Trabia Garden

I can't remember if I've ever asked this before, but, if I have, it's probably high time I asked it again.

What mistakes, misconceptions and/or superstitions do you remember from playing videogames as a child? (Or, indeed, as an adult.)

For example, when my brother Joseph and I were kids, we'd often play Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on our Sega Master System II. Or, to be more precise, Joseph would play while I watched. I loved the Sonic games but couldn't play them myself; I couldn't handle being responsible for Sonic's life. I felt terrible watching Sonic the Hedgehog die and knowing it was my fault. (This is exactly why I can't play Supermassive games.)

The fourth stage of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is the Sky High Zone, Act 1. At one point, this stage features a hang glider you're supposed to ride across a chasm. You can use the directional buttons to tilt the hang glider up or down in order to control its descent.

We did not know you could manoeuvre the hang glider. The preceding zone, the Under Ground Zone, featured mine carts you couldn't control at all; they just took you wherever they wanted to go. We assumed the hang glider was the same. In our heads, you got on the hang glider and you were at the mercy of the winds.

Which meant we couldn't get across the chasm.

Every one of our playthroughs of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 went like this: we'd play through the Under Ground Zone, which took maybe ten minutes, and then we'd throw ourselves fruitlessly onto the hang glider and fall onto the spikes below until we ran out of lives, and then we'd have to start the whole game over again.

There were maybe two exciting moments when we accidentally made it to the other side and went on with the game, convinced that the winds had been kind to us. But it was very rare for us to see any of the rest of the game. Almost every one of our many playthroughs of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 ended four stages in, with the remaining seventeen stages hopelessly out of reach.

And yet we kept on replaying the start of the game, and we enjoyed it! Thinking back, I'm amazed by how patient we were.

(Part of our enjoyment came from our absolute obsession with all the game's weird glitches. We were convinced they pointed to secrets waiting to be discovered, rather than just being programming oddities.)

Speaking of bizarre levels of childhood patience, I'm still impressed by thirteen-year-old me's willingness to play through almost the entirety of Final Fantasy VIII just spamming GFs in every battle, because I didn't understand the junction system. 'You have very low stats and every attack takes thirty seconds' is an absolutely ludicrous way to play that game, but somehow I persevered. (I persevered because I was really attached to Squall.)

And, of course, there's the time General Caraway told the sniper team 'you'll take the shot at 20.00', and I obediently waited until I had twenty hours on the game clock and was then puzzled when nothing happened.

Tell me of your own gaming misconceptions; I'd love to hear about them!

More AI: The Somnium Files: nirvanA Initiative! I've just finished Gen's Somnium.

You never know whether this game is going to give you dick jokes or philosophical lectures. It's a real rollercoaster.


( Notes on AI: The Somnium Files: nirvanA Initiative. )


I wish real cooking just involved pressing the right sequence of buttons on a controller. I'm okay at that. I'm a disaster at cooking.

I tried to make soup a few days ago. The recipe said it took twenty minutes to make; it took me an hour and a half. I used a frying pan instead of a saucepan, I boiled it instead of simmering, and I think I burnt myself on a wooden spoon.

('I just burnt myself on something, but I don't know what it was. There are a lot of hot things around, but I don't think it was any of them,' I said, bewildered. My housemates laughed at me.)

'I apologise for everything that's happened here,' I said, serving the soup up. Seconds later: 'I forgot spoons.'

Puzzling autopilot malfunction recently: sitting on the loo, I took off my socks, neatly tucked one inside the other, and tossed them into the bathroom bin.

I think in my head I was changing my sanitary towel.


I watched Your Name for a third time, started crying approximately one second in, and was a sobbing mess over the closing credits. (Fortunately, I did most of my crying at the start and end; I was a little afraid at first that I'd just be bawling non-stop for the full two hours.)

It's my favourite film; I think it always will be. Nothing else has ever hit me in quite the same way. I've never wished for a sequel, or gone looking for fanfiction; it's absolutely self-contained and absolutely perfect.

I mentioned my passion for this film to my housemates afterwards.

Ginger: I've never seen Your Name.
Riona: Did we not watch it as a household?
Ginger: I don't think so. I remember we watched... er, it's not called Mambo No. 5.
(long pause)
Riona: I really want to know what you're thinking of.
(long pause)
Ginger: Big Hero 6.


Dontnod, the developers of Life Is Strange, have put out a trailer for a new game: Tell Me Why, due out in summer 2020.

It's another game about siblings! You're spoiling me, Dontnod! In fact, it's about identical twins, one of whom is trans, which seems like an interesting dynamic. Apparently it's the first ever trans protagonist from a major videogame developer.

It's a Microsoft exclusive, unfortunately. This is very much a Sony household, and I doubt my laptop has the power to run it. But Ginger's also intrigued by the concept and has a gaming laptop, so I'll probably end up watching them play.

(I can't believe the last instalment of Life Is Strange 2 is out in eighteen days. I'll never be ready. I'm far too invested in Sean and Daniel, and I really hope I can get a good ending for these boys.)


Coming back to the opening of this entry: if you have any stories of bizarre things you've caught yourself doing while your mind was elsewhere, I'd love to hear them!

Our cat Mabel has a habit of adopting soft toys and moving them around the flat. This means I recently turned around and found Rei's Banette lying on the floor of my bedroom.

Banette, if you're unfamiliar with this particular Pokémon, is canonically a cursed, murderous soft toy.

I was not very happy.


I worried at the start of Red Dead Redemption II that I wouldn't get along with this game. It's starting to click for me now, but it's not fun, if that makes sense. It's engaging and ambitious and immersive and beautiful, but it doesn't actually feel good to play. As a Wild West simulator, it does pretty well; as a game, it struggles.

Everything that isn't actual gameplay is great! It's very strange. I'm enjoying it, but I'm confused.

I love my horse dearly. At first, in the mission where you go to the stables and are forced to buy a horse, I went WAIT, WHAT, NO, I ALREADY HAVE A HORSE, DON'T FORCE ME TO - and then I inevitably fell in love with the horse I bought. Her name is Kay and she's a very good girl. Being able to stroke your horse at will is a great addition.

If I wanted to worry about keeping my videogame protagonists fed, though, I'd buy a Tamagotchi. And I wish there were a way to make Arthur hold on to the weapons you've equipped him with rather than shoving them enthusiastically into his saddlebag whenever he strays within two miles of his horse.

I'm also extremely bad at this game! At one point the police were looking for me and I tried to get away from the scene of my crime and rode Kay straight into a tree. I flew off my horse, my horse fell over, and the police came up and shot me while I was trying to recover.

I'm glad there are moments of humour. I think my favourite thing in the game so far is in the mission 'A Quiet Time', when you're gearing up for a bar fight and it immediately cuts to all of you dancing together. I also love that one of the missions is just shovelling manure.

I fuss over my horse a lot. I'll stroke her when I'm about to mount her or have just dismounted; I'll go to greet her in the morning when Arthur's just woken up. My housemates have started to express discomfort with the way Arthur coos over her and calls her a good girl. 'It sounds sexual.' I refuse to be deterred.

You can keep a handful of additional horses in the stables, so I still have my first horse, who's named Marcus after The 100's Kane. The other horse I have in the stable is Lady, an American Standardbred. I saw a guy trying to get a stone out of his horse's hoof on the side of the road, and the horse kicked him to death, and I went 'hey, free horse, I'm sure I absolutely will not regret this.' She kicked me a couple of times as well, but we're friends now.


On a different note entirely: today I tried to find out some information about newts and learnt they're a type of salamander and went 'wait, what' because somehow I have gone three decades believing that salamanders are fictional.

I DIDN'T KNOW WATERLOO IN LONDON WAS NAMED AFTER THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO. For my entire life I've thought the Battle of Waterloo was fought in London! I'm so embarrassed.

(I told my dad this. He asked if he could get a refund from my school.)


Just finished a replay of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag (it seemed necessary after Pirates of the Caribbean) and got tearful all over again at the ending. Of all the Assassin's Creed games, I think Black Flag has the story I get most invested in, perhaps because it's so small-scale and personal. The focus is very much on Edward and all that he learns and all that he loses, rather than on the Assassin-Templar conflict.

This is why Black Flag is one of my favourite games in the series, even though two thirds of the missions are terrible. Tailing isn't fun! Eavesdropping is a nightmare! Naval combat is - well, actually I enjoyed the sailing bits a lot more on this playthrough than I did on my first. Which is good, and not just on the revelatory 'videogames are better when you enjoy playing them' level; it was difficult to get into Edward Kenway's mindset when he was so at home on the water and I was so miserable. But there's no excuse for the missions where you have to tail in the ship.

Edward/Kidd is still the best pairing. Amazing discovery on this replay: in the opening cutscene of an early mission ('A Single Madman'), Kidd pats Edward on the arse. I want them to have so much sex where Edward's painfully in love and Kidd's just going 'need some stress relief; I suppose you'll do.'

On this replay, I really got the sense that Anne Bonny could have been Edward's second wife if things had gone slightly differently, although there would always have been the strange underlying sadness of their shared loss. It's an intriguing thought, but in that universe we'd never have had Haytham and the horrible but fascinating Haytham-and-Connor relationship, and that would have been a tragedy.


Here's something that's been bothering me. In the original Pokémon games, Professor Oak shows up to congratulate your rival on becoming the Pokémon Champion. On finding out that you've beaten him, though, he scolds your rival: 'I'm disappointed! I came when I heard you beat the Elite Four! But, when I got here, you had already lost!'

Isn't that a bit harsh? However briefly, your grandson was the best Pokémon trainer in the country. Most people are never going to achieve those heights! Give him a bit of recognition, Oak, for goodness' sake.

Oh, my goodness, browntroutblues recorded a podfic of Behind the Curtain, my Glee Kurt/Blaine horror fic! And the recording is perfect. I'm absolutely thrilled. If you like the fic, please do listen and then tell her how great she is. (She is really great!)


In other news, I finished Portal 2 today, and I don't think the ending could have been any more satisfying had it offered me actual real-life cake. What a great game.


( Spoilers for the ending of Portal 2. )


I was actually stuck for ages in a late-game chamber because I had forgotten that I could go through portals. I was just thinking about portals in terms of sending other things through them. That's fine, self; who can be expected to remember that you can go through those things? It's only the entire premise of the game.

I appear to have been sorted into Hufflepuff on Pottermore.

Whoops!

Oh, I so wanted to be in Ravenclaw. I really did. But the first question on my Sorting quiz was 'How would you like history to remember you?', and two of the options were 'the Wise' and 'the Good', and I sat there and thought, 'I want to be in Ravenclaw,' and then I thought, '...but I would rather be "the Good".'

And honesty is itself a Hufflepuff trait, so I suppose choosing that option makes me doubly Hufflepuff.

Hufflepuff is a very fine house, and it would have been my second choice, and its badger mascot on Pottermore is completely adorable. But people do tend to underestimate Hufflepuffs, and having my intelligence underestimated is something that I really, really hate. If I actually did attend Hogwarts, the attitude displayed towards Hufflepuff would drive me absolutely mad. (Also, I feel Ravenclaw fits me more closely because it represents not only my good qualities but the really annoying things about me. The really annoying things are a significant aspect of my personality, Sorting Hat!)

In any case, here are some amazing fictional characters who would probably be in Hufflepuff: Fluttershy, Applejack, Zell Dincht (he'll try to pretend he's in Gryffindor; don't listen), Laguna Loire, Sazh Katzroy, Snow Villiers, Blaine Anderson (the fandom tends to put him in Gryffindor because his actor also portrayed Harry Potter, but I don't think Blaine is a Gryffindor at all), Ty Lee, Zuko (he gets very touchy about this; don't mention it to him), Rory Williams, Mickey Smith, Fernando Sucre, Dean Winchester, Maes Hughes, Allison Cameron (borderline Slytherin in later seasons), Dr John 'JD' Dorian, Karen Fisher, Annie Sawyer, Guinevere of Merlin. Yuna of Final Fantasy X, one of my favourite characters ever, is borderline Hufflepuff-Gryffindor, as is Bonnie MacFarlane. Dr Heinz Doofenshmirtz vehemently claims to have been a Slytherin, but his student records tell a very different story.


AND NOW MORE RED DEAD REDEMPTION, BECAUSE I CAN'T SHUT UP.

All right. As you may have gleaned by now, I love Red Dead Redemption. I love the world; I love Marston; I love Bonnie; I love my horse; I love the dialogue; I love faffing around in the magnificent wilderness for hours on end, doing nothing that advances the plot but having fun anyway.

There are some things I do not love about this game, however, and I shall now convey one of these to you in poetic form.


Ode to the Wildlife of Red Dead Redemption

dear cougars
please stop killing my horse
you're awfully pretty and furry, of course
but I wish you would show just a hint of remorse
:( :( :(

I particularly hate the cougars because they've made New Austin scary for me. The game is so beautiful and I just want to ride for hours, but whenever I venture out of the cougar-free haven of Mexico I'm on edge because at any moment a cougar could come along to ruin my day. (When a cougar does kill my horse, I have to reload. I can't help it. By this point, I have become so attached to my Kentucky Saddler that I find myself greeting him with 'Hey, baby' as he approaches.)

You know when you hold a very strong opinion about something and, looking for reassurance that you're not alone, seek others who share that opinion? I became so frustrated with the cougars that I eventually decided to search on Google for others who hated them as much as I did. I think the phrase I chose for my search was 'fuck cougars' or 'fucking cougars'.

This, as you'll probably have guessed, turned out to be a mistake.

Maybe Pottermore was right; I'm really not a Ravenclaw.

Er! Apologies if any of you saw the entry that was here for a few seconds before I deleted it; I accidentally hit 'Enter' in the wrong place and posted my entire saved entry draft, which contains assorted unfinished fragments that may or may not become full entries in the future. What I actually intended to post was this.


Here is a story for you: there is a song called 'It Wasn't Me', sung by a man apparently named Shaggy. It contains the following line:

Picture this: we were both buck naked, banging on the bathroom floor.

For years - for years - I thought he meant that he and his ladyfriend were actually on their hands and knees next to each other, hitting the floor of the bathroom with their fists. I didn't quite know what they were trying to achieve with this, or indeed why they had deemed it necessary to discard their clothes prior to their floor-banging session, but that was what I envisioned whenever I heard the song.

The probably-intended interpretation didn't hit me until a month or so ago.

(If you have any musical-misinterpretation stories of your own, do share!)


Why do I want to write so much Kingdom Hearts fanfiction all of a sudden? I want to write about Sora and Riku and Kairi having adventures! I want to write Sora/Riku/Kairi! I want to write about Hayner and Seifer travelling through all of the Kingdom Hearts II worlds in their endeavour to make it back to Twilight Town and gradually coming to grudgingly respect each other! I want to write about Sora and Demyx being best friends! I want to write Leon/Tifa! THERE IS EVEN AN EXCEEDINGLY WRONG PART OF ME THAT WANTS TO PAIR RIKU UP WITH MICKEY MOUSE.

Unfortunately, I have been utterly unable to write anything lately.

Argh.

(In the case of Riku/Mickey, however, that's probably for the best.)


Finally: Donna Noble of Doctor Who is losing really quite badly to Zoe of Firefly in the second round of cidercupcakes' all-female character championship poll. I don't expect her to win (she's almost two hundred votes behind), and although I'm not a Firefly fan Zoe seems fairly cool, but I'd like to close the gap at least a little, because Donna Noble is one of my favourite characters ever.