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how me a frog posted:Is it too late to be in? The OP does not specify time zones. tdome standard is 2359 PST, so you're probably safe assuming that?
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Jan 6, 2015 09:00
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I am all over this.
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Jan 6, 2015 09:08
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sebmojo posted:tdome standard is 2359 PST, so you're probably safe assuming that? That's my bad. I was going to go off of CST, since that's the time zone I'm in. But, yeah, you have until 2359 Wednesday night to put yourself in. Lots of time left. how me a frog posted:Is it too late to be in? The OP does not specify time zones. You're well within the time limit. Welcome to the contest! Rupert Buttermilk posted:poo poo, can I take myself out? I was just going to write about my non gamer dad playing Super Mario Bros when we first got out NES. Nothing like these stories. You can, since sign-ups are still open, but I wouldn't. Even if you don't think you'll do as well as others doesn't mean you won't. Having something heartfelt with a strong voice and good fundamentals has won contests before.
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Jan 6, 2015 14:32
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J.A.B.C. posted:That's my bad. I was going to go off of CST, since that's the time zone I'm in. Well, alright, I'll try and whip something up.
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Jan 6, 2015 14:48
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In.
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Jan 6, 2015 15:16
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Tubular was bullshit. I was right around nine years old, and my divorced dad was trying to buy our love. Unfortunately, he had moved back in with his parents and was attempting to get his life together, so he was doing it on a budget. He figured it out though. He bought us a Super Nintendo, and promised to buy us whatever new game we wanted for it. As long as we finished the game we had first. “Do you mean as long as we beat the game?” The Super Nintendo came with Super Mario World. My father wasn’t a stupid man. And he was pretty up to date on video games for a 90’s dad. He’d seen Warp Whistles when we'd played Super Mario 3. He knew what was up. “No. You have to finish it. You have to beat everything.” Well, poo poo. Despite the difficulty, my brothers and I were game. Every weekend when we visited my dad, we were back in the Dinosaur Kingdom knocking out levels like it was our job. Forest of Illusion? Piece of cake. Choco Island? A little tricky, but we managed. The Sunken Ghost Ship? Oh, gently caress you. But we did it. Yoshi died a thousand deaths, but we did it. And then came Super Star Road. Hidden up on that penis-looking mound in the middle of regular Star Road, taunting us. We saved that for last. Friends had shown us what happens when you beat Super Star Road. We’d seen the trippy Mario masks that replaced Koopa Troopas. We’d seen the weird bird things that took over for the Bullet Bills. It was the coolest thing. But every kid who made it through to the other side of the rainbow gave us the same warning. “Watch out for that second level in Super Star Road. It is bullshit.” Only, you know, not so profane. They were nine too. But it was. Tubular was bullshit. Unless my five-year-old brother was playing second player, we hardly ever saw the Game Over screen. We always were able to take a break if a level was getting tough and go fill up on lives somewhere else. Not on Tubular. Something about that level sucked us in. It’s that one level where you have to use the balloon power-up gimmick to float through, dodging fire-spitting lotus flowers (fuckers) and football-kicking Charging Chucks (assholes). If you’ve seen pictures of it, it’s one of the shortest levels in the game, but it didn’t feel that way to us. It felt endless. And it always felt like we were so close to figuring it out. “If I was a few pixels to the left, that fireball would have never hit me.” “If I had been just a little faster, I could have made it to that next question-box and would have gotten another balloon.” “That Charging Chuck aimed for me. He never kicks it that far. The game cheats.” This went on for months. My dad was getting desperate. He was losing the divorce arms race. That Christmas, my mother had bought us a Super Nintendo too (Tubular went unbeaten at her house too). And she bought extra games. My dad had moved out of his parents place, gotten an apartment and had enough money to get us whatever we wanted, but he had to stick by his rules. No new games until we finished the first one. We got the Nintendo Power guide. We mapped out where every enemy and power-up box was. Tubular still killed us every time. It almost broke us. And then a miracle occurred. One weekend, we came over, booted up the SNES and Tubular had been beaten. I still don’t know if he paid the next-door neighbor’s kid to finish it, or if he did it himself in a fit of gaming genius, but there it was. Conquered. It was like seeing the road to the Promised Land open up before us. My brothers and I quickly destroyed the rest of the levels of Super Star Road and gloried in the strange new enemies it unlocked. As the oldest, I got to pick the next game, and we drove out to Toys R Us to pick up Final Fantasy II that weekend (I didn’t tell my dad about the hidden collectables in that game. Or he knew and pretended not to so we wouldn’t have to go through that whole nonsense again.) Years later, I still have most of Tubular memorized. And it’s still bullshit. I can beat it on my own now, but I still get that sense of amazement when I see the line extend from the second level to the third on Super Star Road. 780 words Tom Swift Jr. fucked around with this message at 23:24 on Jan 6, 2015 |
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Jan 6, 2015 23:15
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how me a frog posted:I hope I was eligible to be in because here is my entry: I love the ending to this. Really great. Soul Reaver posted:Things were looking grim. They strode towards me, long glaives in-hand, their armour thick and their demon-masks snarling silently. I already knew this wasn’t going to be easy. This though. Jesus loving Christ, this. Well loving done.
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Jan 7, 2015 01:29
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Who says you can't write for both threads. In, you cocksucker JABC.
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Jan 7, 2015 01:45
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I started drafting something just for fun and I became so embarrassed of myself I almost deleted my account. Everything I write sounds stupid and edgy. Thanks for reminding me why I don't write anything ever. I enjoy reading what you guys are writing though so keep it coming.
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Jan 7, 2015 04:27
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I'll enter
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Jan 7, 2015 19:01
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Highblood posted:I started drafting something just for fun and I became so embarrassed of myself I almost deleted my account. Everything I write sounds stupid and edgy. Thanks for reminding me why I don't write anything ever. I started this contest expecting a bunch of that stuff, and you have until Friday to make something work, so just go for it. The worst you can get is a new avatar and even writing crappy posts helps you become better by examining your own faults. If not, then my next prompt is going to fit right in with edgy schlock, so bring yourself to that one. That being said,  12 hours until sign-ups close, and we already have a darn good list of people ready to post and some stories already in the thread.
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Jan 7, 2015 19:16
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im not in any more
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Jan 7, 2015 20:56
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I'd like to participate.
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Jan 7, 2015 23:35
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I'm in! Also, Tom Swift Jr. posted:Tubular was bullshit.
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Jan 7, 2015 23:52
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i am going to write a thing, for this contest
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Jan 8, 2015 00:46
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In
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Jan 8, 2015 02:52
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gently caress it. Why not? I'm in.
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Jan 8, 2015 02:52
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Hey can we use stories from previous, nonactive Thunderdome threads? Because I've got a story that will put you guys over the moon. The full moon.
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Jan 8, 2015 04:03
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in
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Jan 8, 2015 04:23
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gently caress you, you don't know a thing about writing! Jitzu_the_Monk posted:Hey can we use stories from previous, nonactive Thunderdome threads? Because I've got a story that will put you guys over the moon. The full moon. Don't be a lazy blumpkin.
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Jan 8, 2015 04:27
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Mercedes posted:gently caress you, you don't know a thing about writing! I read ALL the books in the elder scrolls games so my writing skills are top notch
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Jan 8, 2015 04:28
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but not the ones in Dragon Age because i'm not terrible
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Jan 8, 2015 04:30
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Scalding Coffee posted:It will be even better than the book version. this is false so far btw
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Jan 8, 2015 04:40
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Oh alright sure why not, it'll give me something to mull over tomorrow. in. expect something terrible, the intent of which is as yet indeterminate.
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Jan 8, 2015 04:48
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i wrote my thing, an embellished account of a quest in fallout 3 that panned out amusingly for me it's pretty straightforward i guess. i hope u like anyway -- Pieces of Bittercup sailed through the air as I walked down the road towards the suburb, returning to Big Town for the first time since I’d rescued its inhabitants from jolly green assholes. I’d originally arrived there by chance – a drifter at the time, I’d spent some time squatting in a caravan out in the Capital wasteland, scavenging what I could for food. Its previous owner didn’t mind – he’d lived in a pile round the back since I’d planted my rear end down there. But after a time I grew restless, and that bandit camp on the other side of the valley felt like it was inching closer every day. So I packed up my belongings and drifted, and ended up in Big Town. One of the first I spoke to on arrival was a skinny girl named Bittercup. A self-described misunderstood kid, she seemed friendly at first, but it quickly became plain she wanted out of town bad one way or another, whether alive or in a body bag. Pretty much the second or third words out of her mouth were “You’re not seeing anyone right now, are you?” I replied, “Hon, you’d probably be loving dead by sundown if you stuck to me.” She objected, saying that didn’t matter and maybe she wanted to die anyway, but dealt with the rejection saying that she’d dated most of the boys in town, I wasn’t special for her asking. For someone so unconcerned by death she sure seemed preoccupied with it, but I wasn’t judging – as I found out not long afterwards she’d seen a lot of needless killing of her fellows, and that can gently caress anybody up. So Bittercup’s coping mechanism was to become a goth. Annoying and clingy, but basically harmless. Making myself more known in Big Town I met some others, mostly young, mostly paranoid of uninvited visitors and scared – speaking to an anxious man named Pappy, I learned some of the town’s inhabitants had been taken away by super mutants for god knows what purpose. The inhabitants of this hole had no clear way of rescuing them, but I’d shuffled around the wastes enough to stand a chance, and with nothing better to do I accepted the role of saviour they badly needed. I snuck into the crumbling police department the super mutants called their headquarters undetected. While I don’t know for sure what the mutants were going to do to those kids, I don’t think they were going to kill them – if they were I would have already been too late. I checked the place thoroughly, and found a black girl named Red, a white boy named Shorty, and several green imbeciles I didn’t care to engage. Red I got out from behind bars with a stolen password, Shorty I freed from his irons after whacking the mutant menacing him. Once they were free, we made for the ceiling hatch I’d entered through and escaped. Two of the mutants finally figured out what was going on, maybe they’d heard me cap that one bastard with Shorty, and led an affray - Red and Shorty ran ahead back to Big Town while I VATsed the mutants from afar with my SMG, so far broken in only on bandits around my old place. With them dispatched I returned to the town, praying that neither had been swallowed whole by the local wildlife. Fortunately they’d both made it, and I asked a few questions now the heat was off. Red and Shorty told me Big Town was a basically a raised patch of dirt in a blasted suburb (A super mutant turd, Shorty said) some children in a cave a way off had claimed as a great place to send members of their group once they weren’t children any longer. Never-Never Land bullshit; those dumb little bastards, wherever they were, had no idea how much it sucked there, and they sucked at preparing their number for the wastes. Besides its barrenness, the place was a prime target for any piece of poo poo slaver, bandit or mutant to prey upon, and they frequently snatched these poor defenceless brats away for their own awful ends. Turned out Red was the town doctor, or as near to one as they had – a boy lying in the back room of her surgery, Timebomb, had been on the receiving end of a volley of buckshot from the super mutant attack she’d been kidnapped by and seemed marked for death, though she was doing the best she could to keep him away from the light. She was lucky I’d some triage experience from being shot at by the raiders near my old caravan, and was able to fix that boy up. We got on well after that, and it turned out Red was a useful person to be in cahoots with despite her embittered outlook. Once news got out I’d sewn up Timebomb folks were pretty happy about my being around. I knew it was just a matter of time until the mutants took another shot at this village, seeking revenge, so I hunkered down, waiting for action. I didn’t have to wait long. Within the hour some could be seen in the distance, trudging towards the town looking to reclaim their quarry. I said I’d finally show these people, essentially still kids (Pappy aside), how to defend themselves – in my pack were several mines I’d been saving for such an occasion, and with the bridge into Big Town as its chokepoint I reckoned strategic placement would scare the super mutants off. Truth was, I wasn’t the explosives specialist I was claiming – I’d had some experience disarming them, particularly during an encounter with an insane survivalist a month or so prior, but I feared I spoke a bigger game than I could manage. But I was lucky, too: with a few minutes to spare I planted those mines around the entrance to Big Town, the kids stepping back as they watched, and hoped for the best. And the best happened, thank god. The brutes stomped down the road between their base and the town, expecting another easy raid, and were blindsided completely by the traps I’d set. As they flailed gigantically the kids cheered and mocked, some (mainly Timebomb) throwing rocks. Eventually the mutants fell back, cursing us, and didn’t come back. I did good, and the kids were ecstatic – this was the first time in memory the mutants had come to Big Town and hadn’t stolen or murdered any of them. They didn’t have much to repay me with but insisted on rewarding me with bottle caps, and Timebomb presented me with an eightball I gingerly thanked him for. My work here was done, and hopefully these people could continue to live in their crappy frontier town without further menace. As I stood by the bridge, the sun setting behind me, I said my farewells. Like any good lone ranger it was time for me to ride into that sunset, and I was so taken in by the romantic cowboy bullshit of the situation it wasn’t until I was hurtling through the air that I realised I’d stepped too close to an unexploded mine. I landed on my face, fortunately still in one piece, stood, wiped the blood from my nose, and hobbled carefully back to the town – I didn’t suppose some treatment would be too much to ask? The following morning I made my way east, to take care of some unfinished business I don’t want to get into here, but my curious nature meant I eventually had to check in and make sure Big Town was getting on alright. I’d gained a pooch since, too, and because I’m sentimental I thought it would be nice to take him to see the place I’d had my first real heroic turn. Bittercup was the first to see me approach, and had trotted over the bridge to greet me, waving. One step, one click later, you know the rest. The waving arm thudded in the dust a few feet away from me, and most of the rest of her body parts splooshed into the irradiated moat circling the settlement. It seemed my half-assed explosives training had meant nobody had cleared up the unused, live landmines. The ringing in my ears faded to Dogmeat’s frantic barking, panicking at the arm. As the shock of Bittercup’s sudden and violent death subsided, I couldn’t keep it inside – I laughed uncontrollably as I crouched to calm the pooch. If anyone was going to bite it from something that had saved her life a few weeks previous, it had to be Bittercup. Red, among others, heard the commotion and stepped outside her surgery, and on seeing me guffawing heartily at the dismembered limb, shot me the most abjectly horrified stare I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a fair few of those at the receiving end of a shishkebab. She still sold me antirads, at least.
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Jan 8, 2015 05:14
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Jitzu_the_Monk posted:Hey can we use stories from previous, nonactive Thunderdome threads? Because I've got a story that will put you guys over the moon. The full moon. I'll say no to this, as it seems a bit off. I don't know why, but it does. And with that,  This is the last hour for sign-ups!
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Jan 8, 2015 05:54
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gently caress it all, I'm in.
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Jan 8, 2015 06:06
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J.A.B.C. posted:And with that, gently caress it, in. I hope I don't get an av, I like mine 
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Jan 8, 2015 06:10
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Thats it for sign-ups! Let the Game Hungers begin!
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Jan 8, 2015 07:19
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My fanfiction haiku will win this round. It just needs to be perfected.
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Jan 8, 2015 07:21
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A Thousand Years of Games Word count: 1500 "Well, whaddya wanna do?" asked Denko. It was the first time he'd ever had Wilder over to his house. "You got anything for two players? Otherwise, I brought Secret of Mana," said Wilder. "You mean like Street Fighter or Mario Kart?" "Uh, sorta. What about a game where you work together?" "Yeah, we have Darius Twin!" "What kinda game is that?" "Spaceship kind. Like Gradius." "Oh. I'm lovely at--" Wilder covered his mouth the way tweens do when they know they've said something naughty within earshot of adults. "--junk at those," he corrected himself. "Don't worry, my aunty knows the secret code," said Denko. They ran up the hill to her house to ask what it was. She wrote it down for them. Incorrectly. "Okay, this time, YOU try hold L and R. Then I choose two players, and I hold Select and Start, and..." They both had forty-odd lives. "Hey, it worked!" said Wilder as he crashed into the very first enemy. "And you come back to life right there, just like Contra! I like this game!" The friends cruised carelessly through gas giants, ruined fleets, and deep space until they reached the final stage. Neither had more than ten tries left, but they braved the miniboss gauntlet all the way to the final boss. Wilder was down to his last life. "I don't think I'm gonna make it!" Denko recited a platitude doubtlessly handed down to him by his father. "If can, can. If no can, still can." One of the boss's bullets cooked Wilder's ship (and last man) just as Denko delivered the coup de grace. "drat! And I was so close!" "At least you get to see the ending." "Yeah, there's that." "You'll get it next time." ••• Wilder and Denko were both covered in dust from working on Denko's family farm from early that morning. Now that it was noon, their responsibilities were fulfilled and they could finally get down to business. Wilder brandished a jewel case. "Brah, we gotta try this thing: Beatmania. My friend burned me this CD!" By the time the moon had come up, their hopelessly random keyboard-mashing had evolved into a dextrous dance in which they only missed most of the notes (this, of course, was limited to that Country Road song with the catchily-animated accompaniment they'd been chipping at all day). Denko's mom happened to pass by. "Oh, you guys still playing that John Denver song?" she asked as she peeked into the room. Once she was gone, Wilder whispered, "Who the gently caress is John Denver?" Denko shrugged. ••• "I'm feelin' it today, dude. I'm gonna survive Darius Twin." "That's what you said the last three times you were here, too." "Brah, for real this time." For once, Wilder was right. ••• "Whaddya wanna do today, dude?" asked Denko, idly scratching at his chin. He desperately needed to shave. "Well," said Wilder, "I always play Dynasty Warriors with my bros in boarding school. You guys got that one?" "I fuckin' LOVE Dynasty Warriors! Xiahou Dun is my man!" "Perfect, my guy is Zhou Yu!" They played, as they always did when Wilder stayed over, until Denko's mom stopped by at one in the morning to give them the this-isn't-a-suggestion that they should go the gently caress to sleep. The PS2 awoke the moment the sky brightened. "Brah, we should do the thing where we edit the opening sequence. This scene, right here!" The new and improved intro in which Xiahou Dun and Zhou Yu stood back to back against a thousand foes was permanently etched into their memory cards. ••• "What you mean, you bought Thousand Arms? You couldn't shut up about how you didn't have it! Brah, I had to go ALL the way to Pearlridge to find this ONE copy for you for Christmas!" Denko shrugged. "Look at this this way: now we can BOTH play it and learn how to pick up chicks!" ••• Denko daringly closed on Emperor Fossil's main gun, constantly dodging just before it fired. "You lost a ton of weight at college." Wilder took a more pragmatic approach and attacked diagonally from where the boss couldn't hit him. "I walk a lot, that's why. Oh yeah, I hooked up with this chick, too!" "Nice, nice. What, Asian?" "Brah, that's all you. White girls all the way for me." "Oh, gross. They wear shoes in the house." "Yeah, I know. Unsanitary, but no matter." He dodged around a giant fish spaceship that he knew was coming. "Hey, if she comes to Hawaii, can I borrow Darius Twin? I wanna play this game with everybody I like. It's dumb, but kinda symbolic, y'know?" Denko laughed. "Oh, so you like ME? Like THAT?" "You know what I mean, you fucker." Denko laughed. "Go ahead, take 'em!" That jinxed it, of course, and she never came to visit. ••• "We'll both play as Lucas, but I'll do the palette swap so I look like Claus," said Wilder, Sierra Nevada in one hand and Wiimote in the other. "Brothers, just like in Mother 3!" "One last chance to back down: me and Wilder get crunk and play this poo poo all the time," Denko warned his cousins, who snorted indignantly. Their mouths said, "Bring it," but their smug little eyes said, our jackass cousin and his friend are pretty much grown-ups, they don't stand a chance. On that fateful day, two twitchy teenagers were summarily stomped by a pair of undefeated undergraduates who could barely see through their beer goggles. ••• Having graduated from university, Wilder and Denko had also both graduated to playing with their college buddies online. They'd established a fairly regular crew. "Dude, Denko, how come when we play these games--no matter if it's, like, Borderlands or Terraria or whatever--you always call your guy, 'Banana?'" "Oh, I dunno. I like it." "What, that's your favorite?" "Yeah, I guess." "Where, in your mouth?" "Hey Wilder, you wanna hear a secret?" "What?" "gently caress you." ••• Wilder's phone had tallied about half a dozen unanswered calls and twice as many texts to Denko. "I dunno, he must be bangin', like, twenty chicks. Yeah, at the same time. I ain't heard from him in two weeks," he said to his Skype buddies. His text message sound played. "Oh, I lie. That's him now!" - sorry, i stay hospital - haha what brah you get stds - lol no, cancer - bullshit. what stage - idk. four? ••• Denko yawned. "Okay guys, I think I'm good for tonight." "No prob. See you on tomorrow, shitlord," said Wilder. After Denko disconnected from their call, he sighed. "Mother. Fuckin'. gently caress." Their long-distance broseidon grunted in agreement. "All we can really do is have good times with him now, though," he said. "I guess." ••• Wilder stared out the window alongside a bedridden Denko. "gently caress, I hate seein' you like this." "Nah, it'll be okay." "Yeah, probably." Wilder fought through the lump in his throat and gathered up every last theatrical thread in his soul. "Hey, you remember back in the day when we used to play Dynasty Warriors?" "Good times, good times." "There was the Shu with Liu Bei and Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, and they were sworn brothers, right? I was thinking maybe we should do something like that. It's kinda silly, but, well, y'know." "I can dig it." "Well, from this day forward, you and me, we're oathbrothers. We might not die on the same hour on the same day on the same battlefield, but you know me: I wanna write for a living, so my word's worth more than blood." "Mm, that kind of brotherhood." Wilder glanced uncomfortably around the room. Anything but have to see his brother suffering with his own eyes. The SNES was still there, no different from the time they'd played it last. "Brah, let's play Darius Twin." "Sounds good." Denko's decaying reflexes didn't see him to the last stage, but at least Wilder was able to show him the ending. ••• The fully-upgraded guns on Wilder's ship sliced effortlessly through wave after wave of minibosses on the final stage. They cut through the Super Alloylantern's defenses and took down Great Tusk without a hitch. "Been almost a year now. I still miss you a lot." The credits rolled. "I dunno, maybe you can see this. I don't really believe in that kinda thing, though." I know this song, thought Wilder. I love this song. "I dreamt I got to hang out with your ghost again last night. Stupid, huh?" THANK YOU FOR PLAYING "Sorry we couldn't take you on one last adventure like we said we would. Wasn't in the stars, I guess." HALL OF FAME "Well, maybe in the next world, you're getting to bang those animes, just like you always wanted. Those fuckin' PVC statues, your 'Girls Day Dolls!'" Wilder smiled. We always used to fight over who would get the killing blows, who would get the most points. "And whenever I wanna see you again, I just gotta play this." He entered his initials: T. W. D.
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Jan 8, 2015 10:28
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Holy poo poo buddy. You may be yankin' my chain here. But holy poo poo. 
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Jan 8, 2015 14:35
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The White Dragon posted:A Thousand Years of Games Word count: 1500 dang
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Jan 8, 2015 17:17
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gently caress cancer.
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Jan 8, 2015 17:34
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It’s not easy being a kid and having your whole world turned upside down. Moving does that. Moving to another city can be rough, moving to another country where you don’t speak the language is something entirely different. Your friends are gone, you can’t make new ones because you don’t speak the language, hell even the person who’s supposed to be your new father speaks some strange language that’s completely indecipherable to you. You’re alone. The things you had didn’t come with you, they had to be sold. Your mother doesn’t tell you why… The first few months are the worst. The mother is the liaison between the father and the kid. She speaks their languages and so conversation happens between all 3 of them, awkwardly. The father tries to understand the child. He takes the kid to places he liked when he was a kid, but the kid doesn’t enjoy it. He shows him things that the kid had never seen before. The kid appreciates that more, but it’s not enough. They come from different worlds, speak different languages, different cultures. The parents talk whenever the kid’s sleeping, though it really wouldn’t have mattered. Not like he could understand them. “He’s not really taking the move well, is he?” “I don’t know what else to do..” “Well, back in The Country he had a Nintendo that he and his friends liked to play..” So the kid’s sitting in his living room the next afternoon, face too close to the TV, and playing Mario Kart on his newly bought SNES. The father bought it for him, as he did many other things. Toys, movies, cassette tapes so he can record his own movies. He’s fully focused on the game, not paying attention to anything else around him. So he doesn’t hear the man that’s was to be his father sitting behind him, looking at this kid play. He doesn’t understand it. This is fun these days? What happened to running around the neighborhood, causing mischief and such? The father’s lost in thoughts while he’s watching, thinking about their relationship. “How can I reach him?” The father thinks as the kid laughs in victory, as he’s beaten just a very difficult track. “Well, at least he’s laughing now..”. Then he spots something as the kid cycles back to the main menu. A Two Player option. The father doesn’t understand the game, but he remembers how fun it was to play board games with family. Maybe this will be like that? The Kid turns around as his father moves to sit next to him. He picks up the second controller and points to the “2P” option. The kid understands, nods his head and selects it. It took some time at first, explaining the controls using vague pointing and lots of body language. But then, once they both started playing… The afternoon turned into evening. The mother ordered out, so the boys could keep on playing. At the end of the day, they were a proper family.
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Jan 8, 2015 20:35
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When I was six, I asked Santa for a Sega Genesis. I’d seen it for the first time at a friends’ house and I really wanted one. It was my first-ever request to Santa Claus. My parents say that I usually asked him for “not coal”. The things were ridiculously expensive though, and we weren’t exactly loaded. When Christmas rolled around, there wasn’t a Sega under the tree. But I was fine with that! Santa could only hold so many Segas in his sleigh. All it meant was that there were kids ahead of me in line who deserved it more. I explained that to my parents when they asked me whether I was upset, and I guess they passed the word along to Santa (I still don’t know how that works), because a few days later they woke me up early. “Go check the Christmas tree, I think you missed something.” As it turned out, I had! Behind the tree. Wedged in-between the tree and the wall, was a present. A big present. A Sega fuckin’ Genesis! My poor mom, though. She was terribly sleep-deprived from having me and a newborn baby around, and having the Sega running basically every waking moment did bad things to her. 20 years later, she still hums the Sonic 2 theme when she’s not paying attention. That and the blaring SEEEEGAAAAA still sticks with her despite never, ever touching the thing. What she really remembered, and what I had almost forgotten, was Aladdin. When the movie had first come out, she’d taken me to see it in the theaters. We’d come home singing A Whole New World, and we basically never stopped. So when she saw the video game on some store shelf somewhere, she thought it make a great birthday gift. That game was torture. It was reasonable up until the final 40% ish of the game, then it went full Dark Souls and would not let you advance one step without killing you a dozen times. I only got one or two games a year though, so I. Would Not. Quit! When I finally beat the last boss, the whole family came out to see it. My dad, my mom, little brother, everyone. They’d watched me play it for weeks. I had been forged in the fires and reborn anew. This was what I got for all my hard work: http://youtu.be/MfgETaRJkMg?t=1m22s I like to think that experience taught me a lot about what to expect in life. There were exceptions to the “two games a year” rule. For instance, if my dad found something cheap in a bargain bin somewhere. That’s how we came by Mickey Mouse and the Circus of Mystery. “Look!” my dad said hopefully. “It says it has co-op! You can play with your sister!” My little sister had zero interest in video games. All it meant was huge fights between my brother and I over who had to play as Minnie. We eventually solved this in the traditional way: by grabbing pool cues and pillows and jousting in ye ancient manner. This only ended when we shattered all the pool cues. The other big exception to the “two games a year” rule was if something weird happened, like what happened to Jeremy. Jeremy’s mom across the street was a real character, a hard-charging single mom. She drank, and smoked and cursed, but her overall disposition was so sweet that I never worried about her at all. Jeremy had some emotional issues, I guess because his father was a terrible alcoholic who had been ordered by the court to stay away, so being the cool hangout was the way his mom ensured he had friends. She was the only one who bought Mortal Kombat when it came out for home consoles, and more than that, she would actually put in the blood code for us. Not only that, she would just casually drop in for a round and do crazy poo poo like turn into a dragon and eat us, or knock us into the spike pit. She was awesome. I asked to borrow the game while they were away on a trip, and they said “yes”. Then they never came back. I learned years later that the husband had come after them with a tire iron. Never heard what the final outcome was, just that they never came back. I just hope there weren’t any fatalities. You might have picked up that we lived in a pretty sketchy neighborhood. I wasn’t allowed to play outside unless my mom or one of the other neighborhood moms was watching. Which meant I never got to play outside. since they were always busy. One day my mom decided to rectify this by buying a toy we could play with together. It was one of those whirlybird things—you pulled a cord, which launched a spinning plastic top flying high into the air, where it would inevitably land on someone’s roof, or a tree, or the power lines. My neighbor blew quite a bit of money on a nice one and ended up waiting three full years for it to drop out of the big tree in front of their house after the first time they used it. Stupid things. My mom did not spend any money on ours though. In fact, she’d gotten it for 10 bucks somewhere. We went out into our tiny backyard, she gave it a wind-up, and off it flew, vertically, straight into my face, hard enough to knock me on my rear end. Off we go to the doctors, because I’m spitting up blood like its ketchup. I sit for an hour in the doctor’s office, he sees me for 30 seconds and tells my mom the obvious: this kid needs stitches. So then it was time to head on over to the ER for another hour, all the while trying not to bleed on anything important. Finally, the ER doc says that he can’t really numb the spot perfectly because of where it is (just below my lip), so he’ll do the best he can and to raise my hand if there’s any pain. I waved my little hand around the whole time he was sewing up my face. And that’s how I got Urban Strike and Super Battleship on the same day. Fond memories. Vengarr fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Jan 8, 2015 |
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Jan 8, 2015 21:00
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Only Pride Word Count: 994 Brahm left the radio off as he drove from the funeral. He let the rushing wind be his music. Dad’s truck never had a working radio. It seemed right. When he pulled into his parent’s driveway, a part of him expected to find his dad outside in a robe, smoking a cigar as he watered the grass. Those cigars. Brahm slammed the shifter into park and he flung himself backward against his seat. He mentally counted the times he and his sisters teamed up to get Dad to stop smoking those things. It was one of the few times he got along with his sisters, but in the end they couldn’t convince him. Unopened mail littered the table, boxes stacked on the floor and it seemed every piece of dinnerware was piled in the sink. His oldest sister Katie chipped away at the plate fortress. Her bloodshot eyes flicked up in a brief acknowledgement. “Hey,” he began, awkwardly scratching the side of his face, “Where’s everyone else?” Katie brought the back of her hand up to her nose and sniffed. She kept her gaze down and continued washing the dishes. Brahm recalled the eulogy from that afternoon. Katie had talked about how she and Dad had loved playing soccer together. About how he had once was asked to leave a game because of how he had cursed the referee out when Katie had been wrongfully given a yellow card. Brahm had opened his mouth to ask her again but Katie had interrupted him. “Mom’s in the bedroom. Genevieve and Gwen are helping clean up the house.” “I’ll go and help.” He had felt like he should say something reassuring, but all he could think of were clichés. Brahm shuffled down the hallway and glanced at all the family photos lined across the wall. Funny how even though he looked just like his dad, they never really had anything in common like he did with the girls. He heard the twins in the guest bedroom talking between themselves. He leaned against the door frame and watched them. They delivered their eulogy together. For some reason, Genevieve and Gwen were the only ones who could stomach hunting. Brahm snorted when he remembered how he had barfed when he had first seen deer guts. “Hey Brahm, didn’t see ya there,” Gwen said, breaking him from his reverie. Her eyes and nose were red. “What can I do to pitch in?” Brahm said. Genevieve pointed behind him. Ever since she’d got that watercolor tattoo on her arm, it was a cinch to tell them apart. “We’re trying to sort all this crap so we can put it in storage or something. Could you go in Mom’s room and pull boxes out from the closet?” Brahm looked across the hall to gaze at his mom. She was blue-tinted by the TV as she lay in her bed. He swallowed the lump in his throat. When it was his turn in the eulogy, his chest had tightened while he’d floundered to recite something that he and his dad had done together. He had felt ashamed that the only memory he could share was that his father would occasionally watch him play video games. When Brahm entered his mother’s room, she was asleep with the Food Network playing on the TV. He quietly walked to the closet and gawked at all of his dad’s stuff. Old clothes were strewn about and boxes bursting full of magazines were stacked on the floor. A familiar letterhead peeked out from an opened box. He crouched, pulled it closer then lifted it out. He held an issue of Nintendo Power. He frowned and thumbed through the rest. These were all addressed to his dad. Brahm pulled a few more magazines out from the box and mouthed the names of the publications. PSN, Gamepro, Electronic Gaming Monthly, Game Informer; with every issue he pulled out, his confusion grew. Brahm opened a magazine and skimmed through the pages. He stopped on a review of Super Metroid for the SNES. He trembled as he read his father’s handwritten note. Brahm was excited about a Metroid game this morning. That little pimple faced kid Steve has it. High reviews. A little violent, but he’s old enough to handle that. Birthday? He set the magazine down and grabbed another one, flipping through the pages until he found his father’s handwriting again. Sam bought himself a Castlevania game for the Playstation. He raved about it and said it was hard. Need something Brahm won’t beat in a weekend. Money’s tight. Not sure when I’ll be able to afford another game for him. Tears splattered on the page. Brahm blinked back in surprise then dabbed them with his sleeve, trying to preserve the pages. His dad had never played a video game in his entire life, and yet he’d devoted all this time to reading about something he didn’t really care about, just for Brahm. “Honey?” His mom’s voice caught him by surprise. “M-mom?” His voice slipped. “Did you know about this?” Brahm felt like a child who had found out that Santa wasn’t real. His mom patted the edge of the bed. Brahm sat next to her and she wrapped her arms around his shoulders. “Why didn’t he ever tell me?” he asked. “Your father loved watching you opening your Nintendos and squeal with delight. He took pride in his research, you know. Bragged to all his coworkers how he always knew what presents to give you guys.” Brahm had a startling revelation. “So my eulogy…” His mother’s lips quivered in a small smile. “He would have been so happy to hear you say those words.” *** During the eulogy, Brahm had said that his best memories of his father was when he watched him play video games. Yet now, as he drove back to his place with boxes full of magazines, there was no shame. Only pride.
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Jan 8, 2015 22:59
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RAINY SEASON The jump from 8 to 16 bit was a big thing. The 1980s were a crazy time for gaming, gameplay and genre were still in flux from year to year, it felt like every few months would bring something completely new and surprising. Adolescence is like that too, the whole world changing perspective and configuration every six months. I came of age after the Atari VCS crash but before the NES had gained traction -- I would come to know the NES a couple of years later through my friends’ younger siblings. When I was in high school, the platform rivalry was between the Atari 800 and Commodore 64. Kirk, like me, was an Atari kid, and Kirk further distinguished himself by only having one foot halfway in the nerd pool. I was spectacularly nerdy and awkward, but bandaged it up with shirts and patches for punk and metal bands. I was mostly shunned by both the metalhead and academic-nerd cliques, but in Kirk I found a friend who was a little bit brainy with the potential to be a misfit. Or at least I was the person Kirk came to when he decided he wanted to try drugs, which he did clumsily and with great enthusiasm (one of the best pieces of advice I ever received after the fact: don’t do drugs until you finish high school). Before Kirk discovered drugs, there was Accolade’s “Hardball” on the Atari 800. I’ve never liked baseball much but Hardball was one of the first “realistic” looking sports games, with simple full-body graphics of the players during the pitch, rather than just a bunch of blocky stick figures. Hardball became a running joke because usually after about five or six innings, one of us would grow tired of the bullshit baseball game, reach over to mash the reset button on the 800XL, and ad lib some sports commentary about how the game had been tragically rained out. The rainy season became an all-purpose coup de grâce, a device to be invoked whenever a game got too tedious or too bullshit. Kirk got into computers through his dad, an army vet who’d retired young on disability and set up a little computer consulting business. It was through Kirk’s dad that I got my first look at an Atari 520ST, a machine that ran on the same 16-bit Motorola 68000 processor as the original monochrome toaster Macintosh. The ST was a whole different ballgame from the 8-bit machines which connected to a spare TV. It had a high resolution 320x200 full color monitor and loaded software off from brightly colored mini disks that were clearly from the future. Somehow I hustled my parents into getting me an ST the following Christmas (a serious computer I can use for school, I’m sure the sales pitch went). It arrived right about the time I was becoming a typical super morose teen, spackling every inch of my bedroom walls with band posters and skull-saturated notebook art and basically never opening my bedroom door except to eat or excrete or go to school. My parents were mostly okay with how I was obviously getting some computer skills, and after the big initial purchase I think they were happy that my entertainment budget mostly consisted of a steady stream of blank disks to download and trade games with my Atari friends. Kirk came over pretty often and we had our steady rotation of ST games: Time Bandit, Speedball 2, EPYX Championship Wrestling. A terrible port of Street Fighter 1, on a machine with only one joystick button. The game changer, however, was Cinemaware’s TV Sports Football. It was around this time that Kirk decided he wanted to start smoking pot. Having decent social skills and poor impulse control, Kirk usually knew a couple of questionable dudes to get weed from, after which he would come over and smoke and we played ST games. Kirk and I both had difficult relationships with our parents, I think that’s another reason we were friends. A classic Kirk story is he would come over on a Sunday evening, decide he wanted to smoke up, and spend half an hour calling weed dealers on the land line in our family tv room, being not at all discrete in his queries if “anything was happening?” My mom was not stupid, she would hover outside the tv room repeatedly dusting the same end table and listening in, calling me into the hall to give me the icy stare of death and telling me she wanted Kirk to leave, which I would not abide as Kirk was one of my few real friends. The tension was awful and exhausting. Eventually Kirk would convince some guy to meet him at the corner 7-11 to sell him a bag of weed, and we would disappear into my room for several hours, Megadeth and Social Distortion cassettes providing the soundtrack to TV Sports Football. TV Sports Football was pretty much the first game I played (outside of RPGs) that offered any kind of deep, persistent customization. It had a pretty detailed create-a-team mode where you could adjust your players’ stats, and most importantly NAME YOUR DUDES. This has always been a big selling point for a game. We would spend hours tweaking stats and doing a sort of ongoing soap opera improv about our teams. Mostly I remember Kirk had a star runningback named Jason Jason, and my QB was named Kellen Heller. Kirk was a pretty big football fan, and I was a D&D/strategy game freak, and the ongoing custom team tuning gave us both an opportunity to flex those particular areas of our interest. TV Sports Football also had a highly abuseable fake punt play that wasn’t *quite* game-breaking, but was effective enough that it was almost unheard of to attempt an actual punt. This became a massive running joke of “oh poo poo it is 3rd and 2, I am totally on the ropes, I am truly and sincerely going to actual punt.” Sometimes it became a contest of honor to run nothing but fake punts, play after play, and a mark of shame when one of us would break down and call an actual play sometime deep in the second half. And if things got too ridiculous or frustrating, one or the other of us could reach up, punch an F-key atop the ST keyboard, and declare the game rained out. A year or two later I had accumulated an electric guitar and a drum machine and enlisted Kirk in my musical experiments when he came over. This culminated in a bedroom comedy metal band called Cöbrächrïst — I became guitarist Emmanuel Cöbrä, Kirk ran the drum machine as percussionist Joey Chrïst, and together we belted out ponderous 3-chord epics like “Glue Gun Orgy”, “Satanic Sunday School”, and “Robot Streetwalker.” I’m still weirdly proud of that music, and for every hour we spent playing and recording, we spent just as long designing album cover artwork and fabricating elaborate scenarios where Joey Chrïst would mount his drum kit atop a spiked steamroller and chase people around the stadium during the drum solo. Like TV Sports Football, we had found a thing where the metagame was as much fun as the game itself. Kirk and I drifted apart a couple of years after high school. The last time we hung out, he was working as a night watchman in a cemetery and I was working in an art supply store. We were a couple of maladjusted teens, we both had some tough times over the years. These days I don’t keep up with more than a few games a year. I love games which are a little weird and abstract and open to interpretation. I want games where I can make up stupid little stories. We never gave a gently caress about achievements or tournament ladders, it was all about the banter and the metagame. And sometimes things are tedious and awful and sometimes it’s one heck of a rainy season. h_double fucked around with this message at 03:43 on Jan 9, 2015 |
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Jan 9, 2015 01:07
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Roll Credits 913 Words “I love the Power Glove. It’s so bad.” I knew just by looking at the foam gauntlet on the screen that he must have meant it was actually bad, as in terrible. My dad had taken me to this Nintendo ad disguised as a film simply because I was the target market for such advertisements. Fred Savage and his girlfriend from Rilo Kiley shilled to me for an hour and a half and I ate it up. I was almost full of the stuff when I remember seeing the wall of the tournament stage pull up from the floor and unveil Super Mario Bros. 3. My mouth was dropped in excitement from that moment up until the final credits. For weeks after it was all I’d talk about. My dad was used to hearing me blab on about Nintendo – he was the one who’d bought it for me in the first place and I’d gone crazy ever since. Throughout my childhood, my dad used my consoles almost as much as I did. We had some difference in taste – my favorite game was Mega Man 2, my dad’s was The Black Bass – but we still had a shared love of games. We both loved Mario, though. Hell, even my mom loved Mario. It wasn’t long into February, on a Saturday morning, when I found Super Mario Bros. 3 on our kitchen table. It wasn’t a special occasion so it was odd to buy a game from the blue, but I think my dad was just as excited about it as I was. We had to have it. The yellow box with the flying Mario was mind-blowing at first – holy cow, a flying Mario! I tore it open, dashed into my room, and jammed it into the NES. I sat on my bottom bunk, next to my dad in a kitchen chair, as we played two-player. For hours we went through the game, beating up any Koopa Kid we came across. We were an indomitable team. “Hammer Bros.! Another star? Ugh! What the heck is this coin ship?” Further and further we progressed as the day began to draw to a close. We found ourselves flustered by World 6, with what I still feel is a too-sharp increase in difficulty. I grew tired by the time we’d made it halfway through World 8, but we couldn’t give up – not when we were so close. We resolved to leave the system on overnight and beat it in the morning. That night I dreamed a dream of Mario. I touched a mushroom and got bigger, smashing through the inexplicable poster of the Dick Tracy NES game on my wall and into a bright and colorful world outside. I was taller than the all of the floating blocks and I jumped up and over them to reach even further blocks. Fire spouted from my hands. Coins rained from the sky. I could fly. When I woke up, my WWF clock was half past Ultimate Warrior which meant it was about two or three AM. I’d left the television on as I always did, afraid the darkness would get me. The light was blocked, however, and I forced my eyes to stay open to see the disturbance. All I could make out was the hulking figure of my dad, a bottle of vodka at his side, sitting in front of the television. Words were scrolling by rapidly and I struggled to make them out over his shoulder. Credits. My dad had beaten the game without me. When I asked him about it he said he really wanted to finish the game, and I was so upset. We would beat it together later, but it wasn’t the same. That first time was supposed to be about both of us. I, of course, forgave him for his Mario-related transgressions, but I’d never be able to get that back. Time passed. We beat Super Mario World together, a save system making things a bit easier on us. He watched me beat Super Mario 64, his hands growing older and too shaky to hold the controller, oohing and aahing at the 3D graphics. We beat all those games together multiple times. We were Mario masters, finding all the secrets, beating every exit, and even making up lyrics to the games’ wonderful soundtracks. He died in 2001, taken by sudden and undiagnosed cirrhosis. The next year Mario Sunshine didn’t seem so appealing. I didn’t play another Mario game until 2007, unable to resist Super Mario Galaxy. It was wonderful, at that point my favorite in the series. As I watched the credits roll by, however, my mind drifted back to that moment in the theater when the wall lifted up and there was Raccoon Mario flying through the air. I drifted back to finding him watching the credits without me. I drifted back to loving Mario with my dad. He could keep Super Mario Bros. 3. That was for him and me. I had all the rest, but Super Mario Bros. 3 truly belonged to us together and he earned that ending just as much as I did. From the Wizard to my tiny bedroom, that game was ours, so when I play it now it’s like I’m reliving a little part of being with him. At the end, when I’ve tossed Bowser into that endless pit, I like to sit there and pretend it’s half past Ultimate Warrior and just watch the credits.
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Jan 9, 2015 07:17
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Working at the Nintendo Helpline was an okay part-time job for Jane. It paid decent enough, hours were good enough for him to take it while studying for her degree, and it was easy enough. You pretty much had to find the game the kid needed help on in the tip book and spout off whatever tip they needed. The catch was that you had to sound like you cared. They weren’t stealing their parent’s credit card for nothing. Once in a while you had to deal with a little rear end in a top hat, but it wasn’t too much. However, there was one call Jane would remember. It was around 6PM on a Wednesday when she got the call. Jane pulled out the tip book and answered the phone. “Nintendo Helpline, how can I help you?” What came out of the phone sounded different than the usual child or occasional parent. It sound like someone closer to her age, probably male, with an obnoxious pitch to it. “Yes, uhh, hello, I’d like to, uhh, get some help with, uhh, Fainaru Fantajî Shikkusu?” “Excuse me?” There was a sigh almost as heavy as the person making it. “Final Fantasy III.” “Oh. Okay. What do you need help with?” “I was informed that there was, um, a hidden scene with Terra and Celes. And uhh, I don’t want to get into, uhh, intimate details, but it’s supposed to have them bathing?” Though he was not familiar with the game personally, Jane knew when the caller had been told a fake secret. Well, usually when he heard false rumors, they were from kids who were told Sonic was playable in Super Mario World. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think that’s in the game.” “Um, yes, yes it is.” The voice started to become less nervous and more agitated. “I have a very reputable resource that explicitly states such a scene can be unlocked.” “But they did not explain how to unlock it?” “No, no. This, uh, resource, did not want the secret to become widespread.” “Sir, I believe that you have been given a false rumor. They’re very common.” “No, no I was not! You should check!” Jane wanted to sigh, but that was against company policy. So instead she went according to the procedure those stupid training videos stated she should. “Give me a moment, and let me check.” Jane opened her tip book and checked the section for Final Fantasy III. It wasn’t heavily detailed. Generic tips, strategies that amounted to “kill enough enemies to level up”, a few secrets, but obviously nothing about a bath scene. “Sir, there is no bath scene in the game. Is there anything else you wish to know about?” “I want to talk to your manager. I’m not paying 4.99 a minute for disservice like this!” “Sir, there is no need for that. You have been given a false rumor and nothing more. Are you sure you don’t need anything else?” There was a pause. “How do I beat the Storm Dragon?” “Bring a lot of potions.” 509 words
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Jan 9, 2015 15:27
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