#these screenshots don’t reach far anyways pretend you don’t see it I’ll take better screens tomorrow

[candycryptids]

Certified horse girl moment with Mindy, the sweetest lil lady alive. Who will mug you for treats.

[obeyme-kaidii-writes]

Confession

Leviathan x gn!MC

Words - 2,333

Content Warnings - just fluff. slight angst, but lots of cuddles

Prompt/Inspiration - Based on the in game chat “Whispers of Love”

Summary - Levi finally works up the courage to confess to you and immediately regrets it.

AO3

Levi was pacing his room. He had just sent you a message, finally proclaiming his love to you. The manga he had been reading had really inspired him, and he really related to the main character.

But this was stupid. He made a bad decision. Why did he have to be so impulsive? He shouldn’t have read that stupid manga. Why did you have to recommend it to him? No, it wasn’t the manga’s fault. It was his. He was the failure. He was the one that took it too far. He was the one that couldn’t separate his fantasy from reality.

He tumbled into his tub with a groan and buried his face into his body pillow. Stupid, stupid, stupid, he thought.

“Oh! Wait! Maybe it’s not too late? Maybe they haven’t seen it yet? Yeah that’s it. I’ll just sneak into their room and….”

DING

His stomach lurched. That was your ringtone. He was too late. You had seen the message. And not only that you had replied.

Hesitantly he reached out for his DDD and flicked the screen on. After taking a few deep breaths, Levi slowly opened one eye and read your response.

“Thanks!” was all you had said.

Whatever hope had remained within him crumbled. That was not the response he was looking for. He almost wished you had just laughed at him and played it off as a joke. But no, you just thanked him with a smile.

Before he knew what was happening, tears had started streaming down his cheeks, dripping onto his DDD.

“Dammit!” he growled. He did not have time for this. Why did he have to be so emotional? That’s probably something you didn’t like about him, he guessed. Who would want to be around someone so sensitive and dramatic? Why would you spend time with a person that always took things personally and got defensive?

How was he ever going to face you now?

Levi rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his palms, desperate to make the tears stop. As he struggled to regain his composure, a thought occurred to him.

“What if I just played it off? I’ll...I’ll say it was a joke. Someone else sent the message. That’ll work. Yeah that’ll work,” Levi had started rambling out loud, trying to psyche himself up and convince himself that his plan would indeed work and that he could save at least a scrap of his dignity.

“Aarghh! That’s not what I meant! That was Belphie! He ran off with my phone!”

And sent, he thought to himself, proudly.

“Yeah, that’ll work. They’ll never know it was me now. It’ll be ok. We will just laugh it off and everything will go back to normal. We can have our game night again and watch that new anime I found. And everything will be okay. It doesn’t have to change.”

DING

You had replied again, “I took a screenshot of it!” you teased.

Levi groaned once more and threw himself back down into his nest of blankets and pillows in his tub. This was awful. He could practically hear your laughter in his head. As he cocooned himself with his favorite Ruri-chan blanket, he closed his eyes tightly and tried to take some deep breaths.

It’ll be ok. You were just being your normal self. You didn’t suspect anything. He’ll stay in his room for a couple days, and when he emerges everything will be the same. You’ll be the same.

But no matter how much he tried to soothe himself, the tears had started to flow again. His mind was consumed with thoughts of his own failures and shortcomings. He was such a loser. He was so awkward. And weird. And gross. You deserved someone better. It’s a miracle you were even friends with him. He should be happy with that. He should be happy you even bothered to smile at him at all.

Before long, Levi found himself drifting off to sleep, hoping his dreams would at least be more pleasant than his joke of a life.

——————

“That was Belphie! He ran off with my phone!”

You looked down from your DDD to the mop of shaggy black hair in your lap, belonging to the sleepy demon. Belphegor had joined you in your room a while ago to watch a movie together and, predictably, fallen asleep at some point. His arms were wrapped around your legs as his head rested on your thighs, while he slept peacefully next to you.

Does this mean Levi’s confession was real? You had been uncertain at first, since it was so unexpected and seemed out of character for the shy, introverted demon. But he was definitely trying to backtrack and save himself from embarrassment now. And clearly he was panicking if he couldn’t even have been bothered to at least check with Belphie to make sure he’d cover for him.

Anticipation had started to build in your chest. You had never imagined that Levi would be the one to confess to you. You had played out this scenario time and time again in your own head and it had always involved you confessing to him. A smile had soon spread across your face, and your imagination had already jumped ahead to your first kiss, your first intimate moment...

But first, you just couldn’t resist teasing your poor otaku.

“I took a screenshot of it!” you replied.

You started laughing to yourself, struggling to remain quiet as you were overcome with gleeful giggling. You eagerly waited for Levi’s response to come.

And waited.

And waited.

After about 10 minutes you realized something had to have been wrong. Oh no, you thought. I must have taken it too far. Your heart squeezed in your chest as you wondered what he could be doing right now. If you knew one thing about him, it was the fact that he had the tendency to overthink things and go off on dark, twisted spirals before checking the facts.

As the silence stretched on, you were certain this was one of those times.

“Hey Belphie. I need you to let me up,” you ran your fingers through his hair, trying to gently wake him. He only tightened his grip around your legs and nuzzled his cheek on your thigh.

You gave a sigh, and started to pry his arms off of you, “Come on. I know you’re awake now. Let me go.”

“You’re no fun,” he groaned as he rolled over and curled up on the other side of your bed.

“How long have you been awake anyways?”

“Since around the time you started giggling like a little school girl. It’s hard to sleep when your pillow keeps shaking.”

“Sorry Belphie,” you smiled, getting up from your bed and heading towards the door, “I don’t think I’ll be back tonight, so just turn the TV off if you leave.”

“Oh?” he turned slightly, so he could see you over his shoulder, “Where are you running off to?”

“Just checking on Levi,” you shrugged. As much as you wanted to tell the world that he had in fact confessed to you, you knew this wasn’t the time. And Belphegor was certainly not the demon to confide in when it came to his brother’s insecurities.

Belphie smirked at you before rolling back over, “Tell him congratulations on finally becoming a man.”

“Oh shut up you. That’s not what’s going on and you know it!” you chucked a small pillow that had fallen to the floor at him as he laughed, thoroughly enjoying how flustered he made you.

——————

“Levi? Are you there? I’m coming in.”

Before he even had time to react, you had opened the door to his bedroom. He was absolutely not ready to face you yet, so he decided the only course of action was to pretend he was asleep. That worked in his manga, right? He closed his eyes tightly and tried to curl up as small as possible to conceal his face. He’d be fine so long as you didn’t look at him too closely.

The first thing you noticed upon entering Levi’s room was that all the lights were off. Not even the glow of the computer monitor or the television was present. The only source of light in fact, came from the huge aquarium that ran the length of one of the bedroom walls.

You couldn’t help but think how odd that was. You had spent a lot of time in Levi’s room after all, and never once was it this dark. There was almost always some screen on somewhere, playing a movie or game or even just music. But everything was dark and silent now.

Closing the door gently behind you, you carefully scanned the room in search of Levi. Maybe he wasn’t here after all? But finally your eyes settled on the bundle of blankets in his tub that seemed to shift occasionally.

You sighed, a soft smile playing at your lips. Yeah, you had definitely taken things too far.

“Hey, Levi,” you said, keeping your voice down and speaking gently, “I know you’re there.”

You crouched down next to the tub, resting your arms on the side. A tuft of purplish blue was peaking out beneath the blankets and you carefully reached out to brush it away, revealing Leviathan’s eyes.

“You ok?”

He pulled the blankets even tighter around himself, wanting so badly to disappear and have the floor swallow him up.

“Yep, just fine. Trying to get some sleep,” he turned his head and squeezed his eyes shut.

“That’s good,” you said, stroking his hair again. Unconsciously he leaned into your touch, “I was watching a new movie earlier, you know,” you paused, Levi opened one eye to look at you and examine the expression on your face. Maybe he had been worried for nothing. Maybe you were just going to let him pretend this didn’t happen. Maybe….

“With Belphegor,” you continued.

Levi’s eyes went wide as the color drained from his face. He stiffened. Oh shit. He didn’t even think about that. He was such an idiot. Of course you were with Belphie! He should have known that. You had even told him about the movie and asked if he wanted to join. But he hadn’t been interested and wanted to catch up on some animes he had missed. Stupid stupid stupid.

“Belphie didn’t send that message, did he?” you asked, smiling.

“.....no,” Levi managed to squeak out. He could feel the tears building in his eyes again. This was worse then he could possibly imagine. You had caught him in his lie. And now you were going to reject him face to face. And that would be it. It would be all over. He’d never see his Henry again.

“And did you mean it? What you said the first time?”

“Yeah,” his voice cracked. He might as well answer you honestly now. It wasn’t like things could have gotten worse.

Levi heard you moving, and he chanced a look at the edge of the tub only to find that you were no longer there. He figured you must have decided to leave, and he let out the breath he had been holding, as his tears finally flowed freely.

But what he did not expect was the movement he now felt behind him as you climbed carefully into the tub and wrapped your arms around his chest.

“Wh wh wh what are you doing?!”

“Hmm, I appear to be cuddling with you,” you said, pulling him closer.

“I know that!” He was irritated now. Why were you still teasing him? Couldn’t you tell he had had enough and wanted to be alone?

You pulled the blanket down to his shoulders, allowing you a clear view of his head and neck. You could tell even from this angle that he been crying, and it made you feel incredibly guilty. You hadn’t meant for him to get this upset.

You leaned forward and rested your head on his, placing a small kiss on his hair, “I love you, too,” you whispered into his ear.

Before you had a chance to react, Levi had whipped around and was now facing you. His tears had stopped from pure shock and he just stared, mouth hanging open. You gave him another smile, as you cupped his cheek and brushed away the remaining tears with your thumb.

“Do you mean that?” His eyes looked so hopeful. He was trying his best not to get his hopes up, but it was a battle he was clearly losing. You could hear the fear and hesitation in his voice.

“Yeah, I do,” you leaned forward again and pressed another kiss to his forehead this time, taking a moment to breathe in his scent before pulling away slightly so you could wrap your arms around him again. He didn’t need much encouragement to return the gesture and bury his face in your chest. Before long he was clinging to you desperately, as tightly as possible, afraid this was all a dream and he’d soon wake up and you’d be gone.

“I’m sorry for teasing you,” you cooed, running your fingers through his hair, “I should have said something earlier but I was kinda nervous too.” You kissed the top of his head again before resting your cheek against him, “I’m really sorry. And I really do love you, Levi. I have for a long time now.”

His arms tightened around you once more, and he turned his head slightly to speak. He wanted to make sure you could hear him clearly and that it wasn’t muffled by your shirt. He was starting to calm down now, and the adrenaline that had previously given him the courage to turn to face you was fading. He did not want to repeat himself, and he did not know when he was going to be able to say this again....

“I love you too.”

[entergamingxp]

Five of the Best: Cheat Codes • Eurogamer.net

Five of the Best is a weekly series about the incidental details we don’t celebrate enough. We’ve talked about all kinds of things so far from Game Over screens to Scares and Villains – there’s a whole Five of the Best archive if you’re interested. But there’s so much more to talk about too.

Five of the Best works like this. Various Eurogamer writers share memories and then you – probably outraged we haven’t included the thing you’re thinking of – can share that thing you’ve been thinking of in the comments below. Then we all have a lovely chat about it. Your collective memory has never failed to amaze us – don’t let it stop now!

No, no, I won’t do it, I won’t cheat, you can’t make me. I’m going to play this game properly and if it gets hard then so be it. That’s the challenge, that’s when I really learn the game. If I cut corners then what kind of player am I? But gosh this section is hard, I don’t think I can take dying again. Maybe I’ll just pop in one little code in to help…

We’ve all done it. Tell me you’ve never used a cheat code and I’ll call you a liar. But are they really so bad? Was typing PANZER to drop a tank on your location in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City really that bad? No! It’s hardly unfair to have a tank is it? Precisely. And aren’t cheat codes secretly what games charge us for in their stores these days anyway?

So here’s to cheat codes, those little developer hacks we don’t like to admit we can’t live without. And here are five of the best.

Blind-typing in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

When I arrived back from three months in Australia, many years ago, I had a broken heel and a broken wrist. I had been a silly boy and jumped off a roof. Both breaks were on the same side of my body, I should add, so I was only allowed one crutch and hobbled around like a pirate. It was a strong look. You should have seen my dad’s face when he picked me up at Heathrow.

Anyway, it meant I couldn’t do much that summer but stay in and play games (I’m sure there probably were other things I could do but I didn’t want to), and one of the games that kept me – and my lovely friend Tom, who kept popping round to see me – busy, was Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. We loved it, pootling around 80s Miami getting into all kinds of trouble.

Pretty soon, though, trouble piled up and, well, GTA games can be really annoying sometimes so we reached for a bit of help. We cheated. We began blind-typing (we couldn’t see what we were writing) cheat phrases that would do all manner of wonderful things. “PANZER” to spawn a tank – it just fell out of the sky next to us. “GETTHEREFAST” to spawn a speedy Sabre Turbo. “BIGBANG” to blow up all vehicles nearby. (There’s a whole list of GTA: Vice City cheat codes elsewhere on Eurogamer but fair warning, some haven’t aged well.)

We got really good at typing them – hey, some weren’t easy! And I’ve got fond memories of us both knowing instinctively which phrases to deploy and when. Ah, that was a lovely summer.

-Bertie

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Sheng Long in Street Fighter 2

There were a lot of fake Street Fighter 2 cheats floating around my school. I remember someone (could have been me, honestly, it was that long ago) claimed you could unlock the bosses – Balrog, Vega, Sagat and M. Bison – as playable characters. That was rubbish. Someone else (again, could have been me) told everyone there was a cheat code to get blood in the censored SNES version. Again, rubbish.

But one that definitely got me was Sheng Long. “You must defeat Sheng Long to stand a chance,” Ryu would say after winning a match. What a troll. There was no Sheng Long. No cheat code to unlock him. And yet, I spent hours trying to.

I can’t remember exactly how I became aware of this infamous Street Fighter 2 hoax, but I think it originated from an import copy of Electronic Gaming Monthly, a US magazine the newsagent around the corner from my secondary school on Beulah Hill in South London would sell a couple of months late (I used to get so excited for EGM as it had screenshots for games we wouldn’t see sold in the UK for months, sometimes years).

In early 1992, EGM ran an April Fool’s article explaining how to unlock Sheng Long, complete with photoshopped screenshots. To unlock Sheng Long you had to beat all the computer players without taking a single pixel of damage. Then, when you got to evil boss M. Bison, you had to draw 10 rounds in a row without taking any damage. Do that, EGM said, and Sheng Long would appear on-screen, chuck M. Bison out of the arena and fight you. This was all, quite clearly, bollocks, but 11-year-old me didn’t realise it was a joke. I didn’t realise this joke was supposed to be about the arcade version of Street Fighter 2, either. I didn’t even realise Capcom changed the mistranslation in Ryu’s win quote from “Sheng Long” to “Dragon Punch” for the console release. I was 11.

But as people in my school claimed they’d managed to unlock Sheng Long by doing this cheat (the liars!), I tried my hand. I tried. And tried. And tried. And tried, for hours and hours and hours until my fingers literally bled on the SNES d-pad. Every now and then I’d get to M. Bison without taking any damage, but the bastard dictator would always nick a pixel off me, usually through cheap chip damage. I raged.

Eventually I gave up, and the Sheng Long hoax sort of just went away. But it got me. I could not defeat Sheng Long. I did not stand a chance.

Bastards.

-Wes

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Going west in Wonder Boy 3

Wonder Boy 3 was one of those crucial games that blew my mind – one of the rare games that pops up every now and then to tell you that everything you thought about the possibilities of video games has to be re-evaluated. It was an RPG that behaved like a platformer. Since platformers were linear, this was a revelation – a platformer in which you could go everywhere! I played it endlessly with my school friends. And there was a rumour in the playground about this cheat code for it.

“Type in West One” someone told me one day. The game used a password save system. Couldn’t be too hard? But what my friend and I heard was “Type in West 1.” So we did. Nothing. We retyped it. Retyped it again. And again.

Then we started adding ones. Or 1s. Anyway something magical happened. West 111111 worked. It’s a weird cheat – drops you about halfway through the game with a fair amount of loot and also casts you as Wonder Boy, who you don’t get to play as very often here. It’s not as good as West One, which drops you at the end of the game with everything.

But it felt special: it belonged to us, my friend Gareth and I. We found it. We were the only people who knew about it.

Years later I discovered that West One is actually Westone, the developer of the game. Years later than that a beautiful new version of the game came out. And West One still works! As does West 111111. An incredible feeling.

BTW, I think it was actually We5t One back in the day, because the system didn’t have an S.

-Donlan

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Wonder Boy is wonderful, in case you’re wondering. Skip to around the twenty-minute mark if you’re impatient!

God

I’ve got a confession to make: You know Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines? I cheated at it. I pulled down that console and typed ‘god’ and never looked back. It’s hardly my fault if they make it that easy to do, is it? Plus which, vampires kind of are gods, aren’t they? I don’t think it was unreasonable of me to try and role-play one that way (they’ll never buy it Bertie).

Truth is it’s not the first game I’ve done it in, either. God mode propelled me through a few games from what I can remember. Jedi Academy; Duke Nukem 3D; the Quakes. And that’s where it all started: Quake. By pulling down the console with the tilde key, or the key above TAB in my case, you could enter the code IDDQD and become invincible. This was quickly coined as “god mode” by the community and so the code became “god” ever since.

-Bertie

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This seems like a nice playthrough series. I can’t wait for the sequel!

Ms Pac-Man and Galaga 20th Anniversary

Years ago, though of course it feels like a month or two at most, I had a gloriously tedious data-entry job in Brighton. I could pretend it was toil, but that kind of empty-headed typing gig has always brought me a certain kind of pleasure – I’m pretty empty-headed typing this right now – and even better there was another temp working with me called Stu who loved video games and actually got me back into the scene after a few years away from it all.

Every lunchtime Stu and I, and another colleague called Fi who wasn’t a temp but was allowed to come along anyway, would go down to one of the arcades on West Street. One of them had a 20th Anniversary Namco machine, Ms Pac-Man and Galaga on a single cabinet. We were terrible at these games but we’d each have a go, and we were soon fighting a couple of strangers for regular spots on the leaderboard.

Then Stu did a bit of research and discovered that if you entered a code with the joystick before you chose your game you could play the original Pac-Man. I gather – I may be wrong – that the original Pac-Man is nowhere near as good as Ms Pac-Man. But it had rarity – just playing it on the machine felt illicit. I would love to tell you that we ended up fighting over the scoreboard with the same strangers who regularly beat us at Galaga and standard Pac-Man, but I just can’t remember.

What I remember is that the first time Stu input the code and a new game appeared. It felt impossible, like a tiny 8-bit hole had been poked in the universe. And on the other side of that hole were pixels and dots and power pills.

-Donlan

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This is not Donlan’s friend Stu by the way – but I bet he wishes it was!

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/07/five-of-the-best-cheat-codes-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=five-of-the-best-cheat-codes-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net