[insert witty title here]

Super Mario Galaxy and No More Heroes sit mostly untouched on my Wii.
I never did get past Devil Hunter difficulty in Devil May Cry 4 for my 360, nor do I really care to. My created wrestlers in Smackdown VS Raw 2009 lay still at skill level 37.
I’ve logged on City of Heroes about a whole three times the last month. Hellgate: London I never went online with, nor apparently will I ever be able to again. Phantasy Star Universe has never been reopened ever since I lost my save data. Unreal Tournament 3 was never played after the second day I had it, once I beat the campaign.

For the past couple week, I have been playing older and more obscure games religiously.
Guwange is exquisite, despite being so simple.
Alien Soldier is climax after climax, without ever growing old.
Splatterhouse 3 is a gruesome, if not unique, take on the beat-’em-up formula, and manages to attain horror without sacrificing action, or sacrificing action for horror.
World Heroes is a very underappreciated fighter series that had several very interesting ideas.

I’m not exactly what one would call a “retro gamer”, but I can’t deny the wonder that several ooooold games had, compared to much newer games. A lot of games now fall in the category of same old–look at shooters as of late, for example, which mostly have been an obscene sea of dull grey-brown space marine. Earlier shooters could have you as a rampaging oni that could shoot arrows for some undeveloped reason, or flinging strips of paper, or a wild west cowboy cow, or an extremely potent psychic shooting only mind bullets, or a half-naked ninja chick.
Man.
I’d kill to have shooter protagonists nowadays be even not human.

Modern-day games are certainly more technically proficient, more capable of doin’ stuffs, and can realize imaginations like nothing else. But…I dunno…just feels like they’ve lost their soul. All the simple, fun, shooty-uppy stuff has been sacrificed for warehouses in space against nazis, while escorting a yappy guy who calls in your ear as support and finding keys.
I mean, seriously. Some of the top sells in the shooter genre lately? Halo 3, Dead Space, Killzone 2? You couldn’t find a more bland and uninspired bunch if you tried, but I guess these guys do something right. Even though  it’s all THE FUTUREEEE with a faceless guy shooting up endless swarms of evil aliens and good god I could go on and on and on.

The past had a lot of imagination, that modern-day technology could really amplify.

To say that I’m a bit of a DnD novice is akin to saying that the sun is moderately warm.
There’s no tabletop gaming centers around here, none of my bookstores sell any of the books, few people around where I live are interested in gaming (much less tabletop gaming), I have no money to buy the fancy figurines and other strange stuff, and I go through Neverwinter Nights by picking Fighter/Barbarian and invoking deathening upon innocent kobolds just trying to get a meal for their starving wives and children.
The only experience I’ve had with DnD is the butt of so many jokes, the motivational posters talking about fat nerds staying up at 4 AM and desperately trying to score with that imaginary chick with his Charisma-specced Paladin while mapping out statistic after statistic to overcome Cthulhu. And let’s not even get into LARPing.

It seems a little anticlimatic that this would just burst in a simple conversation:
Friend: Hey, I found a strange RPG system. Wanna try it out with me?
Me: Sure.
And with that, it ended.

I’d like to say that “though the conversation ended, something else grand began” and talk about treks into “a whole new world”, but to make this out to be anything more than it is would be pretty pointless. It’s just tabletop gaming. Not even tabletop gaming on an actual table, but on the internet. On MSN Messenger. And the RPG system we’re using has us as generic anime maids.
Let me just reiterate that.
We’re bastardizing a pasttime constantly made fun of, not doing it on an actual table but rather on a clunky IM client with a word limit and giganterous names with fancy formatting that take up more space than half the posts, and we’re all grown men playing as Japanese cartoon maids stumbling around in comically over-the-top scenarios while going “ia, dame, yamete!” and “aishiteruuu desu ne~~” while serving a nonexistant master, who commands our every whim, and all of the scenarios are taken straight out of a page from a dime-store glorious nippon mahngah shop where the Sailor Moon and Dragonball Z cosplayers frequent.
Oh, and did I mention that your characters traits are randomly generated by dice rolls, and that you have as much of a chance of being a hermaphrodite princess of the Yakuza entering maid service to be a bride as you do of being a pro-wrestling mummy who watches over an army of demonic soldiers due to being the long-lost sister of the master who’s also in love with him?

And yet, I stayed up until 4:30 AM last night playing my pretend giggly maid with other grown men, in a practice we will do regularly from here on out, no doubt resulting in an inevitable avalanche of estrogen castrating our virtual dongs.
The thing is, all of us know this. The phrase “dumb, stupid fun” exists for a reason, and none of us are taking this seriously. Just the act of rolling up a character took two hours and had us in stitches, trying to find ways to logically and coherently piece it all together–as if logic and coherency had a place in Nipponland in the first place. I didn’t at all in any semblence know any of the people other than my friend, but I was swapping jokes and one-liners about the situations with them in absolutely no time. The GM threw the possibility of a dragon at us. One gamemate accidentally had an entire horde of goblins stripping in front of us.
And what did we do? We rolled the dice, played out the results, and stayed up way damn late awaiting with baited breath as to how each others’ fictional giggly maid would respond to a hot-blooded cooking duel.

We weren’t interested in the story. We weren’t interested in the overarching consequences of this. We just wanted to have dumb, stupid fun.
But I think what really brought it to life was the community. It was just three/four of us, sure, but it was still more than one person. Each sharing ideas and jokes and acting as a foil to another’s dramatic advances.

At the very least, I’ll need to study this more. There’s a goldmine of psychological study that can be done here, even if the dissection of story structure and how it pieces together from madlib basis may be a futile attempt that ends in madness.
Regardless, I’ll end this with a quote describing an asset of another person’s character:

“Her worst enemy is the hair on her own head, which may or may not be as intelligent as her, but is certainly far more malevolent. “