wheels the TV into the room for first period, pulls out a Dreamcast from his desk, makes the display and power connections with uncanny efficiency, and plugs in two controllers. He pushes the power button and turns to the class.
If you can beat my Lizardman, you gain a letter grade. If you can tell me five facts about the country where the level takes place, you gain a letter grade. If you do both, you’re getting a pizza party and a letter grade. May the best fighter win. Becca Aldridge, you’re up.
I could never find Granstream Saga and had long since given up, assuming I had made it up. I had rented it once, played it for 20 minutes, then forgotten about it for 15 years. I spent the next few years trying to find it occasionally but I just could not figure it out. Then one day my friend randomly posted that he was playing it on discord and I could’ve cried.
Jaffe’s strong reaction to the Animal Crossing birthday party stuck out to me. I recently revisited my Animal Crossing New Horizons Island and I also had a strong reaction with all the very emotional memories of peak COVID quarantine flooding back to me.
The vibes were also extremely off. In the old Animal Crossings your town would turn into a weeds-filled wasteland if you don’t visit it for some months. In NH everything was exactly as I left it. It’s been 4 years! It should NOT be look exactly the same!
I regularly forget the name of Xexyz. I don’t think I had any recollection of the game title at all after the one time I rented it, until one day months or maybe a year later while waiting for everyone else to stop making trips to the Wendy’s salad bar, I went title by title through a generic 500 Secrets For NES Games guide, determined to figure out if that was an actual game or something I imagined. So I have known it was real, but every 5-10 years probably I will half forget it again until I have some reason to search around for what the deal was with “that X game” (as I just did now).
If I really wanted to do “I’m clown man” justice I would’ve had to use the voice my mom uses when she’s describing something a “rude woman” said to her but I don’t wanna break that out for the show.
For years I was nearly convinced I had dreamed a certain low-poly 3D fighting game. After a lot of searching spread out over years, I finally found it was Zero Divide! I don’t know a thing about it, but the relief of removing that kind of mind splinter is like no other.
Tokyo Mirage Sessions drove me a little insane. The story just keeps putting these teenaged girls (aged up to make 'em legal in the US version!) into gross situations in the Idol industry where they have to get reluctantly photographed in revealing costumes and hold hands with sweaty middle-aged fans and it seems like it’s about to be critical of the industry but it just never is. And then there’s one character who’s like a goofy American weaboo guy, who is definitely a pedophile who’s obsessed with your one little twelve year old party member and nobody ever calls him out! They’re just like “oh, that Barry! what a character”
The last video game I purchased in a gamestop was a used copy of Baten Kaitos. I was a Wii owner going back to those Gamecube games I missed. Did not stick with Baten Kaitos at all.
The Black Myth Wukong stuff is so odd to me because I would wager 90% of the streamers playing the game would have avoided those topics anyway. There was no reason to be weird about it!
The last game I got at GameStop was the Mass Effect Legendary Edition, on release day in 2021. It was a spur of the moment decision for me. Bad day at work, nostalgia trip for Mass Effect, reading a review during lunch: oh, I need this game now.
I go to GameStop. It’s a location new to me after a closer one closed down. It is an open space at least half full of collectibles. One single clerk is working there. When he asks what I’m looking for, rather than doing my usual “just browsing” and finding the case myself, I ask about Mass Effect Legendary Edition. “Oh, you’re quite lucky. We do have a copy on hand,” he replies. He then goes on to regale me with how they don’t keep many physical copies on hand anymore, if I want a game I should preorder it in the future, and, again, just how lucky I was. By the end of the interaction, I have resolved to never come in there again.
At the risk of seeming like an old man shaking his fist at the clouds, let me unpack that. I can understand each individual point the clerk was making: why they don’t keep a lot of inventory, why pre-orders are important to gauge that need, and why they would present pre-orders as a customer convenience. But all of that mainly excludes GameStop from being a viable source for a game for me. I don’t preorder before reviews are out. At that point, days before a release at most, I’m most likely ordering digitally. If I want a physical copy, I’ve still got better options ordering online and waiting maybe a couple of days than going to the store and possibly wasting a drive. Then, if I do want to possibly waste a drive, I am better off targeting a store that doesn’t do pre-orders much, like a big department store, than GameStop, which I have been told is like gambling but without the fun. What he has told me, unknowingly, is that GameStop is last in my mental checklist of how to get a game.
How much do you want to bet that Tim Walz picked up Hydro Thunder?
The last game I got at GameSpStop was Sonic Frontiers on November 8, 2022. I wasn’t planning on playing Sonic Frontiers or shopping at GameStop, but I was out for a coffee walk that day, had free time, the sun was out, I was feeling good, and I knew there was a New Sonic out that day. It just seemed like a nice whim to go to a GameStop and buy the New Sonic for Nintendo Switch, even though my modern systems are all digital. I did that and ended up really having a lot of fun with Sonic Frontiers, so much so that I went back two days later and returned the Switch copy – which looks like unfiltered butthole – so that I could play through the game on PC, which I did. So the GameStop gesture was a bit meaningless, but before that, the last game I bought at GameStop was Devil’s Third, at the Seafood City mall in Eagle Rock, CA, on August 4th, 2015. I was the sole pre-order for that game.
On the Last Guardian, that reminds me of when people you know just kind of pick one strange game to fixate on – not like a Fortnite/Madden/CoD “this is the game I keep up with” game, but a game they read about or an obscure sequel to a rental or something and they just become the biggest most unfiltered freak for that game. You expect that from people like Insert Credit forum posters, but I love when it happens to people who don’t know what a PC Engine SuperGrafx is. I dated a woman who was in a band with a Power Ranger who bought a PS3, on launch day with no games, specifically for the Last Guardian. She just waited and waited and waited for the Last Guardian, left a space on her shelf for the Last Guardian, and took a week off work to play the Last Guardian. I like that feeling when people get so deeply into something so harmless
Also, for Japanese speakers, is there any sort of interesting nomenclature on using the English word “Try” in a slightly different way than English speakers use it (more like an encouraging directive, kind of like a “ganbare”)? Hope that’s not a dumb question, but I see it pop up in gaming-adjacent stuff and it always makes me wonder. There’s Try the arcade, and game titles like Birdie Try, Scrum Try, Gundam Try Age, etc.
Huckabees. What a great film. (Which also has characters named Jaffe).
