The Intern

In case you haven't heard, I finished Contra 4 a few weeks ago. Yesterday one of my co-workers received his PhD, and I'm pretty sure even he's jealous of my accomplishment.

Soon after, I found myself in want of a new Nintendo DS game to satisfy my primal urge to press buttons and look at flashing lights. What scares me is that, since last August, I've played and completed some of the best games the DS has to offer, and after kicking some aliens in their testicles -- aliens must have testicles, right? I'm too assed to look it up on Wikipedia -- I feared that there were no games left in which I'd be interested.

Enter: Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (sorry if I broke your capacity to read more than one colon in a single sentence*).

Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, Dawn of Sorrow's successor, was the first game I immersed myself in when I bought the DS, and I love it like...well, you know. But let's be Frank Abagnale: shit can get tedious at times. I'm all for killing manifold (old men) base creatures, but, you know what, I could do without spending an entire week trying to master the cream pie as a weapon. Because I like to pretend that I'm too busy for such pointlessness.

Conversely, what made Contra 4 such an ass-kicking experience was that at no point did the game ever feel like a chore. Sure, some strategy is involved, but never did I find myself spending an hour killing enemies just so I could level up. Contra 4 was the first game in a long time that made my palms sweat because it was so intense.

I knew what I was getting into by following up such a game with the lesson in patience that is Dawn of Sorrow, but it wasn't easy. Gone were my rapid-fire machine guns, in their stead replaced by weapons slower than frozen molasses.

Still, I endured. I made my bones. I dredged through slow, feeble weapons and built up my experience, knowing, like a caveman with foresight, that my hard work would eventually benefit all of mankind.

It was when I found the tomahawk -- okay, I'll be honest; I spent a half hour farming coins and bought it -- that the game finally started paying dividenz. When I parlayed that sucker into the throwing sickle, that's when I knew it was on. That's when the game stopped feeling like work.

At last I was free to unleash my passive-aggressive, misanthropic fury upon the underworld! Look, as much as I love video games, I'm on Roger Ebert's side vis a vis his opinion that they're not art. Video games have never provided me any insight deeper than a feeling of accomplishment, soon followed by a feeling of shame. So if video games are art, so is masturbation.

Justified, I began playing more often than before in my attempt to finish the game. But I should have known. Dawn of Sorrow is not a game to be played casually. You do that, you get the "bad ending."

Want to know how to get the good ending? Read online strategy guides and walkthroughs. They're the Cliffs Notes of gaming. And Dawn of Sorrow is fucking Ulysses. Look, I enjoy puzzles, but knowing which armor or weapon (or soul) to equip to make sure the game doesn't end prematurly is a folly. There's no logic involved, and the only people who get through the game immaculately are those who have way to much fucking time on their hands to spend on configuring random items, or those who get lucky and stumble upon the right combination of said items.

I don't know about you, but cheating -- unless it relates to relationships -- holds a negative connotation in my mind. It's ethically reprehensible to me. But like a john with a scratch to be itched, I'll find out via some game FAQ written by a sociopath who's probably collecting disability checks how to proceed, then hate myself for the pleasure of doing so.

I've never understood the allure of role-playing or turn-based games. Pokemon Diamond is one of the highest-rated games the DS has to offer, but to me it's an exercise in masochism. Who in pluperfect hell would choose to spend a minute of free time fighting a creature that looks like a vegetable when he could go outside and in a second kick a Chihuahua?

(The irony here isn't lost on me. An hour ago I promised to call my girlfriend, but I've been so caught up in the transcendent relevancy of this post that I've neglected to do so. Also, my dog might be hungry. I can't tell yet whether she's sleeping or dead.)

Collecting stuff can be fun. I used to collect comic books, and I still have a lot of the ones that my brother didn't steal and sell to fuel his numerous addictions (mostly bingo, sometimes cocaine). At least I can hold a comic book or a Golden State Warriors cap signed by the members of House of Pain and Cypress Hill. That shit's tangible. And while I'm aware that nowadays you can trade items online with friends, or sell them for actual money that you can use to buy shit such as Mars bars or shaving cream in the real world, virtual objects possess only abstract properties. (Maybe that's why I hate Monopoly and was never good at buying stocks.)

I prefer the truth. Like Russel Hammond, I want something real, something I can hold.

But when I grew up I realized that you can just buy trophies. Now I'm good at everything.


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