.

63. Do they have an accent? She’s got the typical American/Canadian accent that doesn’t sound like an accent when you’re in north america. She has a few words out of the stereotypical Canadian accent but you’re dead if you point it out.

64. Upon seeing a slice of chocolate cake, what is their first reaction? Step one: acquire cake Step two: ingest

65. If they knew they were going to die, what would they do/say? She’d be terrified, crying as she spends every moment she can with all her friends. Telling and hearig stories, terrified that she’ll be forgotten.

66. How do they feel about sex? She enjoys it but doesn’t need it. Really depends on her partner.

67. What is their sexuality? She’s bisexual, leaning towards female and nonbinary people.

68. Do they become squeamish at the sight of blood? No way, blood can’t phase her at this point. She’s stitched and bandaged too many wounds to care about blood anymore.

69. Is there anything that they find really gross? Rotten food, just the sight of it makes her want to puke, and the smell will definitely make her puke.

70. Which TV Trope(s) best describes them? The cold-hearted bully who actually has a Tragic Backstory and can’t cope with it. Just needs someone to understand her.

71. Do they enjoy helping people? Her friends, yes. Sometimes strangers, but usually busy taking care of herself.

72. Are they allergic to anything? Nope, her immune system is chill.

73. Do they have a pet? James has Pequeño and she’s basically his aunt. She also has a rose haired tarantula named Princess she keeps in her room. Sam pretends they aren’t terrified of Princess.

74. Are they quick to anger? What are they like when they lose their temper? She’ll get angry in a heartbeat. She has two possibilities when angry: brooding and internalizing it all, or yelling and screaming until she ends up breaking down crying (usually someone is bleeding at this point).

75. How patient are they? She isn’t.

76. Are they good at cooking? Good enough. Nothing special but it’s pretty good.

77. Favorite insult? Do they insult people often? All the time. Big fan of “go die in a barn fire” and “who’s this clown?”

78. How do they act when they’re particularly happy? She’s grinning, laughing at everything and loud as can be.

79. What do they do when they learn about other people’s fears? She’s super careful to protect them from it and try not to mention that stuff.

80. Are they trustworthy? If you’re established as friends, she will die before she betrays you.

81. Do they try to hide their emotions? Are they good at it? She hides them on instinct, and is good at first but everything quickly overwhelms her and shows through.

82. Do they exercise regularly? All the time.

83. Are they comfortable with the way they look? She’s not terribly confident, but comfortable with her looks. She doesn’t plan on changing.

84. What are some physical features that they find attractive on people? She loves their arms, like muscular or small and dainty she loves the shoulders, biceps, forearms, hands. Can’t get enough.

85. What kind of personalities do they find attractive? Calm, helpful personalities, but still enough energy to go out and have fun. She wants someone to balance her out, but have fun when they can

86. Do they like sweet foods? In small amounts, she usually prefers salty or savory stuff.

87. What is their age? She’s 18.

88. Are they tall or short or somewhere in between? Damn tall, she’s 6’3”.

89. Do they wear glasses or contacts? Nope, her eyes are fine.

90. Do they consider themselves attractive? Somewhat, but not much.

91. What is their sense of humor like? Usually based on stupid puns and morbid jokes.

92. What mood are they most often in? Used to be depressed like 24/7, now is actually happy or at least content for the most part.

93. What kinds of things anger them? Basically anything, but especially people being rude, at least as she perceives.

94. Outlook on life? Kinda shitty but she’s stuck here so she might as well make the best of it.

95. What kind of things make them sad/depressed? Life. Basically anything. Anything had the potential to be sucked into the depressive vortex and made to be depressing.

96. What is their greatest weakness? Being insecure in herself. Also girls.

97. What is the greatest strength? Fighting for what she believes in.

98. Something that they regret? The years spent drunk and high that she could have been enjoying.

99. Biggest accomplishment? Getting out of the institution with James and Simon, alive and well.

100. Create your own! Ask anything you’d like!

[cerastes]

Sir Percival Is Very Nice And Disconcertingly Gullible Part 1

HELLO citizens. Today, I want to share with you the story of a certain Knight of the Round Table who knows how to maneuver his foot around people’s asses, looks like a prim and proper lady in a skirt, and also doesn’t know what a penis is. I am talking about the one and only Sir Percival. But before Sir Percival was a Sir or Percival, he was a lady, a cute girl, an adorable toddler. No, there’s no magic involved, no magic transformation, it’s just that he was raised as a girl (culturally speaking, in relation to the time) by his mother, and he never really questioned it, because to question things, you need life experience, and you get more life experience from cleaning dirty fingernails than you do cooped up in a caslte. Oh yeah, by the way, his mother kept him cooped in a castle and he was ffffffforbidden from ever leaving it. Also, I’ll have to split this in parts because it is TOO LONG.

LET’S ELABORATE: Percival was the prince of certain lands, and his father was either King Pellinore or Alain le Gros, and in either case, the father is a celebrated warrior. Point is, Percival is of noble lineage and the son of a warrior king, which of course means he has superpowers, because this is Arthurian mythos. Regardless of who his father was, he also had at least four siblings, all four of them Knights of the Round Table. Now this is the part where you expect his family to be proud of how many fine warriors it has produced. Except you are WRONG, because my man’s mother was actually Not Too Happy With The Family Business, so when Percival was born, Mom, who is unnamed because being a woman in Arthurian mythos sucks because you either die or are a huge asshole, said “mmMMMM NO” and raised Percival away from everything that could be considered “manly” back in the day (read: knights) and without letting him ever learn of dangerous stuff like “swords” or “holy grails”. Accounts vary whether Mom took Percival and his sister away from their castle and to live in the forest or if she simply raised Percival in the castle proper, but for all intents and purposes, what matters here is that Percival looks better than you and I in a dress, can knit a fierce sweater, weaves the meanest baskets, and can sew a whole dress from the ground up using only dirty curtains and positive thoughts.

So Mom, Sister, and Percival are having fun, living a soft and cute life, when SUDDENLY, knights appear. Mom was busy watching Star Trek reruns and this distracted her long enough for Percival to notice them and ask “MOM HOLY FUCK WHAT ARE THOSE METAL DUDES”. Mom realized too late that He Had Been Exposed, so she acted fast on her feet and said “Ah, Percy, those are... Angels. They are servants of God, so don’t look at them too much, because you see them when you die or when you are close to something that could result in your death!”, so the first thing Percival does is ask his sister if she can tie a sturdy noose, nice and cozy, so he can hang himself immediately to become an angel, they look SO COOL, and his sister, with all the delicacy of a car accident, shuts him the fuck up and asks him to stop being a weirdo for one second.

Since his UNCOOPERATIVE family was made of unreasonable asses out of nowhere, P-Diddy sneaks out of the castle (which is also the first time he ever gets out of that castle WOW LOCKING YOUR KIDS IS SUCH A GOOD IDEA) and approaches the angels, trying to not be seen by them because he doesn’t want to die, but during his Sneaking Operation, he steps on the loudest,most scandalous tree branch in history and mythos because it lets out a CRRRRRCCCKKK SO FUCKING LOUD the knights’ horses go apeshit, one of them kicks a knight in the face, and another straight up runs into a river and drowns, which makes you think what in the fuck are these horses on the field of duty for if a kid in a dress can scare them into Escort Mission AI-levels of idiocy. Well, that aside, the knights obviously freak the fuck out and are like “WOAH HEY WHY ARE YOU DOING THAT STOP!” which quickly turns into “WHY ARE YOU WEARING A DRESS!” and honestly, Parsee was kinda weirded out because angels are supposed to be more solemn than this, and definitely not as loud. P-kun voices these concerns, and the knights have themselves a gigglesnort, quickly and politely explaining that they are knights, not angels, and that yelling, questioning, and killing was part of their job. Then they explained it was a lie, because they never ask questions, only yell and kill, which you guys and gals at home probably think is just me making a joke, except Knights of the Round Table killed each other a SHITLOAD of times simply because they didn’t know who the other guy was, because there was this understanding, this covenant back in the day where, if you were a knight and the other guy was a knight and yelling was involved, as it usually is in the field of battle, you most likely were enemies and had to murder each other, and apparently no one fucking recognized each others’ armor or anything.

What I am trying to say is that people in Arthurian mythos are MORONIC BRUTES and that Britain is a PvP-enabled zone, which is why shit like Camlann happens.

Anyways.

Percival was apparently pretty ok with these metal dudes being professional loud murderers because he immediately asks if he can become a professional loud murderer, but he gets turned away because he is still a kid at this point, and kids can’t be knights, BUT, as soon as his hormones start going nuts and awkward, solitary strands of hair start growing on his moles and around his nipples, he’s old enough to become a knight. He’s content enough with this answer, and so he heads home and gets turbo-grounded the moment his mom catches him. In the process of being turbo-grounded, Percy let out to his mom that he wanted to become a knight, which turned this into an ultra mega turbo grounding instead because he said The Forbidden Word and now Mom’s angry.

Even being his mom and everything, however, Mom knew she couldn’t really oppose the wishes of his son like this, so what did she do instead? What every normal person in a front of a situation that requires cooperation from both ends and that demands maturity and sensibility would do: Lie.

She outright kept telling Percival that he was still 12 years old, even as the years passed. More concerning is the fact that P-kun didn’t question this at all. Well, whatever floats your boat, weirdo Arthurian family.

Percival turns 17 or 18 years of age, depending on the source, which is the age where kids are considered men and can thusly start screaming and killing [for honor], but he is still convinced he is 12 years old because Mom Sucks. All is well as usual in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber Castle WHEN SUDDENLY, a knight appears, except this one is a BAD KNIGHT, his first thought upon seeing the castle was “my, what a NICE and GORGEOUS door, I bet ramming it down and raping whatever girl I find inside would make this an even better day! : )“ so he gets to work and, sure enough, just solo-decimates the entire castle door and is getting ready to Bad Touch Mom and Sister when Percival, now no longer a kid, but rather, a powerfully built, ripped, 24 pack abs superwarrior (remember what I told you about lineage and mythos?) appears before him all like “hey can you maybe not do that shit to my family? It is rude”.

The Bad Knight takes one look at this body building champion, and lets out a “WHY ARE YOU WEARING A DRESS”. Ah, yeah, Percy was still wearing the dress. So the Bad Knight is kinda laughing because this kid, he can be SSJ Broly all he wants, he’s still in a dress. The laughing, however, ceases immediately when Percival grabs the dude, who is encased in armor and that knocked down the castle door all by himself, and just sorta casually throws him past the castle walls and breaks his entire body. Again, Percival, who never has trained his muscles in any way or learned anything more violent than embroidery, just gave this dude the So Long Gay Bowser throw from Mario 64, from the courtyard, launching him ABOVE the castle walls, and right into the ground outside. That huge “CRASH BOOM!” you heard just now was not the knight falling down, it was his self-esteem crashing after having a kid in a dress ragdoll him. No, wait, no, never mind, it was his body, because DEAD PEOPLE can’t feel shit.

“so, uh, mom” “no” “I just threw a fully armored man” “nope” “I think uh” “nu uh” “I might be an adult” “Grounded”

So P-kun is grounded, fine, and more time passes, when SUDDENLY, a cockatrice attacked the castle. Now, what is a cockatrice? It’s a two-legged serpent with a rooster’s head, and it kills you by looking at you and petrifying you. Basically, a gorgon with a funny hat. Sometimes, because the “petrifying” bit is something of a conjecture by latter authors or analyzers of mythology. The cockatrice actually just kinda sorta outright killed you when it looked at you. So this thing is wreaking havoc in the Censorship Castle, shooting rude glares and crying loudly in the morning, and this Deeply Annoys Percival. The young man simply walks out, uproots a whole a tree, as you normally do, and swats the cockatrice with a flick, sending it DBZ-style flying against the nearest wall. When he saw THAT didn’t kill the very confused monster, Percival, with his bare fucking hands, rips the tree he uprooted into a thinner form by legit ripping the bark layer by layer with his unreasonable strength, fashioning a spear with the tree by doing this (what the wtf?) and using that to stab the shit out of the cockatrice, who probably was already dead as fuck the moment it saw this dude just outright manhandling the tree and turning it into a spear with his bare hands.

“mom” “no” “mom I just uprooted a tree and killed an instakill monster with it’’ “NO’’ “I’m no scientist because those still don’t exist but I am pretty sure I am an adult now” “no sweetie that was just a stray dog” “mom I know dogs and that wasn’t a dog. No dog of ours ever shot laser beams out of its eyes or looked like a dragon wearing a chicken hat” “it’s a breed that comes from Scotland” “MOM”

So Percival more or less has enough of Mom’s shit, and finally gets her blessing to leave the castle. Immediately afterward, Mom dies. Because being female in Arthurian mythos means you ei-- Oh, I already made that one. Well, yeah, there you go. Also the sister also died. But Percival is on his way to become a knight!

What exciting adventures are in store for Percival? Stay tuned for PART 2, in which Percival enters a dysfunctional relationship, makes bad business decisions, and headbutts Sir Lancelot du Lac right in the face, and yes, this is all shit that happens on the exciting Road To Knighthood.

[kentkennyradcliffe]

Chapter 2: Mrs. Burnes.

School was always awkward for me. I was known in the classroom and people seemed to like me, but I wasn’t anyone’s best friend. I never gave anyone the time to play with me. I remember during school I would stay to myself until someone came to me and wanted to talk or play.

No one picked on me or thought bad of me in elementary school. Everyone generally liked me. My social skills were odd, and I stood up for the kids who were made of, and I didn’t care about school because I made easy grades. The kids were the least of my interests during class. But once recess came I was out there playing with them. There was a huge colorful dome bar thingy that I would sit on top of. Other kids always wanted to play with me and I took advantage of that. I would get them to do what I wanted. I was bossy but not mean. We would play the color game, which was this: one kid would be on the ground, with their eyes closed and they would spin around then touch a bar. Whatever color the bar was, that was the color that the kids on top of the bar had to touch. If they weren’t touching it when the kid on ground taps them, then that kid lost.

Until 2nd grade I had Mrs. Burns, the robust, jolly woman with glasses. First time I saw her I thought she resembled an alien. And her classroom was very alien-like. She called it her pod. In my imaginative mind, this meant she was going to put us in pods and turn us into aliens. I was so convinced Mrs. Burns was an alien, that I made my own safety paper reflector to keep her human changing alien pods away. How silly of me.

2nd and 3rd grade were my big years. It was the years I started to notice things. I noticed my image in the mirror. I noticed other people. I noticed my class work. I noticed books like Julie b. Jones. I noticed Holidays and the fact that presents were given on the big ones like Christmas and Easter. I noticed time and clocks and when the sun went down (that was the most important thing for a child to know, the worst thing in the world would be to get stuck outside in the dark. That’s when the boogeyman comes out you know.)

I was in the cub scouts for a year. I enjoyed it. The meetings were fun and I liked the arts and crafts stuff. The boat contest and the car contest were fun. I won a trophy with the boat contest. We had to construct our own boats and make them float on the water. I don’t remember if I helped dad make the boat or not. But I do know I was very proud of myself when I learned I was winning. I had no pressure to win from my dad, which I didn’t realize until now. He wasn’t the type of dad who would go crazy at a little league baseball game (which I was a part of in kinder garden). I didn’t win 1st place, but I came in 2nd, which was fine with me because my trophy was bigger than 3rd.

The extra classes besides our homeroom class were my favorite. Gym, Music, and Art. Color and music became especially important for me in my 2nd and 3rd grade years. Gym was just annoying. Music and art were my favorite classes. I always looked forward to each class because I had the most fun in them. The music class really stands out in my mind as one of the best classes ever. We had a new teacher every year. The first one was old and skinny and mean and pulled out her hair when she got mad. I didn’t like her. Next we had Mrs. Sherman, the calm nature girl who didn’t like chairs so we all sat in a big circle on the floor like Indians. Then there was Mr. Thurman. He was the one who I liked because he let us use the instruments. He also had the coolest music classroom videos. I saw Here’s Dolly and The Music Man for the very first time in his class.

Gym was a joke. Mr. Walker, the big-boned basketball coach who believed way too much in tie-bow videos, dodge ball, and synchronized dance. He set up different sections of the gym for different activities. We had ropes in the back that he wanted us to swing on like monkeys from one end to other. There were only three ropes, but he spaced them out so far that it seemed like he should have had 6. Then the tie-bow section was at the furthest most wall with the big cougar mascot painted on the wall. I actually liked the guy on the video; he was African American and had a voice like an army sarge. I followed the movements very carefully. One day I got bored with it and instead of doing the high kicks, I just swung my arms and legs out and bobbed side to side on alternating feet, like a frog being stretched out on all fours like a rubber band.

Mr. Walker had a huge colorful ball that we had to keep in the air. That was one of our tests. The synchronized dancing was always fun. Cotton-eye Joe, hand-jive, the electric slide, the maharani… he had us even do ballroom dancing. I remember volleyball too. I never wanted to hit the ball. When it came to sports time in gym I always fell short to comply. I hated playing dodge ball and basketball and wiffleball. Tennis was fun though. But I only liked hitting the ball as hard as I could and not actually trying to keep it in the court. I never liked following the rules in the game. It was no fun with rules.

In art class, I had a teacher named Mrs. Thurman. If you’ve ever watched King of the Hill, she is Nancy Dribble. The big blonde hair, the Texan accent, it was all Mrs. Thurman. She let us be creative and free with our art, but she still gave us certain criteria.

Cougar den was introduced in 2nd grade. It was an after school daycare that Crestwood elementary housed. Mrs. Cindi was the leader. And all of her slaves were us kids. She was scary. But now that I think about it, she was very good at keeping all 200 something of us in line.

Mrs. Pat in cougar den was a big influence in my decision to color. I colored all the time in cougar den. The coloring books were practically mine. I would take one and sit down at a table and get all the crayons in the coloring box and if one was missing I would search for it until I found it. I did now like missing crayons. One time a boy stole my red crayon. It was so mean. I saw him take it, but he insisted that he didn’t. I was no fool. That mean dumb boy must have thought I was blind. How could he be so dumb to think that by taking a crayon out of my hand and running away with it and then stuffing it in his pocket and come back 5 minutes later,  would make me forget about my missing red crayon. Did he not know who he was dealing with? How dare that boy be so dumb? I wanted revenge. Then I saw dragon ball z come on the TV and I immediately forgot.

In 3rd grade TV was god. I noticed the TV and began watching channel 34. It had wonderful shows like Animaniacs, Historama, Batman beyond, and Pokémon. Pokémon exploded onto the world when I was in 3rd grade. The TV show was how I first discovered it. I loved team rocket and the fire Pokémon. I was enamored by the cartoon. Then I had my mom buy me my very first pack of Pokémon cards. I collected all the first 150 cards. I was so proud of my collection. I took them everywhere I went. Then for Easter my mom and dad got me the first Pokémon games, Red and Blue for game boy.  My life was complete. I never out that thing down! I wouldn’t let anyone else touch my game. I took it to school and played it during recess with the other kids who had the same game. Sometimes we would all sit around the TV for video games and just talk about the new Pokémon we caught. I never wanted to trade with the other kids. I felt like my Pokémon were caught by me, so why should I trade them with anyone?

Video games were another important aspect of my childhood. I got a Nintendo 64 for Christmas of my 3rd grade year. Super Mario 64, some old Japanese game that had a boy with black hair and he could transform into 4 other characters, and another game that I don’t even remember. I knew that cougar den had an N64 and I watched the older kids play Super Mario 64 on it so I could go home and do what they did. That’s how I beat the game. Then Banjo-Tooie came out. Rareware made their best games for Nintendo, why did they leave? Anyway, I bought that game with my own money that I earned for doing chores. Every day that I came home from elementary school, I would go into my room and play Banjo-Tooie. It took me a whole two years to beat the game. Donkey Kong, Legend of Zelda, Mario-kart and Mario Party 1, 2, and 3 were my other favorites. I played them with my cousins mostly because they were the only people who I liked spending the night.

I was lucky to have such close cousins. Nicky, Zack, Josh... One of them would spend the night every week. And Mario kart or Mario party were the games we played. Me and Nicky became really good at Mario kart, while I loved beating Zack and Josh at Mario party. I even would play that game by myself just to get more stars for the store. I think that was the only reason why I liked to play with Zack and Josh on Mario party. The game boards were so interesting to me. I loved the Mario Party 2 game the most. It had a board where it was a pirate game. Then the GameCube came out. I had a subscription to Game Informer for a year and I loved reading about the new games. Nintendo was my platform of choice. I noticed that when the GameCube came out, the play station and Xbox was taking over, so the coverage on the GameCube was minor. I bought The Legend of Zelda: Windwaker, Mario Kart, Soul Calibur, and Super Smash Bros. I played those all time. Never any time for friends…

When I had my cousins over, I treated them bad. I never seemed to care about what they wanted to do. I only wanted to do what I wanted to do. I was bossy and kind of sarcastic. But they always loved me. We used to go down to the little creak that I called a river in the back of the trees that I called woods. We thought that all of these trees were a big wooded area that was free to explore by us. When all the time it was just people’s backyards and big open fields that would soon become places for houses.  Zack and Josh would bring a big bag so we could take the “fossils” we found back to my house and put them under the tree house.

My dad made a clubhouse for me when I was little. I guess I was around 7 or 8. It was a big gift for me, and I never really used it as much as dad wanted me to. I know he felt like I didn’t care, but I did. I loved it. I just didn’t have anyone to play in it with me. And it was so lonely being in there along. When Zack and Josh came over we would go in it and sit there forever and we created a little club that was for only us. We would hide treasure in it and write on the walls and the railing. I tried climbing it one time to show off how strong I was. But I couldn’t get up to the top. Then we just forgot about the whole thing. Well actually I forgot about it. It is still out there, now it is dad’s tool shed. I’m too old for it now anyway. But I never felt like dad knew how much I much appreciated him making it for me. It really took a lot of work.

[fardell24b]

Lawndale and Sandi Griffin’s Genie - Chapter 2 - Part 1

Chapter 2: Friday Adventures

Friday February 19, 1999

Lawndale

1111 Glen Oaks Lane 4:30

Quinn awoke from a strange dream. ‘I don’t know what to make of that,’ she thought. She tried to go back to sleep.

 She soon found that she couldn’t so she decided to go down to the kitchen for a healthy snack.

However she found that she was not the only one who was up. Daria was sitting at the table reading a book and drinking from a cup when she walked in.

 “Couldn’t sleep either?” Quinn asked.

 “Something like that,” Daria said.

 Quinn grabbed some carrot sticks and poured some milk. She then sat down across from Daria and sighed.

“Something on your mind?” Daria asked.

 “Huh?”

 “You look deep in thought. You don’t usually look like that.”

 “Funny,” Quinn said, in her usual tone of voice. She then continued, more seriously. “It’s this situation you know? It is going to change everything! The Fashion Club, the social dynamic at school, the guys whom I date, possibly even all of Lawndale itself. It is frightening. It is as you said, Daria. The very idea of Sandi with a genie is frightening! The only reason why things weren’t worse yesterday is that Sandi hadn’t realised the full potential, and that Jean’s mischievousness is good natured,” Quinn said.

 “You are right. It is going to change everything. Especially if either Ms Li or Sandi’s Mom find out,” Daria said.

 Quinn thought, and didn’t like what she speculated (especially when she realised that Ms Li would use the genie to install more security measures for the school). “Dar-i-a! That is more frightening than with Sandi!”

 “Exactly, that is one thing that you have to bring up with Stacy and Tiffany when they get here at breakfast. I will be talking to Jane around the same time. We could then meet at the school and discuss our decisions,” Daria said.

 “Dar-ia! If I mention the possibility of the genie falling into the hands of either the principal or Mrs Griffin, Stacy would faint, and then she would be basically a wreck!” Quinn said.

 “Quinn, they need to be informed of that possibility, or your discussions may be for naught,” Daria said.

 Quinn was then in thought, for a moment and then spoke, “You are right, Daria, much as I hate to admit that. We may be late to school though.” She was sure that calming Stacy down would take up much of their time.

 “If you are running late, you can continue your discussion on the way to school,” Daria suggested.

 “I guess we had better and maybe Jeffy can give me a ride,” Quinn said. They talked for another minute about the situation.

  “But now I don’t feel like going back to sleep!” Quinn said.

 “Neither do I,” Daria said.

 “But what are we going to do for the next few hours?”

 “The same way we used to spend the wee small hours together when we were younger,” Daria said, as she stood up and went towards the living room.

 “Video games? Sure, though I am mostly out of practice.”

 “Which console do you want to use? The SNES or the N64?”

 “SNES?” Quinn asked, confused. She knew what N64 meant but ‘SNES’ had her confused.

 “You know, the Super Nintendo,” Daria said, as she pointed to where the system in question lay beneath the television and the VCR.

 “Oh, it’s an acronym! Duh, Quinn!” she murmured to herself. “Maybe the N64, but I am not sure what game,” she continued.

 “Ok,” Daria said, she unplugged the SNES and plugged in the N64. She and Quinn then played Mario Kart 64.

  324 Eichler Street 5:00

Stacy awoke trembling as she remembered the events of the day before. “It was just a dream,” she said. She then realised, “or was it?” she grabbed her diary and read the most recent entry.

“So, it did happen!” She fainted back into her bed.

 5 minutes later, Stacy came to. She remembered everything from the day before, from the incident at recess, to the conversation with Quinn’s mom. She re-read the diary entry.

 She knew that she wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep, so she went down to the living room and took out the PlayStation. ‘I haven’t played this for a while. This will help me keep my mind off things until it’s time to go to Quinn’s,’ she thought. She found Final Fantasy VII and put the disk into the system.

  111 Howard Drive 5:30

Jane was in the kitchen, looking for an early breakfast, when her brother Trent entered after a night of practice with his band, Mystik Spiral.

“You are up early, Janie,” he said.

 “So are you,” Jane countered.

 “Practice ran late, or early,” Trent said. He saw that his younger sister was in thought. “Something on your mind?” he asked.

 “Oh, I told Tom about my 11th birthday,” Jane said.

 “Cool,” Trent said, as he remembered that day.

 “He thought so too. Anyway the problem is with the reason why I told him,” Jane said. Trent waited. “You remember the family we bowled next to, right?”

 “Yes, the daughter had anger issues,” Trent said, wondering where Jane was going with this line of conversation.

 “Yes. She is also the leader of the clique that Daria’s sister is part of,” Jane said.

 “What are you getting at Janie?”

 “Sandi was bowling next to Tom and I and she was bowling well. However I also remembered rumours that were going around school yesterday.”

 “Since when do you pay attention to rumours at school?”

 “Not often, but hear this. An extra floor appeared on the top of the science block yesterday! And the teachers don’t know how,” Jane said.

 Trent could see that that his younger sister was not pulling his leg.

 “So you are saying that this girl is involved in some kind of magic?” Trent asked, he had seen much of Lawndale in his 22 years, and some of what he had seen couldn’t be explained rationally...

 “Exactly, Daria’s sister and her not so tame pack of football players also mentioned a classroom full of water, when we passed them in the hall,” Jane said.

 “Something is definitely happening.”

 “Daria called late last night, she said that Quinn spilled the beans to her family. She mentioned a genie. She is coming over at 7:00 and then we are going to talk about the situation. It seemed like she was unwilling to trust the phone for some reason,” Jane said.

 “Is that it?”

 “Yeah,” Jane said, in thought about what Daria might be telling her when she came over.

 Trent was concerned for his sister. “Maybe I can get the old Atari out of the Attic and we can play something? Something to do, if you can’t get to sleep,” he said. Sleep was never a difficulty for Trent, narcoleptic as he was (Indeed the difficulty was staying awake for long periods).

 Jane briefly considered the idea. “That is a very good idea,” she said. Trent went out to the stairs. ‘Although I may be spoiled by the arcades and the Morgendorffers’ Nintendo’s,’ she thought. She then went upstairs herself and waited for Trent near the bottom of the attic stairs.

 Trent came down from the attic with a box with the 2600 system on the top of it. “Which game do you want to play first?” he asked.

  Jane finished connecting the Atari to the television in her bedroom. “Let’s see, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, E.T. the Extra Terrestrial, Trent! That is the worst game of all time! Why do we have it?”

 “Hmm, I guess that is why Wind said that the store was almost full of them when he bought it,” Trent said, referring to his and Jane’s older brother.

 “At least the first 2 are amongst the best games of all time,” Jane said, putting the Pac-Man cartridge into the console. ‘Of course Wind would get it,’ she mused.

 She and Trent took turns playing Pac-Man until Trent fell asleep and then Jane continued playing until Daria arrived.

  631 Bernstein Avenue 6:00

Tiffany awoke and looked at her bedside clock. ‘I may as well get up,’ she thought. She remembered the events of the previous day, from Sandi’s floating until her discussion with Quinn’s mother. ‘I hope Quinn and Stacy will know what to do,’ she thought. She thought about the ways that Lawndale could change as a result of Sandi’s finding a genie. All of the conclusions she reached frightened her.

‘I still have an hour until I have to go to Quinn’s,’ she thought. She thought of a way to occupy her time. She then recalled the old Sega, that was down in the den. ‘I haven’t played anything since I started high school,’ she thought.

 Tiffany found the Sega Genesis where she remembered it to be and carefully plugged it in to the den’s television. Certain that she had gotten the connections right she selected a game and plugged the cartridge in.

 She was soon playing the game, sending the character all over the screen. “Sonic is fa-ast!” she said with her eyes on the blue hedgehog...

  Varmittan Imperial Palace-Tree 6:30

“So it is a Genie!” the Varmittan Emperor exclaimed.

 “Yes. The younger of the two human children was quite adamant about that!” Captain Jaywi said, as he tried to contain his excitement.

 “I have read the archives, the previous mention of a genie in the ‘Pennsylvania’ region was in Oakwood, 30 years ago, 5 moon cycles before the humans made their first landing upon the moon,” the Emperor said.

 “What occurred?” Captain Jaywi asked, curious.

 “There was some chaos prior to the genie disappearing in the third day of the incident. Prior to that there was a sighting 60 years ago in Middlebury, but the information from then is fragmentary,” the Emperor said. Captain Jaywi knew why the information would be fragmentary, something to do with a War involving Europe...

 The Emperor and the captain continued their discussion before the Emperor sent the Captain back to Glen Oaks Lane.

  Tiffany looked at the clock as she switched off the Sega. ‘Yikes! I have to be at Quinn’s in 10 minutes!’ she thought. Just as well her house was only 2 blocks from the Morgendorffers. She went up to her room, grabbed her handbag and came back downstairs. “Bye, Mommy,” she said as she ran out the back door... She then went into the laneway.

  324 Eichler Street 7:06

Stacy looked at the time. “Oh no! I have lost track of time!” she said. She then saved the game and then rushed upstairs to get changed.

 5 minutes later she came down the stairs, turned off the PlayStation (and put it away) and then ran out the front door.

  Daria met Tiffany at the door as she was going out. “See you at school, Quinni,” Daria said.

 “Quinni?” Tiffany asked.

 “It is a nickname, like when Kevin calls his friend ‘Mack-Daddy’,” Daria said.

 “Only not so annoying,” Quinn said as she turned off the N64 and started walking over.

 “Oh yeah, like when my name is short-tened to Tiff.”

 “’Ari’, do you see Stacy?”

 Daria glared at Quinn for a fraction of a second before stepping out of the door, past Tiffany and looking up and down the street for Stacy. “She is nowhere to be seen. Does she always lack punctuality?”

 “In Middle School, she was all-ways, Tard-dy.”

 “She is usually the last to arrive at Fashion Club meetings,” Quinn said.

 “If I see her, I’ll tell her that you are waiting,” Daria said, as she set out for Jane’s. Quinn watched her sister walk out to the sidewalk before turning back to Tiffany.

 “Let’s go wait in the kitchen, we will wait for five minutes and then start our discussion without her.”

 “I hope she gets here soo-on,” Tiffany said as she closed the door.

[rosenwrites]

A Peachy Predicament

Character(s): Linh

Suggested Music: A King of Apathy

               “Alright, I hope this place as a Nintendo 64.” Linh said to herself as she parked her car. Christmas was drawing closer and the twins have been good as always. Well, aside from the occasional scuffles. But even then, it was always to defend someone else, so Linh forgave them. It was snowing outside. She stepped out of the car and stood face to face with the Toys R Us store. She waddled over to the entrance, taking care not to slip on the icy concrete.

Just as Linh was about to walk through the front door, she heard someone groaning from around the corner. She stopped, hesitant of what to do next. She shook her head and made her way around the corner of the store.

“I hope this doesn’t end with me getting robbed.” Linh thought to herself. She turned the corner and braced herself when she found the source of the groaning. A woman with short blonde hair was down on the ground, clutching her ankle in pain with her black luggage bag beside her.

“Oh my goodness! Are you okay?” Linh asked in a panic.

“No, I twisted my ankle—owowow!” The lady replied in pain. “Damn it, we still needed to get ready for the show, too? How are we going to do this now?”

“Wait, there’s going to be a show?” Linh inquired as she helped the lady back onto her feet and lent her shoulder to her. She also made sure to get the luggage, as well.

“Yes, as a special promotion for the launch of the Nintendo 64 as well as Super Mario 64. I was supposed to play the role of Princess Peach.”

“Princess Peach? I thought her name was Princess Toadstool.”

“That’s what the script said. You’d have to ask the guy in charge of this. Just help me over to the employee entrance. I guess I have to break the news to them.” The two women wobbled their way to the store’s employee entrance. “Oh, by the way, my name is Cynthia.”

“I’m Linh. So how was this show supposed to go?”

“Well, we can’t exactly spoil the ending of Super Mario 64, so we were going to do a re-enactment of the ending of Super Mario World.”

“Oh hey, I remember that!”

“Really? Then I think we can overcome his dilemma.” Cynthia smiled as the two of them went through the employee entrance. They made their way through the brightly lit hall and to the spacious employee lounge. The director and other actors were waiting for them.

“Cynthia! We were worried about you! What happened to your leg?” A man wearing a hat with a rolled-up script in his hands approached Cynthia and Linh. There was a clear look of concern on his face.

“Mr. Spagnuolo, I’m sorry but I twisted my ankle on my way here. I can’t do the show like this.”

The director, other actors, and staff all gasped.

“Alright, first take a seat.” Mr. Spagnuolo said. “We’ll take a look at it before deciding what to do next.”

Linh helped Cynthia over to one of the black leather chairs in the lounge and sat her down. She slipped off Cynthia’s shoe and sock and rolled up her pant leg to get a better look. As expected, her ankle was in bad shape. It was swollen and red. There was no way Cynthia could do the show without injuring herself. One actor wearing a red shirt and blue overalls, presumably playing the role of Mario, handed Cynthia a bag of ice to place on her ankle. She thanked him for his thoughtfulness as she pressed the bag of ice up against her ankle.

“So what are we going to do now?” The Mario actor asked. “The show starts in twenty minutes and I doubt Cynthia’s ankle will heal up in that time.”

“Mr. Spagnuolo, Rob, I have an idea.” Cynthia said. “Linh here could take my place. I mean, she’s the same height and size as me, plus she’s played the Mario games before. She even spotted the discrepancy of the princess’s name.”

“Wait, what? We didn’t discuss this!” Linh protested. “I don’t even have the right hair for the princess. And why is her name Princess Peach now, anyway?”

“Oh, that’s an easy explanation.” Mr. Spagnuolo answered. “Princess Peach was always her name in Japan, and Nintendo’s American branch finally decided to fix that mistake. By the way, I’m Nick Spagnuolo. It’s nice to meet you, Linh.”

“And don’t worry about the hair. We have a wig ready.” Cynthia added. “Please Linh, we have nobody else to turn to!”

“I didn’t ask for this! I just wanted to buy a Nintendo 64 for my niece and nephew. Now I’m getting roped into a promotional performance on such short notice!”

“Of course we’re prepared to compensate you for your troubles.” Nick said. “We’ll even reserve a Nintendo 64 just for you to purchase. We’ll even let you have it for half off!”

Linh huffed. “You should’ve said that in the first place! Now I look like a damn fool for making a scene!”

Everyone in the staff lounge laughed and cheered. Cynthia motioned for a hug and Linh obliged.

“Thanks, Linh! You just saved the show!”

“Well, I haven’t saved anything yet. I still need to do the show!”

“Speaking of which, you need to get dressed right now. Also, here’s the script.” Nick shoved the rolled-up script into Linh’s hands as the staff ushered her out of the lounge to get changed. Nick, Cynthia, and Rob were the only ones left in the lounge.

“I sure hope she can pull it off.” Nick remarked.

“I know she can! She told me she’s played the Mario games and even remembers how Super Mario World ended.”

“If that’s true, then I think this’ll go smoothly then.” Rob said as he nodded to himself. “Where’s Charlie, anyway?”

“He got restless and started wandering around.” Nick answered. “I hope he doesn’t scare someone by accident. He’s still in costume!”

Just as Nick finished saying that, Linh could be heard down the hall letting out a short and loud yelp.

“Too late. I think Linh just ran into Charlie.” Cynthia did her best not to giggle at the mental image, but she stopped altogether when Linh showed up at the doorway. With her blonde wig, pink dress, and a touch of makeup, she looked like a real princess. Standing behind her was Charlie, fully in costume as the yellow-scaled, spike shelled, king of the Koopas.

“I see you’ve met Charlie.” Nick said as he covered his mouth, stifling his giggling.

“H-hey! Anyone would be scared if they stepped out of the bathroom and came face to face with Bowser himself!” Linh rebuked as her face turned red.

Charlie gave a gruff chuckle. “If I can scare you that easily, then the kids watching the show should be no problem. But I have to say, for a second there, I thought you were Cynthia.”

“I know, right?” Cynthia scanned Linh from top to bottom with her eyes. “It’s like looking at a mirror! I told you this would work!”

“So you know how this is going down, right?” Rob asked Linh.

“Yeah, we’re cutting right to the final fight at the top of Bowser’s castle. Charlie’s going to be riding around in the Koopa Clown Car with me inside as a hostage. He’ll ride around attacking you by throwing his minions and bowling balls at you. You throw those back at him and he’ll retreat into his car, giving me a chance to help you by throwing a super mushroom. Do this for three times and then Charlie spins out of control and off stage, but not before I get freed and escape with you.”

“Yeah, that’s…that’s exactly how it’ll go.” Rob looked impressed with Linh’s answer.

“See? She’s got this!” Cynthia added.

“Cynthia’s right, we’ll get through this!” Nick nodded in satisfaction. “Cynthia, since you can’t play the role of Peach anymore, I’ll have you act as the MC instead. Get the kids excited and guide the show along.”

“Okay, but I’m gonna need a chair. My ankle is still sprained.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll have that arranged for you. Alright people, break a leg!”

Everyone in the lounge gave a hearty cheer before making their exit. Charlie shuffled his way out with Rob right behind. The remaining staff helped Cynthia as she limped her way along. Linh followed behind Cynthia with Nick behind her. Everyone stopped in front of the door separating the employee area and the store floor. Sitting near the exit was the Koopa Clown Car, only it was on wheels now. Cynthia took a deep breath.

“Alright, let’s do this!” She gave the door a push and made her way onto the shopping floor, still being helped by the staff. There was a stage set up with several rows of seats lined up. Kids were clamouring around the video games section to check out the newest releases for the holiday season. Cynthia and the staff made their way to the stage, borrowing one of the folding chairs from the audience section. The staff set up the chair on the edge of the stage and helped Cynthia sit down. They handed her a microphone, turned on and ready to use. Cynthia tapped the mic and started the show.

“Attention boys and girls!” Cynthia’s voice boomed across the P.A. system. “Please make your way to Nintendo’s special presentation stage. The show is about to begin!”

Right on cue, the children swarmed to the stage, filling up the seats in no time.

“To celebrate the release of the Nintendo 64, we have some very special guests for you today! Our first guest is someone I’m sure you’ll all recognize…”

Rob sprinted towards the stage and leapt high into the air before landing right in the middle. He spun and around, faced the audience of kids, and shot his fist into the air.

“It’s-a me, Mario!” Rob had the audience cheering with that single phrase.

“Mario’s travelled far and wide to rescue Princess Peach, and his journey has finally brought him to the top of Bowser’s castle, where the King of the Koopas awaits him.” Cynthia narrated. “It’s time for Mario to face off against Bowser and rescue Princess Peach!”

Suggested music: The Evil King Bowser

Charlie rode the Koopa Clown Car onto the stage with a bellowing laugh. The kids were frightened by his presence and some even screamed. Linh was also in the car, but she was crouched down and hidden from view.

“Watch out, Mario!” Cynthia shouted “He’s going to run you over! Jump out of the way!” Charlie steered the car at a controllable speed straight at Rob, cackling the whole way. Just as Cynthia predicted, Rob sidestepped the incoming danger. He flashed a V sign at the audience and they started cheering for him.

“Now he’s throwing his minions your way! It’s time to fight back, Mario!” On Cynthia’s cue, Linh began handing off plush versions of Bowser’s minions to Charlie. He threw the first one a great distance at Rob with only one arm, and did it again twice more. Rob jumped out of harm’s way and avoided the first two attacks. He intercepted the third and hurled it back at Charlie. The plush bonked him in the head and he roared in pain.

“Wow, you’re really selling this.” Linh whispered.

“Oh my, is that Princess Peach being held captive by Bowser?” Cynthia asked the audience. “It looks like she’s trying to help Mario!”

“That’s my cue!” Linh popped up from hiding with a super mushroom in her arms. “Help me, Mario!” She cried as she threw the mushroom at Rob. Charlie pulled her back down into hiding as Rob caught the mushroom. The power-up sound effect played and Rob flexed and gestured as if his power was amplified, getting the crowd to cheer more.

“Keep fighting, Mario!” Cynthia shouted. The audience echoed her words. Charlie turned the car around and aimed at Rob again. Rob rolled out of the way and grabbed another plush. He took aim, but had to dodge out of the way again to avoid being run over. He took aim a second time and fired. Rob landed a direct hit on Charlie, and once again he roared in pain.

“Damn, you do a good roar!” Linh commented.

“Princess Peach! Mario needs your help again!” Cynthia announced.

“Here we go again!” Linh emerged from the car with a Nerf throwing missile in her hand. A big piece of cloth was tied to the tail of the missile. “Mario! Take this!” She threw it at Rob and ducked back down again. “The princess never threw cape feathers, though.” She muttered to herself. Rob grabbed the missile and untied the cape from it and around his neck in a flash. The children cheered as the red plumber donned his familiar cape. Rob acted like his movements became much faster and smoother, just like the cape acted in the game. He leapt over to the last enemy plush lying about, picked it up, wound up his arm for a devastating pitch. Charlie revved the car and charged ahead, fast enough to look threatening but slow enough to remain safe.

“Okay, on my signal, you unlock the back and jump out. Rob’ll catch you…hopefully.” Charlie whispered to Linh. She gawked at Charlie, unsure of how to respond to the last part of his instructions. But there was no time. Rob sidestepped the car and whipped the plush at Charlie full force, landing behind the car. It nailed him in the head and howled like he was dying. That was the signal for Linh to jump out the back. She unlocked the back and leapt out to Rob, his arms wide to catch her. Charlie steered the car off the stage ramp and towards the staff area while still belting out his death roars. Rob caught Linh, cradled her in his arms like a real princess.

Suggested Music: Ending Theme

“Mario did it! He saved the princess!” The children cheered as Cynthia made her announcement. Linh waved to the crowd before Rob helped her back down to her feet. They both stood there and kept waving. “Mario’s adventure is over for today. But you can join him on a new adventure in Super Mario 64!” Cynthia pointed to the video games section of the store. While the show was going, the staff installed several Nintendo 64 demonstration setups where the kids could try the game out for free. Many of them rushed over to get their hands on the demo. Some lingered behind with their parents, wanting to meet the actors up close and shake their hands. Linh and Rob obliged. Charlie did as well, after returning from the staff area. The kids took turns shaking the actors’ hands and even took photos with them, courtesy of the store staff. Afterwards, everyone had their turn trying out the new Mario game, the hours flying by in a flash.

Suggested Music: Quiet Talk

In the staff lounge, all the actors put up their feet and relaxed. They had all changed out of their costumes and back into their regular clothes. Rob cleaned up from looking like a plumber and changed into a tailored suit. Charlie, unsurprisingly, turned out to be a large and imposing-looking man, which was immediately subverted by the ugly Christmas sweater he was wearing. Cynthia and Linh chatted together, noting how well Linh was able to go with the flow. Nick waltzed in with a smile beaming on his face.

“The show was a success! The children had a great time and the reviews from the parents were fantastic! Good work, everyone!” The staff and actors all applauded at the news. “For the store staff, you’ll all be receiving a small bonus on your next paycheque. For the actors, you’ve already been paid. And for our last-minute replacement, as promised, the staff reserved a Nintendo 64 for you and you’ll get it for half price.” Everyone clapped as Linh bowed sheepishly.

“I hope we can meet again someday.” Cynthia said to Linh. “You were a real pleasure to work with.”

“Thanks, I feel the same way.” Linh answered. “I had a lot of fun to…” Her voice trailed off as her eyes wandered to the clock. “Ah, shit! I can’t believe it’s this late!”

Meanwhile, at the dog training centre…

“Aunt Linh sure is late…” Phuong said as she stared out the entrance doors.

“Something important must have come up.” Trieu replied from his chair as Johann napped in his lap.