rock and roll strikes back (dot com)

Now that I’m replaying Final Fantasy VII, I’ve been reminded of playing this vid con as a kid. of all the really disturbing imagery the game presents (Jenova, the reactor in Nibelheim, the pervasive feeling that underneath the shiny 3-d graphics, things are just not right), the one thing that got to me the most were the WEAPONs.

For the two people in first-world countries have not actually played FFVII: at the end of the first disc, bad things go down that more or less activate the planet’s self-defense system. this entails a bunch of large, angry, Evangelion-inspired monsters (called WEAPONs; capitalization as found) to emerge from the earth and start tearing shit up. one of these is a large purple dragon called Ultimate Weapon. As a kid, Ultimate Weapon scared the shit out of me. One of the reasons being that like a lot of vid cons of the era, its graphics were painted with especially broad strokes, which makes a lot of old titles look a bit more menacing than they really are (see example: all those ridiculous haunted Majora’s Mask cartridge stories out there). The other being this extremely loud cry it gives whenever you initiate combat with it (which will happen quite a bit).

A couple of years ago, when FFVII was re-released on the Playstation Store, I downloaded and played it for old times’ sake. when I got to Ultimate Weapon, I reminded myself, “Oh yeah! Didn’t I used to be afraid of this guy? Let’s see how much of a dumb kid I was!”

One primal yell that is louder than any other sound effect present in Final Fantasy VII later…

“Holy shit, no wonder I was so terrified!”

I beat it, of course. I won’t lie, though; I did feel a bit of dryness in my throat. A bit of caution and trepidation over a fucking monster in a decade old vid con. It’s embarrassing to admit in hindsight, but we all have our problems, right?

Back in 2000, I had received the new WWF Smackdown (Smackdown 2) for Christmas. As the young, rabid wrestling fans my friends and I were, we had spent many hours creating absolute monstrosities in the Create a Wrestler mode and throwing said creations off of twenty foot ladders and fifteen foot high steel cages and fighting it out in the old WWF New York theme restaurant. We kept at it, despite the fact that the game really had no depth beyond “WHOA DUDE LOOK AT ALL THIS CRAZY SHIT YOU CAN DO IT’S TIGHT!” Then when the time finally came around to the Create a Pay Per View mode, I went in and put together the best card a trio of nutjob teenagers had ever seen.

Now, as a (debatable) creative adult nowadays, you might think I put all of my efforts into coming up with a witty or at the very least intimidating name for the event back then.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA no

I called it, “Asskick 2000.”

In my defense, this was eleven years ago. I would have been at the perfect age group to find something like this funny.