forrest

the dangerous type inflating her kiddie pool for ducks: super cool

#poetry

It was October 2001, and a twelve-year-old boy, after incessant pestering, had just received the newest giant-robot game for the PlayStation 2 as an early Christmas gift from his mother. This annoyed The Boy’s father, who never saw eye-to-eye with his ex-wife and preferred his son to stay focused on the three S’s: school, sports, and socializing; so it follows that The Boy lived two lives, switching back and forth monthly between his mother and father’s house. It was always autumnal during these split-custody blues.

Nearly ten months prior, in December 2000, Bandai released its first game for the PlayStation 2, Mobile Suit Gundam: Journey to Jaburo. The game is largely a retelling of the first half of the classic 1979 anime Mobile Suit Gundam. It follows the crew of the White Base – a military vessel of the Earth Federation – in their nigh-hopeless battle against the Principality of Zeon, a nation of space-Nazis that will do anything to achieve their fascist goals, notably: dropping populated space colonies on Earth thereby killing millions. Bright Noa, captain of the White Base, chances upon a special boy named Amuro Ray, who happens to be a natural when it comes to piloting the Earth Federation’s new experimental giant robot: The Gundam. These events kick off Amuro’s coming-of-age story as he finds himself in a tough-love father-son relationship with Bright Noa and develops a sibling-like rivalry with a Zeon commander as equally talented as he is effortlessly cool and mysterious and handsome and blonde: Char Aznable.

Childhood is wanting to be Char; adulthood is wanting to be Char, also. Which brings us to The Boy; and, of course, The Boy in this story wanted to be Char, but he was more of an Amuro-type: geeky, angsty, obsessive. The Boy’s father was most certainly a Bright Noa-type, both in his disciplinary approach, which leaned heavily towards mild forms of corporal punishment, and in his no-nonsense haircut. And the father just purchased a new home, which he treated like his own White Base.

The new White Base was as tall as a Gundam made of bricks with four exact ninety-degree angles, wearing a pyramid like a paper hat with such perfect folds that it must have been crafted by an origami master who knew all the ancient tricks but lacked any creativity whatsoever. The front door was mathematically placed in the precise middle of the home and was surrounded by exactly nine windows; this made the house appear as some sort of eldritch wall-of-eyes and simply walking by the place evoked an intense feeling of being-watched. The house had a modest front yard dotted with thin maples and, during these autumnal months, the lack of chlorophyll caused the decaying leaves to float down from the hormonal trees and blanket the yard in death both fragrant and fugacious. When the breeze came, the naked trees appeared like skeletal fingers casting curses upon the very land they sprouted from. This eyeball-window-skeleton-hand-tree dynamic caused the local kids to describe the home as a haunted painting of some long-dead person whose eyes actually followed you instead of fake followed you; The Boy just described the home as prison.

For reference, the original Gundam stood eighteen meters tall or fifty-nine feet high or ten-people-standing-on-each-other’s-shoulders, and weighed sixty metric tons or one-hundred-twenty-thousand pounds or half of a blue whale, which aligned closely with a standard-three-story-middle-class home built in the eighties but renovated and sold in the turn of the new millennium; the same type of home The Boy found himself living in every-other month after both his mom and dad and the child therapist told him that it was not his fault and that mommy and daddy just don’t love each other anymore and that, on the bright side, he might have two Christmases from now on.

*eyeball-window-skeleton-hand-tree dynamic with The Boy and The Father and The Gundam

The Boy’s father saw the new home as his own White Base to lead his family into a better life, only with a four-thousand-dollar-a-month price tag; but to The Boy, the new home meant sitting on a hardwood chair with approximately zero lumbar support at the kitchen table all afternoon because he had to finish his homework before he could do anything else and he didn’t know how to do the assignments because he didn’t pay attention in class and he was too ashamed to ask for help so he would only sit there doodling pictures of giant robots in the margins of his worksheets between poking small holes in the fruit placed in the decorative bowl at the middle of the glass table at which he sat for hours. And this infuriated The Boy’s father, who made The Boy sit there until the work was done and then went behind The Boy to check his accuracy, and if it was not correct – which it rarely ever was – he would make The Boy do it all over again. It was tough love for the greater good of the White Base; some real Bright Noa Stuff was going on in that kitchen with the glass table and the uncomfortable chairs. The Father, like all fathers, wanted his son to have a better life than he did – he didn’t want his son stuck in a dead-end sales job at forty, like he was – and this meant perfect grades and sports three days a week and absolutely no distractions.

Directly below The Boy’s cramp-inducing chair, in the basement, was the PlayStation 2; it was hooked up to a television set about the size of a Jackson Pollock canvas, which painted pictures of giant robots upon The Boy’s adolescent brain. Mobile Suit Gundam: Journey to Jaburo was down there in the basement, snapped into the disc tray like the neurons that snapped robots into The Boy’s mind at all hours of the day. The Boy had Gundams on the brain while he was in the classroom staring at the circle that ticked time in slow motion; during every breezy autumn Sunday when raking leaves into piles that were then tossed into metal garbage cans to be burned days later; when he was in the field during recess just-kind-of-wandering-around-looking-at-stuff while the other kids played kickball; during the basketball practices when The Father would desperately encourage him to put-in-even-the-smallest-amount-of-effort; and definitely during that time he was in the outfield when the pop fly crashed into his head like a small meteorite rendering him unconscious for several minutes; and especially while he was wide-eyed in bed, staring into darkness because the child-therapist-prescribed ADHD medication gave him robot-inspired bouts of insomnia.

Every night during these split-custody blues, The Boy would slink out of his bedroom, tiptoe down two flights of stairs, and plop himself on the couch in the basement, where he covered himself in the glow of Mobile Suit Gundam: Journey to Jaburo. There, The Boy would control The Gundam: a glistening white 18-meter-tall Minovsky-Ultracompact Fusion Reactor-powered robot with a state-of-the-art rocket-thruster backpack module that provided a maximum speed of 165 km/h, sporting an incredible 5700 meter sensor range, and boasting a swift 180-degree turning time of 1.1 seconds. It was armed with two gatling guns mounted in its kabuto-shaped head, alongside handheld armaments including a beam rifle, a 380mm hyper bazooka, something resembling a riot shield, and two beam sabers.

The Boy’s wishes were only one pink flash of a beam saber away from being fulfilled. He felt powerful, clever, needed, and completely understood when he climbed into the cockpit of that virtual Gundam. His real father didn’t get it, but Bright Noa did. Bright Noa pushed The Boy to be the best damn Gundam pilot there ever was, while his real father only pushed him to be a healthy, productive member of society – something as far from the mind of a twelve-year-old boy as Mercury is from Mars.

The Gundam, with its shogun-like presence, demanded respect, much like the controls of the game, which – being Bandai’s first game for the PlayStation 2 and their first three-dimensional game ever – were clunky, archaic, obtuse, and reminiscent of an airplane cockpit with lots of unlabeled buttons and switches. Considering the PlayStation 2 DualShock controller with its two analog sticks, d-pad, four face buttons – ECKS, OH, TRIANGLE, SQUARE – two right triggers, two left triggers, start and select, and two secret buttons in the clicking-in of either analog stick, one would assume that The Gundam is moved with the left analog stick while the right analog stick controls the camera, but this is not the case; instead, up and down on the d-pad move The Gundam forward and backward while left and right turn The Gundam left and right; the word “turn” is important here; note that the word is not “move” or “strafe,” because the left and right triggers strafe The Gundam left and right instead. As such, if one wanted to move The Gundam in a diagonal direction, they would need to hold both up on the d-pad and either the left or the right trigger. If one wanted to turn The Gundam 360 degrees, they would need to hold left or right on the d-pad for ten whole seconds while the robot awkwardly stomped around in a circle, which left the clumsy metal giant wide open to enemy attack. This resulted in something akin to piloting a bipedal tank with a Tonka-truck controller.

In Bandai’s three-dimensional naivety, they had accidentally created a control scheme that mirrored what it may actually feel like to control The Gundam: clunky, archaic, obtuse; as if the PlayStation 2 controller was an actual Gundam cockpit. Every button on the DualShock was utilized in some way. The difficulty of the controls made pulling off even basic feats feel like mastering advanced Taekwondo techniques.

Amuro may have read the manual before jumping into the cockpit of The Gundam, but The Boy did not. At first, The Boy was hopelessly wrecked by Zeon mobile suits, but as the nights passed and the homework piled up, he became more dexterous and more dangerous, and soon he was controlling The Gundam like a seasoned veteran. The Gundam became an extension of The Boy, and whenever The Boy successfully slashed through an enemy robot with a well-timed dash attack or boosted out of the way of oncoming bazooka fire, he felt immensely satisfied in a way that The Father’s three S’s could never provide.

*the cockpit of The Gundam

On the seventh night of basement slinking, The Boy had reached the last story-mode mission. The story mode included a meager nine missions, covering the first twenty-nine episodes of the anime, and culminated in a final showdown with Char Aznable at the Earth Federation military base of Jaburo. The final mission consisted of a sortie with several mobile suits before Char entered the fray; and as the game lacked ways to repair The Gundam mid-sortie, The Boy had to carefully eliminate each mobile suit without taking damage. Otherwise, he would have no health left for the showdown with Char, who piloted a deadly amphibious mobile suit painted red – the Z’Gok Commander Type – equipped with sharp claws that could be pointed into metal-piercing spikes or splayed like a starfish to reveal devastating laser cannons. Throughout the first half of the mission, the regiment of Zeon mobile suits – mostly Zakus of green coloring and shoulder pads that looked like something a post-apocalyptic biker gang would require their members to wear (spikes and all) – would extract a great toll on The Gundam’s armor. When Char appeared, The Boy would be easily defeated. It didn’t help that the stagger animation of The Gundam was such that it was far too easy to get caught in an endless loop of laser-beam stagger locks; this stun-lock effect drove The Boy to the edge of madness.

After multiple failed attempts at defeating Char, The Boy lost all pretense of being twelve-years-old and needing-to-be-quiet: he howled as if he was the one getting hurt instead of the facsimilized samurai robot behind the phosphor. Each time The Boy failed the mission, he had to start over from the beginning; this improved his ability to complete the first-half of the sortie – battling over ten Zakus while not getting hit a single time – but ultimately resulted in CONTINUE? when Char locked The Boy in another laser-loop lock of death.

The Boy’s howling traveled through the home’s ductwork and echoed out of the ventilation shafts, alerting The Father, who was reading a Civil War novel in the spare bedroom, as he was prone to do every night. The Father promptly got out of bed, discovered The Boy’s empty room, and made his way down the many flights of stairs into the basement. His fists clenched in paternal frustration as he considered all the ways he would discipline his son. Bright Noa would often slap Amuro right on the face, but The Father preferred the buttocks as it was more socially acceptable. He mentally prepared himself to deliver this proper spanking, preemptively erecting mental bulwarks to deal with The Boy’s inevitable tears.

It was at this time that The Boy really wanted to be Char Aznable. He placed the DualShock on the coffee table in front of him, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath; he imagined that the air he was inhaling was actually the comet trail left by the Red Comet himself. Now serene – and very stubborn – The Boy picked up the controller and became one with The Gundam; he precisely maneuvered his way through the military base of Jaburo, slicing through Zakus as if he were practicing iaijutsu in a bamboo forest. The Boy had mastered the first half of the mission, but it was still not enough. When Char showed up in his crimson robot, The Boy was abruptly snapped back to reality with another CONTINUE? But The Boy was nonplussed. In his channeling of fictitious masked anti-heroes, he had become zen with calm determination, and it showed on his smiling face, all aglow with Mobile Suit Gundam: Journey to Jaburo.

*Char and his crimson Z’gok

The Father silently stood behind the basement couch for minutes, watching his son. At first, The Father was angry; after all, The Boy was sneaking downstairs, breaking the household rules, and it was clear that he had been doing this for a while, as he lacked the nervousness typically associated with burgeoning troublemakers. The Father had tried his damnedest to make The Boy a better version of himself; he had visions of his son becoming a star athlete: tennis and basketball and football and baseball. He even coached The Boy’s sports teams himself. But The Boy was clumsy, uninterested, and unhappy with everything that was thrust upon him. The Father had forgotten what The Boy’s smile looked like during these split-custody blues.

The Boy, now beaming with a huge smile on his face as he edged closer to victory, reloaded the mission once more full of confidence and verve. The screen went black for several seconds while the PlayStation 2 whirred and read the disc; and just as the screen went black, The Boy caught a glimpse of a shadowy figure in the reflection of the television’s leaded glass. The Boy’s stomach dropped and an audible gulp could be heard as he turned to face his father.

But The Father lacked his typical scowl; instead, there was a single hot tear rolling down his cheek. In the reflection of the television screen, The Father had seen his son’s smile for the first time since the divorce, and suddenly, everything made sense. He wiped the tear from his face and sat on the couch next to The Boy.

The Boy trembled in fear. He thought he was surely going to be punished for this transgression and had already started formulating some sort of lie in his head about how this was the first time he had ever come down here and how he might have sleepwalked or how he heard something weird and had to investigate; but The Father, as if reading The Boy’s mind, let out a light chuckle before placing his large hand on his son’s shoulder.

“What are you playing, son?”

The Boy, amidst a sea of stuttering, uttered something that sounded like the word Gundam being fired from a machine gun.

“Mind if I try?”

The Boy responded by staring at his father through dilated pupils swirling with confusion and faint computer-game photons. Then, suddenly, something clicked. The Boy’s lips curved like a rainbow turning upside as he relinquished control of the DualShock controller. The Father eyed the boomerang-like device in his hands, twisted and turned it, and then pressed all the wrong buttons, causing the television screen to go wild with menus and laser beams. This only caused The Boy’s smile to widen – and this smile was like a golden contagion, as The Father could not help but smile himself.

The Boy laughed a cherub’s laugh, placed his hand on his father’s, and spoke without a single stutter,

“No, Dad, not that way. Here, let me show you.”

---

(Originally published on 7/7/2024)

#ComputerGames #MobileSuitGundamJourneyToJaburo #Autobiographical #ShortStory

grandma's many pills as a child, it was so strange now i take them too

#poetry

deep as a puddle i'm so jealous of the sea yet it envies me

#poetry

boy: rowdy and rough quit climbing on the table i have had enough

#poetry

nighttime dalliance appropriate your refuse i am the raccoon

#poetry

Behold: a tubby nine-year-old boy obsessed with computer games and cheese pizza; absentminded, shy, and prone to angry outbursts; selfish, hyperactive, and if he didn’t find immediate joy in a task – he didn’t do that task. He would skip homework because “my dog ate it!” and couldn’t be bothered to come up with a more original excuse because The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Transformers cartoons lived eternal in his mind. These antisocial proclivities landed The Boy in “special education” classes, but the more The Boy was treated as “special,” the worse his behavior became, and he retreated ever deeper into computer games.

The Boy’s Mom didn’t know what to do with him. She noticed The Boy’s digital obsessions and that they were violent; after all, Zelda featured a young boy that slayed monsters with swords. The Mom thought that if she replaced the violence with educational games that this would not only improve The Boy’s behavior – turning him boastworthy for soccer-mom-watercooler-confab – but also show that she cared about his interests, because above all else: she truly loved her son.

The Mom took The Boy to the local electronics store and told him to pick two computer games from the educational section. It was the year 2000 and stores were packed with computer games containing the prefix “Sim’” and the suffix “Tycoon”; these morphemical games were baby’s-first-capitalism; business simulators wrapped in graphical-interfaces targeted toward children. The Boy immediately gravitated to the vibrant theme park packaging of RollerCoaster Tycoon. He quickly dismissed the dated graphics of DinoPark Tycoon. SimCity 3000 was also considered but it intimidated The Boy with its technicalities. And just when The Boy was about to call-it-quits, he noticed a glimmering jewel calling out to him from the discount pile. The jewel was an Italian caricature sporting a floppy chef’s hat and a white apron stained with what was hopefully pizza sauce; he sported a mustache even more extravagant than Freddie Mercury’s during the recording of Queen’s 1980 album “The Game” and was grinning into the camera while holding a pizza-with-the-works as if breaking the fourth wall to summon The Boy into a universe of freshly cooked pizza pies forever. Not only was pizza The Boy’s favorite food, but Queen was also his favorite band – and by this logic: Fast Food Tycoon was bound to be his favorite game.

After The Boy came home and ate a few slices of pizza for dinner, he slid the pizza-shaped disc into the tray of the Windows 98 computer in Dad’s office and clicked through the many prompts of the installer. Upon boot, the words “Fast Food Tycoon, Eat Here” flashed in cold cathode above a seedy street corner that was positioned between a club and a pizza joint; the club was red carpet, and the pizza joint was a money-laundering scheme; both owned by the same organization. The Boy was about to learn many important life lessons.

Fast Food Tycoon – or Pizza Syndicate, as it’s known in Europe – is a business simulator centered around managing your own pizza franchise, created by the German developer Software 2000 and published by Activision in North America in November 2000. When the game starts, you are given the option to make your own pizza person, choosing their picture from a premade selection of Italian caricatures, selecting their name, and adjusting their starting stats from a long list that rivals the most complicated of role-playing computer games. Once your character is created, you are thrown into the sleazy world of pizza and quickly realize that you are smack-dab in the middle of an all-out pizza war between ancient crime families. And there’s no hope of survival unless you sell your soul to the mafia for better ingredients, better pizza, and guaranteed protection from getting whacked by Papa John. Once you become a made man in the dark underworld of pizza, you crawl your way up the pizza chain from Chuck E. Cheese Capo to Don of Domino’s and, if you’re lucky, to The Godfather of Pizza.

*The Boss evaluates your Pizza Performance; he is not impressed.

Fast Food Tycoon is as much about making the tastiest pizza as it is about sending armed goombahs to rival pizza joints; bursting with such depth as “goths like meat on their pizza” to “should I poison the food at Mario’s Pizza Palace or should I just plant a bomb instead?” to “which style of music should I play to attract the correct demographic?” to “should I bribe the mayor or just save the money for more machine guns?” All the while fudging numbers and trying to make the perfect pizza pies only to perpetuate The Great Pizza Wars – an endless cycle of pizza-funded violence.

Fast Food Tycoon teaches children many valuable lessons about the stygian horrors of not only pizza but also business and humanity as a whole. It teaches children that bribing the mayor has massive perks in the form of blind-eyes and tax-exemptions. It teaches that if you plant rats in a restaurant, the Department of Public Health will shut down that restaurant. It teaches that pizza joints are a surprisingly efficient way to launder stolen bank money. It teaches that fear is one of our most powerful motivators. And above all else, it teaches that pizza is very serious business.

Of course, The Mom had no clue that Fast Food Tycoon bestowed these valuable life lessons upon The Boy. To her, Fast Food Tycoon was just another educational business game for her son to level up his business acumen and help on his path to becoming a fitter, happier, and more productive human being. When she watched The Boy play, he was simply managing ledgers and decorating restaurants and there was nothing to be concerned about. The Mom was so impressed by Fast Food Tycoon’s ability to engage The Boy that she recommended her neighbors buy the game for their children, and thus, the ancient cycle of pizza violence continues to this day – The Great Pizza Wars rage on.

When The Boy looked back, he realized that Fast Food Tycoon was not prescriptive; instead, it was a warning – a commentary on the dangers of unregulated capitalism, the prominence of quid pro quo in the private and public sectors, and that, while fear and violence may rule humanity, the golden rule always kicks in and you will eventually reap what you sow; be that in the form of delicious pizza pies or a bag over your head in Papa John’s basement.

---

(Originally published on 4/8/2024)

#ComputerGames #FastFoodTycoon #Autobiographical #Review

As I write this piece on The Powerpuff Girls: Bad Mojo Jojo for the Game Boy Color, I am completely shitfaced and drunk and stoned and very deep into adulthood; at this moment, I am the exact opposite demographic from the one that the developers at Sennari Interactive intended for this game; that demographic being: kids who begged their parents to take them to Toys “R” Us after school to buy some Crazy Bones and happened to wander into the computer games aisle only to find their favorite Cartoon Network cartoon wrapped in Game Boy Color packaging with a $50 price tag stamped on it – in 2000.

Yes, Game Boy Color games cost $50, even in the year 2000. I remember. I was there. I was that kid.

The bottom line is this: if Cartoon Network executives knew that a drunk man in his thirties would be writing a piece containing the words “shitfaced,” “drunk,” or “stoned” for their beloved The Powerpuff Girls: Bad Mojo Jojo and releasing that piece in a highly esteemed computer games magazine, those executives would be sending their goon squad to that man’s office to cut off his fingers, thereby ensuring that he neverever puts digital pen to paper again. And I imagine that goon squad would look very much like villains from The Powerpuff Girls.

The Rowdyruff Boys could be descending upon my location at this very moment.

It’s well known that the 2000s Cartoon Network-branded Game Boy Color games are merely palette swaps with different intellectual property names slapped-on, but The Powerpuff Girls: Bad Mojo Jojo has a unique twist: it’s the first in the mythical The Powerpuff Girls Game Boy Color Trilogy; the other two games being: The Powerpuff Girls: Paint the Townsville Green and The Powerpuff Girls: Battle HIM. Each game allows you to play as one of three prepubescent Chemical-Xers: Blossom, Buttercup, or Bubbles; and has you fighting a different group of villains in each title.

Cartoon Network executives clearly wanted to capitalize on mom’s hard-earned-waitressing-money by coming up with diabolical ways to get children to buy the same game three times. When we were children, being unknowingly taken advantage of by corporate goons was fun; as adults, it’s just another boring day in Townsville. I guess we can blame Pokémon for the Mephistophelian trend of let’s-release-the-same-game-with-minor-differences-as-an-entirely-separate-game-at-full-price-and-incentivize-children-to-buy-them-through-playground-shame-and-ridicule.

The Powerpuff Girls was created by cartoonist Craig Douglas McCracken in 1998; he also helped direct Dexter’s Laboratory, which released around the same time and had a strikingly similar artistic style, albeit Dexter’s Laboratory was created by the legendary Genndy Tartakovsky, known for creating the truly mythical Samurai Jack and Star Wars: Clone Wars cartoons. Don’t get these cartoonists confused; one created the greatest thing in the Star Wars extended universe, and another created a cartoon featuring a very irresponsible father who uses his three genetically engineered children for casual vigilantism.

That’s not a crack on Craig – I am getting wasted and writing about someone else’s creations for a zero-reader computer games blog while he’s had more success doing what he loves than I could ever dream of.

While The Powerpuff Girls was never one of my favorite cartoons as a kid, the significance of one of the villains spitting blood whilst being kicked in the mouth by Buttercup during the opening was not lost on me; being one of the few times blood was shown in a children’s show – and that’s special because this violence inspired me to become that 2000s Toys “R” Us kid who begged his grandma to buy the The Powerpuff Girls: Bad Mojo Jojo during one fateful 2000s summer. My friend also had the game and I wanted to battle him because we both knew all three games had link-cable-functionality but we soon found out that the link-cable-functionality was only for trading collectibles found in the game’s levels and the collectibles were nothing more than blurry pixel art and we were sorely disappointed but we played and beat our respective versions regardless because back then you got a new game once in a blue moon and you savored every moment with those blue-moon games because they were all you had until the next cerulean satellite.

*something resembling an oval with pink eyes rams a man wearing a prison jumper

I asked that same friend if he remembered playing The Powerpuff Girls on Game Boy Color with me during that warm 2000s Charleston summer and he stared at me with a dumbfounded look on his face, indicating that this stuff is far more important to me than it is to him. And that’s probably a bad thing for me; a sign that I shouldn’t be waxing nostalgic on childhood frivolities so often; perhaps my brain power could be put to better use than writing over 1000 words on games that no one has thought about in over two decades and that are clearly targeted toward children?

No – it is he who is wrong, not I.

But I have been waxing far too long; you’re here for the riveting gameplay review, of course – so it’s time to start waning.

The Powerpuff Girls: Bad Mojo Jojo and its two sisters are side-scrolling beat-em-ups with controls as slippery as four glasses of wine at a dive bar after getting into a big fight with your girlfriend; all you can do is punch, kick, and fire some special-liquid-attack provided you have enough Chemical X in your bloodstream. There is no jump button, but holding up on the directional pad makes your character fly for a brief period, which never feels quite right. The levels range from The Professor’s Laboratory to Townsville Rooftops to Pokey Oaks School Playground to The Mouth of a Volcano and they all contain a non-zero-number of barely-hidden collectibles meant to be traded with friends using the link-cable-functionality. The enemies are mostly big dudes in prison jumpers with large muscles and guns; attacking said prison people is a combination of very-specific-angles and luck and always-taking-damage because you got too close to the enemy in the process of attacking. The bosses are just more-dangerous versions of prison dudes and there is no real strategy involved in anything and it’s about as entertaining as playing tic-tac-toe with a six-year-old who cheats.

The Powerpuff Girls Trilogy is an uninspired palette-swap cash-grab meant to encourage kids to trade in-game collectibles with their friends or – for those with no friends – buy all three versions and trade the collectibles with themselves in what amounts to the ultimate foreshadowing of lifelong depression. Of course, kids never did either of these things because the collectibles are lame and the game just isn’t fun to play. Cartoon Network tried to take advantage of children by tricking them into buying their insipid shovelware cash-grab games like Professor Utonium took advantage of three small children to fight crime in Townsville.

Except, Cartoon Network failed. The Powerpuff Girls Trilogy bombed commercially upon release and some Cartoon Network executive somewhere probably got fired for pitching the idea.

Instead of Sugar, Spice, and Everything Nice; The Powerpuff Girls trilogy is Exploitation, Corporatism, and Everything Wrong With the Licensed Games Industry. And, as a result, I am full of artificial sweeteners, sarcasm, and lots and lots of cynicism – thanks Cartoon Network.

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(Originally published on 4/8/2024)

#ComputerGames #PowerpuffGirls #Autobiographical #Review

The deer had to be grazing only fifteen yards away for I could see the tranquility in its eyes. It was a doe; no antlers. With silence and slow, I lifted the butt of Dad’s ancient lever-action rifle to my jawline and held breath while my index finger crept around the grip of the wood and quietly inched toward the trigger guard; trembling. I winked my left eye shut as my right focused into scope, and I could see the beast’s tranquility even clearer now. It wasn’t grazing; it was standing, perusing nature, and it bat lashes as it slowly lowered its slender head toward a solitary leaf on a sapling; nipping it most delicately off the hardwood. The scope revealed the doe’s spiky velvet, an uncommon trait; perfect for my induction ceremony. Dad would be very proud.

I first learned of Counter-Strike within the pages of a PC gaming magazine in Autumn Y2K; it was depicted as a realistic first-person shooter with a focus on multiplayer and teamwork. And although derived from Valve’s Half-Life, it lacked the science fiction aspects that attracted the taped-glasses demographic and appealed more to my audience: southern boys who dreamed of monster trucks and machine guns and mounted deer heads. I wanted Counter-Strike more than anything; especially after my friends at school started playing, but my Dad didn’t see the appeal and wanted me to focus on the three G’s: girls, grades, and guns – and football. But we made a compromise: if I made all B’s in school that year, he would buy me a Dell PC and a copy of Counter-Strike. Needless to say, I studied real hard, and I got those B’s.

As I watched the doe chew leaves from the hardwood, I thought about what Dad told me years ago: “the best way to kill a deer is to shoot ’em while they’re standin’ with one side of their body facin’ ya; that way, ya aim true an’ make every shot count. Ya gotta be quick but silent an’ steady as a rock; that’s the key to bringin’ home the bag, son.” He would say while chewing tobacco as naturally as the doe chewed leaves, “this ‘ere is called a broadside shot an’ it’s the quickest way to kill a deer, son – ya know, they’re still livin’ animals and we don’t want ‘em sufferin’ too bad.”

Counter-Strike is a simple premise wrapped in layers of deep first-person-shooter mechanics; two sides – terrorists and counter-terrorists – firefight across everyday terrain with objectives such as bomb defusal and hostage rescue. The game oozes realism, as each gun is derived from a real world model and handles as one would expect; holding down left-click to rapid-fire – or ‘spraying’ – decreases your accuracy, while firing in short bursts – or ‘tapping’ – keeps your aim steady; holding the ctrl-key to crouch increases precision even further which mirrors the real world firing technique of kneeling with your rear knee placed on the ground and your other leg supporting the elbow of your forward arm. All weapons benefit from these precision mechanics, but the AWP benefits most; the AWP is a sniper rifle that kills in one shot – the drawback being that it requires a reload after being fired.

When I used the AWP – which was always – I pictured my opponent as deer and recalled what Dad told me about the broadside shot, and this advice carried me to Counter-Strike stardom. I became so proficient with the AWP that my friends called me “The AWP King” and I joined local tournaments full of confidence and verve.

Mesmerized – I continued to peer through the looking glass. The doe basked in stray beams piercing the canopy layer, only breaking posture to pluck leaves off the hardwood. My thoughts veered to the ancient rifle that trembled lightly in my hands, passed down from grandfather to father to son in The Ritual of the Hunt. I wondered to myself; did Dad tremble too? Did he hesitate before shooting his first deer? Why was I hesitating at all? To stop the trembling, I took a note from Counter-Strike and held the crtl-key to crouch; my right knee crunched into dry leaves as my left supported my forward arm while I readjusted the ancient rifle. I winked and peered through the looking glass once more, but this time the doe’s magnified eyes were staring back at me.

For our first local tournament, we faced a team composed of kids from our middle school. The winners of the tournament would win brand new gaming PCs. It was hosted at a local LAN Gaming Center called the Arena; a dark warehouse overflowing with computers jam-packed with the most popular computer games of 2001. The ambiance was shadow and fluorescent, like that of a jellyfish in the darkest recesses of the oceans. The Arena was the natural habitat of stoners, outcasts, and those who played Everquest and Doom; a place where both hardcore nerds and potential school shooters mingled freely as there was a surprising amount of overlap in their interests. My team pushed through this unholy union and started discussing strategies for the upcoming digital gunfights when the opposing team walked in; their leader was wheelchair-bound with thick glasses, greasy hair, and a band-tee for a group I had never heard of. My teammate Ryan – an older boy who had been held back several grades and expelled for attacking other students at least twice – pointed at the kid in the wheelchair and called him the f-slur of the homosexual variety and we laughed like a wicked pack of hyenas gyred around a human baby. An Arena employee heard this slur-slinging and gave us a warning, but we shrugged it off because we talked like this all the time – it made us feel superior when someone got offended.

*ancient violence consumes the LAN tournament

The tournament was not going well. The other team seemed to read our minds; we would go B and they would go A; we would go A and they would go B; we would try to camp at spawn but they would flashbang us into confusion and clean up in the aftermath; we would try to rush early but they would anticipate this and trap us in a pincer formation. And to top it off, the disabled boy was far more skilled with the AWP than I – his trigger finger was always seconds faster than mine. We lost the tournament and we were embarrassed, but we masked this embarrassment with the foulest language possible. We slung slurs like bullets at a drunken bar fight in a Wild West saloon.

The slur-slinging culminated in whirlwind-heat-and-flash as Ryan stood up and accused the disabled boy of cheating. I turned to face the altercation, but before I could do anything, Ryan grabbed the disabled boy by his long hair and was screaming slurs at him. Ryan then pulled the disabled boy’s hair with such force that it tornadoed him onto the floor and left a clump of bloody mess in Ryan’s clenched fist. He then started kicking the disabled boy in the gut, “this is what you get for cheating, you gimp fa—!” he shouted on repeat.

Horrified, I leapt in and grabbed Ryan from behind, but he was much stronger than myself and pushed me to the floor. Four Arena employees then jumped in and dragged Ryan off the disabled boy, who was moaning meekly between invocations of “mom” gurgled in spittle and hemoglobin.

The police were called, and an ambulance showed up just as the disabled boy’s mom arrived to pick up her mangled son. There was an exodus as the boy was wheeled out on a stretcher, mumbling incoherently. I watched as the mom hurried to her son’s side with tears swelling in her eyes. She turned to Ryan, who was being escorted by two police officers, and instead of screaming obscenities at him, she started to sob uncontrollably. I knew then that, even though Ryan had attacked the boy, I was just as much at fault as he was. I couldn’t articulate it at the time, but I had dehumanized that boy into a stretcher.

The doe was unmoving, as if stunned by the glare of an ancient violence. I lifted my vision to catch a glimpse of her beyond the glass, but there was no illusion; she stared in confusion, as if asking a single question – “why?” I shifted my vision to the glass once more, expanding her forehead into a perfect target just when two small fawns emerged from the nearby brush. The fawns obscured my view as they nuzzled into their mother, but the doe remained resolute in her questioning. The fawns, noticing their mother’s focus, turned to me, and then they too stood resolute – questioning my ancient violence.

I thought to myself: “Three heads to hang on the wall. Dad would be proud.” But as I looked into the eyes of the fawn, I remembered the boy at the Arena. And as I looked at the doe, I remembered the mother sobbing. I remembered the violence, and just as I remembered this ancient violence, the fawns nuzzled their mother’s velvet head and she nuzzled back, and then they turned with a skip and trotted slowly into the wood, as if there was nothing to be afraid of – as if I was one with nature itself.

My finger eased off the ancient trigger of the ancient rifle, and I slung the ancient violence over my shoulder as I walked back to camp.

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(Originally published 4/8/2024)

#ComputerGames #CounterStrike #Fiction #Ethics #ShortStory