[source: tanooki via destructoid]

Oh shit, Super Mario Galaxy 2 features 2D gameplay! WTF, awesome. Two-dimensional. The good old days. Before pubes and polygons and raging psychosis. There’s a certain simplicity to 2D gameplay that continually draws us back. You know you still love it. For all the perks and benefits of a zillion-polygons and bonerfying graphics, a little old school Mario still makes me a fucking happy clam.

What The Rock wants to know is what fresh hell is this?!*

*I’m having way too much fun reliving my childhood through wrestling experiences on Youtube these days.

I always thought it was some kind of bullshit that the douchebags at Midway replaced the actor who played Liu Kang in the first two Mortal Kombat games when they made MK3. I mean, who the fuck is this Eddie Wong? Dude, no offense, but get the fuck out of here. We all know that Ho Sung Pak is the Liu Kang. He’s the guy we bonded with! I mean, god damn! We went through two tournaments locked in mortal combat with this guy, and you just expect to waltz up and steal our hearts?

Forget all the retarded shit from Mortal Kombat 3 for a second. Forget Stryker, and Sindel and Nightwolf. The real fucking travesty was this jabroni trying to supplant our boy as Liu Kang.

It’s Saturday night and the gang of villains, molesters, and deviants that I call best friends are hanging out in my basement. Per usual our attention is divided between sparkly movements on the slab of plastic my consoles are hooked up to, and my computer. This is simply the way things have been, are, will be, as long as my friends and I hang out. One could only hope. Maybe someday there will be children and recitals and stoic boredom, but for now, our rituals are complete and typical.

It makes sense then, that I was showing my friend Bags the latest Diablo 3 videos that evening. For like my room, like our vulgarity and flatulence, Blizzard itself has become rote in our lives. It’s funny that I can say our lives, meaning my friends — all of them. You see, Bags doesn’t play Warcraft. Neither does my friend Jesse. Neither does Pepsibones.

But after listening to what has to be hundreds of hours of talk about raids, and dungeons, and Molten Core, and various bullshit going on in Vent while they were over, all my friends   have a working knowledge of the Blizzard universe. It has become ingrained, ritual, a part of our lives.

My girlfriend turns to me during the weeknight:

“Do you have to raid tonight?”

I remember explaining World of Warcraft and my uh…addiction to it when I first began dating Sam. I wasn’t aware of the extent of her nerdiness at the time. You see a beautiful blonde girl obsessed with fashion and you think one thing:

“I’m burying this lifestyle as deep as possible.”

I was living in the Warcraft closet. I mean, she knew that I played videogames. That was common hat. But as anyone who plays WoW seriously knows, WoW eschews being a video game and becomes a lifestyle.   Telling your new girlfriend you play videogames is one thing. Telling this to your girlfriend is another:

“Yeah, you see…On Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday…I sort of have to…like…every night I have to be online at 10 o’clock. Yeah. Like, I just have to be. I need to raid.”

“What’s raiding?”

“You see that’s a good question…”

And the conversation spirals from there. Luckily my girlfriend likes to get human amounts of sleep. You know, eight hours or some shit. I’ve heard about that. Sounds neat. I prefer going to bed at 1:30 am and waking up in time for class, whenever that may be. So it works out. She sleeps, and I continue the caffeine and sleep deprivation cycle that is ultimately going to kill me.

But now she gets it, now she knows. And now she asks me if I’m raiding on evenings.

As I said, it’s ingrained, it’s never ending. If you know me, it’ll infect you eventually.

Saturday evening again and we’re still peering over the videos. One of my best friends, Dave, walks over from the plastic slab where Madden is being played to the computer. We’ve moved on from the Diablo 3 videos. Now we’re watching the trailer for WoW: Cataclysm. The next expansion. The newest drug to snare us. It’s never ending.

Every couple of years Blizzard dangles new content in front of the junkies to get us excited, to keep us playing. New characters, continents, abilities, experiences. They know their clients well, they know how to keep us engaged. We’re watching the trailer and of course I’m losing my mind. It’s new WoW! Holy fucking shit!

Dave and I have been the comrades in Blizzard arms since 2000. Nine years now. We have spent a third of our lives plowing through hordes of demons. Dave’s the pusher, really. He got me into Diablo 2 back in the day, and the rest is history. I often tell the story of how my senior year of highschool was all Diablo 2 and Wendy’s.

For hundreds of hours during my senior year, Dave and I, parked across the city from one another, would play Diablo 2 until the wee hours of the morning. I remember with a nostalgic grin the only thing that could bring a stop to our gaming. One of us would inevitably say:

“Fuck, I’m hungry. Want to go to Wendy’s?”

But of course the trip to Wendy’s, the conversation at Wendy’s, the conversation from Wendy’s was all and only raving Diablo 2 madness. Holy shit mana leech ring blah blah Cow World blah blah Mephisto run.

And of course, the only logical conclusion is that we went back to our grinding on our computers immediately upon our return.

Dave, staring at the monitor, staring at Blizzard’s newest drug, rubs a palm against his eyes and says with a laugh:

“Fuck, I’m never going to be able to quit this game.”

But what would we do, if we quit the game? Or specifically, if we quit Blizzard? It sounds so pathetic when I type it, I’ll admit that. But to our defense we have full lives filled with nights with friends, madness at diners in the early mornings, I have tricked a girl into dating me. But there is this other side of us, punctuated by Blizzard. Always Blizzard.

You know you’ve been involved with Blizzard for too long when you can identify parts of your life by the product of theirs you were playing. It’s like asking your Dad what he was doing by asking him to talk about various seasons of his favorite sports team.”

“The 1982 Bruins? Oh yeah, I was…”

I can do the same thing with Blizzard. It freaks me out.

Diablo 2? Senior year.

Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction? Freshmen year of college, DT’s new album, Lord of the Rings.

WoW? We decided to play it during New Year’s Eve, 2004. I got it for my birthday.

WoW: The Burning Crusade? I spent the better part of it addicted to sleeping pills.

WoW: Wrath of the Lich King? The midnight release at Gamestop. Playing it until 3 am. Going to class the next day.

And so on, and so forth. It’s comforting and it’s ritualistic. I look forward to being able to associate future events with points in my life. Who knows what I’ll be doing when Diablo III hits? Finishing my Master’s Degree? What will I be playing when I have my first kid? Will I have to rearrange my honeymoon to fit the release of Galaxy of Starcraft or whatever they drop on us next?

Just kidding. I wouldn’t do that.

Wink.

There was a time when I was a pill-popping, unmedicated bipolar mess. I worked at a convenience station, was woefully unhappy, and spent my days locked in a relationship that was a dead-man walking. And when I try and remember a bright spot during those dismal days, I remember one thing.

Battlestar Galactica.

It’s pathetic to admit that my existence was kept afloat by a bunch of fictional characters gallivanting about a spaceship. But at the same time, we all need our escapes. What are the arts for, if not to use as a means to get away from the drudgery of our lives?

Books, movies, albums, television shows.

So when I say that I love Battlestar Galactica, I mean that I love it. I’ll never cop to it being some astounding piece of fiction. And there are enough threads and articles out there arguing over every minute detail; there are seas of forums swimming with the blood of fallen nerds. So I don’t’ need to write another article for you to read where I tell you how much the finale was amazing or sucked.

We’ve both been there.

Something more boring and personal.

I began watching Battlestar Galactica in 2006. And watching it. And watching it. I’d run through the series with one person. And then get another person addicted, so I could watch it with them. I’d run the show while I was cleaning my room. Or playing World of Warcraft.

I was working at a convenience store in 2006 when I fell in love with Battlestar Galactica. And being the new guy at work, I had to work Friday nights. I was twenty-three at the time, pulling shit pay. Selling lottery tickets and cigarettes to wash-outs and kids I went to high school with.

Being twenty-three and making shit money peddling habits sucked. Doing it on a Friday night while my friends and girlfriend were off elsewhere was even better. I take ownership for not being more proactive in finding a better job, of not improving my lot at the moment.

But I was down in a pretty shitty hole. Rolling out of bed after sleeping through class in time to work three until eleven was a bit of an accomplishment for me those days. And there’s only one thing I remember helping me out on those shitty Friday nights.

Billy Adama and his legion of lasers, robots, and pontificating.

I’d set up shop with my Macbook. Slap that bitch up on two milk crates, and I’d sit on another two facing them. Head resting on fist, fist driving elbow into my thigh. In my Macbook pro would be a random disc of Battlestar whirling.

As I had to stare at club skanks and orange dudes with blow-outs, Starbuck would be getting her ovaries harvested in some creepy Cylon den. As I had to sell some fat old fuck with thick-rimmed glasses five-hundred dollars worth of scratch tickets, Adama would be telling everyone they had jumped far beyond the red line.

The customers would come and go, and every time after they left I’d sit back down. And for a few moments, I was free. I didn’t have to focus on the shitty store, my shitty job, my fifteen-year in progress degree, anything.

It sounds like some rotten teenage drama when I type this. Maybe next I’ll date the football captain after tutoring him, right? But I’m just kicking it real here. If I can tell you how I like fingers in funny places, I can tell you my embarrassing crush on a bunch of pointless characters.

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