Groundings and Gauntlets

I wasn't the best student for most of High School. I skated on ability for a good chunk of my time there, and that meant I didn't do well. The first three years I was there I would not do well the 1st semester, and then in the first grading period of the second semester, my progress report would be awful. My parents would ground me then until my grades came up. My Freshman year of High School, when this occurred, I had already pre-ordered a game called Gauntlet: Dark Legacy. After it arrived, I was forced to let it sit on my cabinet, taunting me, until the day my grades were better. It sat there for about a month, then one weekend, I proved to my parents that my grades were getting better. I brought in test scores from a number of classes to show them how well I had been doing, and as a reward, they suspended the grounding for a weekend. I had a mission to beat that game within the confines of the weekend.

Gauntlet: Dark Legacy was a revamped version of the old Gauntlet games from the 80s. You have a man, and you're in a dungeon, and your goal is to get to the end without dying. Along the way, monsters spew forth endlessly out of monster generators, and the only way to stop them is to destroy the generators. You accomplish this by hitting it with your sword, the same sword you use to hit the monsters. Along the way you can pick up food to increase your life, which, in the old games, was constantly decreasing even when you weren't being attacked. This served to keep the quarters flowing in the arcade machines, and frustrate home users. The game is famous for its voiceovers which informed the user of what was occurring, such as the famous "Wizard needs food badly."

So I called my buddy Kevin and told him of the ceasefire, and we plopped our butts down for some marathon gaming. Joe should have been included, but he was away for the weekend, and this was a one time deal I couldn't afford to blow. For my character I chose the Knight, and the color Blue. Kevin chose the Green Jester. We played that game for at least 12 hours each day. We played it when it was fun, and when it wasn't fun.

You see, there comes a time with every hobby when it just becomes not fun anymore. We knew that our time with the game was limited, so we knew we had to beat it. In order to beat it, we had to do some pretty tedious things; finishing a level multiple times in order to get every collectible, namely. I have distinct memories of us getting angry at each other for not fulfilling our roles adequately. By the time we finished it, we wanted nothing to with it. That game, in all of its simplistic glory, had served its purpose.

The victim in all of this was Joe. When he got back, he was ready to play the game, as he too had been patiently waiting his turn. Unfortunately, though, we had nothing to offer. Sitting down and playing that game only brought out disgust from Kevin and me. We would play for 15 minutes, and after that, we were done. The memories of grinding away at the game until we found its juicy, unfulfilling core, flooded us. We were done, and Joe to this day is angry at us.

7th Saga: Or the Day I Bested my Dad

Growing up, the man crew in my house went through Role Playing Games pretty quickly. Between the three of us we covered a pretty wide swath of random medieval themed adventures of random names. We played Dungeon Magic, Sword of Vermilion, Landstalker; you name it. One of the games that gave me a great story, though, was 7th Saga.

Yeah, you heard that right: shout outs to 7th Saga! 7th Saga was a game on the Super Nintendo where you chose between one of seven heroes on a quest with a large bounty. Along the way, you could team up with the other characters you didn't choose, and even had to fight them along the way. Your options included a Knight, a Cleric, a Wizard, a Robot, a Demon, a Dwarf, and an Alien. It was unique in that it was a linear progression game but your character choice dramatically changed the storyline along the way. For a Super Nintendo RPG, it was pretty neat. When we got it (from who knows where; Flea Market is my guess) my Dad and I were playing the game at the same pace. He was playing as Kamil, the Human Knight. A solid choice; Kamil could heal a little bit, attack a little bit, defend a little bit, and all around was the most well balanced of the seven characters. A very well educated pick. I, on the other hand, was nine years old, and so I chose the mighty robot TETSUJIN. I'm not capitalizing his name for emphasis; his name was always capitalized in the game for whatever reason, while other text was not. Tetsujin was a tank that didn't care for chat. He wanted power, and he wanted you out of his way; obviously I found him to be the coolest.

One day, my Dad came to me with a problem. He had finished a certain dungeon three times now, and every time he finished and came to the next town, the evil alien Wilme was waiting to kill him. In order to get into the Inn and thus rest/save the game, Dad had to beat Wilme. Every time he did, though, Wilme would pound his brains in. Dad couldn't figure it out. I made a bold claim at that point; I would defeat the evil Wilme. My dad scoffed. There's no way I could beat Wilme--I was just a kid. In times when Dad couldn't do things, the only solution was to work harder and level up more; not just to keep banging one's head against the wall and expect different results. A rational line of thinking, but he forgot who he was dealing with. My Dad went so far as to offer up a whole dollar in the incredibly ridiculous event that I actually defeated Wilme.

So I took him up on it. My dad finished the dungeon as he had done so many times in the past, and Wilme waylaid my path. Wilme certainly was formidable. He came with a quick, steady onslaught of attacks. Where my Dad though, would pause his attack and try to heal his wounds, I continued pressing the A button on the Attack option. I knew that Wilme's offense would always outpace my defense, as it had always done with my Dad, so I just figured I'd give stupidly constant offense a shot. I think you can guess what happened next:

Wilme was defeated, and Dad sat there in shock. I subtly reminded him of the bounty he had placed upon Wilme's head, and he, mouth agape, sauntered into his room to procure my Washington. That was the first time I had proved myself better than my Dad in anything, and say what you want, I thought it was a big step in my development, right along with the time I beat Metal Man after my brother had failed multiple times in a row. Thanks again Wilme, you stupid, stupid Alien.

Games that Influenced Me: Street Fighter II

The Super Nintendo system was the first big purchase of my life. I saved up my non-existent allowance for months; I didn't ask for anything. Once my parents realized that I was saving up for something, they started keeping track of how long I had saved for. I think I saved my money for about six months in order to buy a Super Nintendo (give or take a few months; I honestly had no idea how much anything costed back then.) Once I did make my purchase, my brother, Doug, made his own purchase. One of the first games we ever owned for the new system was the breakthrough game that legitimized the "Fighting Game" genre: Street Fighter II.


Street Fighter II has very little to do with fighting on the streets. While there are streets, and there is fighting, the people that do said fighting are rather legendary. They throw fireballs out of their hands, they jump 20 feet into the air during suplexes, they teleport around the boundaries, and their limbs stretch to three body lenghts at will. This is obviously all ignored, or even embraced, by the youngsters who are playing the game, because to us real fighting was boring. Heck, I did that from time to time with my brother or other kids, and it just ended with me getting grounded.

I do remember the day that my brother brought the game home. Unbeknownst to me, the game was rather familar to him. He had already played for many an hour at friends houses, or more likely, The Tilt. The Tilt was a gigantic arcade housed inside the old Fashion Island Mall. I wasn't allowed to go to The Tilt when I was young; Mom said that gangs hung out there. Admittedly, all arcades house a certain amount of seedy activities due to how dark and impersonal they are, so she was probably right to some extent. Regardless, the day my brother bought the game, he immediately set it to its hardest difficulty. The difficulty meter in the game would make the computerized opponents more intelligent depending on how high you set it; sort of like how in chess you can set it to make really stupid moves, or you can set it to be a grand master a la Bobby Fisher. Doug blasted that baby up to Level 7 Hard and beat it without flinching, and then just left to go to his baseball game.

I was floored. It took me about a month just to beat it at level 5; to see Doug beat it right after buying the game at its hardest difficulty was art in action. I remember going to his baseball game later (I was too young to stay at home by myself) and bragging to the other kids that my brother had beaten the game on Level 7 Hard. Doug was the epitome of cool in my mind; the thing I wanted to do, he was "da best" at. My brother is seven years older than me. We shared a room together until my sister went to college, which was up until I entered Jr. High basically. A lot of my early wisdom was shaped around what my brother told me. I learned from him that if I failed at something while another person was talking that it wasn't my fault, but rather that "You broke my concentration." I also remember that I wasn't allowed to pronounce the name of the ONYX tape he owned, "BACDAFUCUP" even though it wasn't a word (Doug just told me not to say it; even though I had no idea what it meant.)

That day though, the day he beat the game at its most difficult, Doug was the best. He could've done anything in my mind. He could've leapt off the Eiffel Tower and lived and I wouldn't have been surprised. Doug had beaten Street Fighter II on Level 7 Hard; everything else paled in comparison. I wonder if this image will be stuck in my mind of what Doug means to me: "Brother, Friend, Destroyer of Level 7 Hard." That needs to be on a plaque in his room one day.

My World Ended with my Presidents' Tape

I was exposed to a pretty liberal music selection growing up. My parents listened to classic rock mostly and 60's style Rhythm and Blues; my oldest sister listened to Pop; my brother listened to rap and hip hop; my other sister listened to indie rock. As such, I listened to pretty much anything that was catchy. I believe I bought my first album when I was four years old. It was "Full Moon Fever" by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. It was a great album. My second album, like many kids my age, was Weird Al Yankovic's "Bad Hair Day." It was a great album. My third album, and the one that struck the best chord with me, was The Presidents of the United States of America's "II."

I loved this album. To this day I could recite every word of it and karaoke your brains out. It contained the hit singles "Volcano" and "Mach 5" as well as personal favorites "Toob Amplifier" and "Twig." I think a lot of people have an album like this; maybe it was "Hit me Baby One More Time," or "Waterfalls," or "I Just Called to Say I Love You." The defining trait of this was that this was the moment you knew you loved music, and this was the album that defined you. Some kids are blessed enough to have this album come to them when they're 3 or 4 years old; those kids probably grew up to be musicians, especially if it was a Hendrix or Al Green album. This is the album you listened to endlessly until your parents caved and bought you a pair of headphones, at which point you simply sat next to the stereo listening until your ears bled. And as such did my ears bleed.

I loved it. I listened to it off this old stereo my Grandpa had given me from the stone age, but somehow still had stereo sound and a bass system that could blow the cat down off the second story balcony (true story: it once did.) I shared a room with my brother at the time, so what time I had that he didn't want the stereo to himself I treasured. I'd sit there and listen, staring off into space wondering how such angelic chords could be discovered by mortals. I had the album on tape, so after each play, I'd have to flip the tape over in order to listen to the rest of it. I remember years later I found a copy of the album, but I couldn't name off which songs I liked, because I never learned the names of the songs. I didn't have iTunes to tell me what song I was listening to; I just knew track 5 was the bomb. One fateful day, though tragedy struck.

I was listening to the album for the 718293313rd time, when all of a sudden, the pace picked up. "I will survive, in my machfive, INMYMACHFIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVE" POOF. Mid chorus, the tape had exploded. I guess the wear and tear the old stereo had caused on the flimsy tape film had finally become too much, and I slammed down the stop/eject button a moment too late. All I found was a garbled mess of film that, even when rewound back in, wouldn't play. I was heartbroken; crestfallen. I remember going to school the next day as one sad panda. I confided in my friend, Daniel Ferrera, that my tape had been eaten and barfed back up to me in a state befitting the verb. Daniel, though, was a good friend. He lived literally right next to school, so he sprinted home, obtained his copy of The Presidents' self titled album, and handed it to me with no hesitation. He told me he wanted me to stop being sad, and that this would help. I told him I appreciated the gesture, but nothing could console the sadness that remained in the black void where my heart once sat. Nothing.

Except this. I listened to it when I got home, got hooked, and was totally fine the next day. This just goes to show you folks; sometimes when kids are depressed, their just inconvenienced. Shout outs to Daniel for knowing exactly what I needed, and shout outs to POTUSA for giving me the inspiration to go on with life.