THE SENGOKU SUPER-REVIEW EXTRAVAGANZA
originally posted on the selectbutton.net forums
CHAPTER 1
Bill and the New Devolutionary Army:
A Review of Sengoku
a game by SNK
by chris pinner
During my freshman year of college, I had two completely separate roommates, most likely due in no small part to my attending two completely different colleges. Bryan, my first roommate, was a drunken mechanical engineering student who repaired watches and asked me about nonexistent scenes in movies he owned when he was drunk on the sweet juices of the University of Dayton's Ghetto. He now owns a house and fixes anything he can get his hands on. The only time I have ever blacked out while drunk was on his front porch, and a certain cell phone (belonging to a guy named Alex who I have been friends with since we were both in the fifth grade) has a video of Mr. spraying me down with a hose when I vomited on his porch from imbibing the large majority of a bottle of Jagermeister that I cannot recall having started to drink.
The second roommate of my freshman year was a guy named Bill. I don't know Bill's last name; I never will. He will forever be simply Bill to me. Bill, the college student who looked like he was middle aged, had somewhat tan skin, a big bushy black mustache, those wire rimmed glasses that have the second bar across the nose at the top (not quite aviators, but somewhat suggesting that kind of frame). Bill never washed his laundry, and the way our room was laid out meant that getting to my bed consisted of jumping and/or climbing over the pile of Bill's dirty clothing that would remain ever-present just inside the door of our second floor room. Bill rarely washed himself, despite our room being across the hall from the best shower on campus (the water pressure being a perfect balance between so powerful that the dirt felt blasted off of your skin, but not powerful enough to hurt).
For spring break, Bill stayed in the room, not going home to visit his family. I went home, and spent the break playing video games with a bunch of friends from high school and pining over not seeing my girlfriend (yes, the same girl that finally dumped me this past September) for a week. When I arrived back in Columbus, Bill was nowhere to be found. For four days, nothing. NO one told me anything, and Bill never showed up. Even his closest friend, a guy who bore a striking physical resemblance to Beavis, didn't stop by to ask about him, and when I ran into him in the hall claimed ignorance. Finally, my RA stopped me walking in the hall, looking like he has something to say, but false starting a few too many times for it to be anything casual.
"Um, Bill is in the hospital right now. He tried to kill himself over Spring Break using your kitchen knife. The cops have the knife if you want it back."
Well shit. I didn't want it back. I didn't particularly want Bill back, per se, but not like I had much choice in the matter. When Bill moved back into the room, he seemed fine. Actually, he seemed highly medicated, the way a person on a lot of antidepressants seems simultaneously perfectly fine, and perfectly not present. And the rest of the year pretty much consisted of Bill and me not talking, and me occasionally spraying him down with Lysol when he was asleep.
Then he got drunk.
It was the weekend before Spring finals. Saturday night, he went out with Beavis and some other people, and I had my girlfriend over to spend the night, figuring Bill would be gone for the night. We both were well asleep when Bill and Beavis burst into the room at approximately 3 in the morning, punching, kicking, and choking each other until Bill was on the bed. Beavis was yelling at him to go to sleep, and at some point Bill gave up and agreed. At some time in this, my joystick (bought to play X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter and the Descent Freespace games) was broken. Bill passed out.
At approximately 6 a.m., Bill woke up, and being still quite intoxicated made a large amount of noise as he stumbled to the door to our room, opening it up and walking into the hall (the hall that constantly smelled like a public swimming pool, a clean one, yes, but a public swimming pool nonetheless), where he quickly proceeded to vomit. He closed the door, and passed out again, only to repeat the performance at around 7 a.m., only without the whole making it to that hallway part of the equation. Upon his attempted return to the comforts of slumber, I decided to ask Bill if he planned to clean up the remnants of his expedition which were currently spreading across the linoleum floor of our room.
"Maybe" was heard from his mouth as the body attached to it made a rapid descent into sleep.
OK, so I ended up getting an RA to yell at Bill until he mopped it all up. The whole time he kept saying rather loudly with a giant grin on his face "You only get drunk your first time once!"
Bill gave me 25 bucks for the joystick. Being in college, I blew this money on something completely different, probably another video game or something. The moral of this whole story is that a broken joystick sucks.
Sengoku didn't have a broken joystick, per se, just the usual first player stick being a little too loose. I wouldn't have noticed, except that I never was able to establish if there was a dash in the game. This doesn't matter to the game. There are more pressing issues.
Apparently it is based on the whole Nobunaga Oda thing. Mr. Apol explained all that. It really only barely applies to the game. What does apply is that the game is only going for about ten seconds before your character (who is either a man in a red thriller jacket and yellow pants with kneepads held on by the will of god alone or a gay cowboy) is warped off to a land somewhere above the modern city he started in, to fight some random enemies based on a strange interpretation of Japanese...umm...whatever.
The Gay Cowboy is important. He wears purple and baby blue. The third move in his combo is a capoeira kick. He might just be Soiree Meira for the Max Impact series. Does Falcoon have mad love for the Sengoku? If he does, he might be the only person in history to love it.
At some point, Thriller and the Gay Cowboy gain the ability to transform into anything from a ninja who only moves by cartwheels to a dog. They may also gain the ability to shoot fireballs, or wield a sword, or make blue dudes fly forth from their palms like so many projectiles. There really seems to be no logic to when these abilities are gained, though they roughly correspond to the collection of floating orbs of various colors. There is never any guide as to what these colors do, and the ones that give you swords can give you anything from two swords to a very phallic single blade. In the end, they will even give you a (PLEASE BECOME ILLITERATE IF YOU CARE ABOUT SENGOKU SPOILERS) seven donger, you know, the "Seven-Branched Sword" that seems to show up in any game where there might be a katana.
This end fight (YES THE SPOILERS ARE CONTINUING BECAUSE I DON'T GIVE A FUCK.) take place while Thriller and/or the Gay Cowboy use their mighty seven-dongers against Nobunaga. Interestingly, there was a game I played as a kid, though I had no understanding of it, called Nobunaga's Ambition. A friend of mine, Alex Parker (who is not the Alex who filmed my vomiting and subsequent being hosed down), used to take the game out of the Cleveland Public Library back when they loaned out games on 5.25 inch floppy disks that were breeding grounds for every computer virus that ever struck Cuyahoga County. He had one of those old Compaqs, when the name actually meant compact. Well, as compact as a computer the size and weight of a significant suitcase can be. We used to play it on that tiny monochrome screen and lose almost every time.
Up until I played Samurai Warriors a few years ago, and beheld with joy what China and 80's cock rock could do to Japanese history in gaming, I pronounced it 'Nobunga'. No typo. 'No BUN (as in hamburger bun) ga'. Fuck you, literacy.
For his birthday each year, Alex Parker used to rent an SNES and a bunch of games and we would play the shit out of them. Alex’s parents didn't really want him to own a game system aside from the Atari they already owned, but for some reason they had no problem throwing down some cash on renting him one for his birthday. I made him rent Final Fantasy 2. Because of that he fell in love with videogame soundtrack and last I heard was in Japan because of that love. That was some time in 2002. Lord only knows where he is now.
Alex Parker should play Sengoku.
Not for the soundtrack. I don't know if there is a soundtrack. I was too distracted by the strange combination of complete tedium with the mind-bending lack of anything approaching coherency to notice any sort of music being played. The fact that the left speaker kept falling off of the top of the Neo Geo cabinet I was playing on certainly had some influence over my ignorance of the soundtrack. The screams of boredom, terror, and bewilderment from my co-player and myself certainly had more of an influence.
I'm sure the Everclear screwdrivers didn't hurt either.
Oh shit, wait, there was totally a soundtrack. Yes, yes. Yes! YES! It was chanting, rhythmic, Japanese, poorly digitized. We turned it up loud, since the music was so quiet. It didn't add anything noticeable to the game, except an extra layer of bewilderment at the goings on, which are clearly taking place in some sort of future land, and would therefore seem to suggest there should at least be some sort of beats pounding behind all that chanting. Maybe there were.
I stopped writing this review there for a moment. By a moment, I meant like twenty-four hours or so. It is now four in the morning in Cleveland, Ohio and I should be sleeping, as sadly I will need to resume some sort of non-nocturnal schedule in the near-foreseeable future.
I like being nocturnal though. It tends to happen slowly to me at any time when there is no guiding force such as a job or school in my life. Currently, there are neither of these, but yet I still get a paycheck, and I am still in school. Higher education is wonderful like that. Cleveland is wonderful at these hours, especially in the winter. It is never darker in this city than at four in the morning in the depths of winter. My first regular experiences with this hour came from the NDA, NDA being short for New Devolutionary Army, or course.
The first time I went to band camp (fuck you and your American Pie snickers, you bastards. I was a nerd in high school and I am a nerd now, and this was pretty much my first experience with absolutely anyone at my freakish all dude overachiever high school, so it is fitting that something happened there) I met a dude named Nathan Jun. He was specific about being called Nathan. At a school full of all guys, nick names and last names were the usual for people, and he didn't particularly seem to like either of those in his case.
Because of this trend, lots of people didn't know I had a name besides Pinner. Many didn't know if it was a nickname or somehow my real name. A few friends, by the end of my junior year of high school, were surprised to find out my name is actually Chris.
Nathan was a giant antisocial mess. He somehow loved being in the band and hated almost everyone else in the band. He blasted Talking Heads and the first Ramones album over his little shitty boombox during our respites in the cabins from marching our asses off for the new band director. The band director won an award for dressing like a traffic signal.
Nathan loved Devo.
Now, to a quiet nerdy kid from the Cleveland Public School system who had spent the last eight years of his life being the smartest kid in the class and having the black eyes and broken noses to prove it, Nathan was perfect. So we became friends.
Nathan got kicked out of the band by the traffic signal. He had been singing "Loser" by Beck to the flag corps on the bus, except he replaced "kill" with "blow". When the traffic signal yelled at him to shut up, he yelled right back, sparing no expletive in the process. Though about half the percussion section would miss him, self included, he got the boot.
So I didn't get to hang out with him as much.
However, I did start hanging out with Ryan, pretty much because we were both nerds and wanted to go see They Might Be Giants on the Factory Showroom tour. Which we did. Cub was their opening band, being the ones who actually wrote the song "New York City" on the Factory showroom album. Cub was a three-piece girl band from Canada. One girl was some kind of Asian; the drummer looked like my grandfather, making the same silly face he always made when somebody took a picture of him, no matter how hard they tried to get him to make another one. It was a pretty good show. I lost the hearing in my left ear for a day and ended up spending the next day at home, "sick". Ryan went to school and fell asleep on the stairs while walking up to his fourth floor English class.
Somehow, Ryan and Nathan started hanging out.
At some point, Nick, Nathan's best bro from back in the days of like first grade came into the fold, and the New Devolutionary Army fell into place. Nathan had gotten Ryan and me into Devo, and Nick had been a Devo freak for years, and somehow our love for all things spud-like brought us together. I don't really know how it all worked. A bunch of other people were part of it too, roughly corresponding to the kid's in Stephen King's It.
I kinda wish I were kidding.
We got really good at Q-Zar, a particular brand of laser tag in Cleveland that turned out to be a lot more strategic than one would initially think, given the way the guns were designed. Basically through properly holding and aiming your gun in a way that violated no rules at all, one could effectively limit the areas in which one could be hit. It worked pretty well, and we played a shitload of laser tag.
The problem with this being that laser tag was located on the exact opposite side of town from myself. And I usually didn't want to come home and face down my mother and deal with all the problems of the divorce she was still struggling to accept after spending a night doing this.
Which is where Nick came in.
Nick's parents didn't give a shit who stayed at their place or how late we were out. We stayed at Nick's a lot, even if he gun dealing 'Nam vet dad did scare the shit out of us and at one point corner Ryan for 6 hours of documentaries about 'Nam that Ryan still tries to forget.
This all meant that we were out at all hours of the night, doing whatever we felt like. Sometimes it was talking in a Denny's (oddly enough, possibly the same Denny's that Ryan now manages). Sometimes it was putting an empty shopping cart up against the flat front bumper of Nick's car, accelerating up to about 30 miles an hour and then hitting the brakes, sending the cart careening off into one of those yellow concrete blocks that divide parking spaces, thus usually launching that cart up into the air.
Because of this, I saw 4 a.m. a lot in those days.
Paradoxically, I sleep best in the 4 a.m. darkness, yet I also enjoy seeing its existence, as if by witnessing it on a regular basis I am assuring myself that the NDA did happen, that Nathan and I did end up going our own separate ways and talking so rarely that we can only manage to barely catch up before losing contact again (but that that fact isn't so bad after all), that I was Ryan's best man, and that there is some cosmic order to the universe of northeastern Ohio.
There is no cosmic order to the universe of Sengoku. None. Someone may try to claim it, but they are wrong. When they tell you there is order to it, that there is some mytho-historical background behind it all that explains who the bad guy is and why he is fucking over Neo Tokyo, they are destroying what is beautiful. When you are sucked into Heaven just ten seconds after starting the game, can any explanation do anything more than take away that which is free and lovely?
The final fight is free and lovely. The seven dongers makes its first and final appearance, in the hands of the heroes. Random super evil bad dude who may be No-Bun-Ga is there and somehow you end up flying upward. There is no ground, though you move like you're on the ground. The background is a bunch of motion lines. Thriller and the Gay Cowboy swing their collective 14 phallic objects at the evil guy. I think he transforms. It doesn't matter. It is all formality at this point.
When he dies, there are credits. Correction: SNK credits. Lovely nicknames combine with wonderful Engrish. Oh, Butch! and Dirty-H Miyakami lead this rag tag band of game-ish rogues who obviously went into this with the best of intentions, and unfortunately somehow failed miserably. People may say that they got it right in Sengoku 2 and 3. I don't know that I ever want to find out. Free and lovely.
I take it back, Falcoon. I love Sengoku, too.
Wait. No I don’t.
Next: Page 2
1 2 3 4 5
originally posted on the selectbutton.net forums
CHAPTER 1
Bill and the New Devolutionary Army:
A Review of Sengoku
a game by SNK
by chris pinner
During my freshman year of college, I had two completely separate roommates, most likely due in no small part to my attending two completely different colleges. Bryan, my first roommate, was a drunken mechanical engineering student who repaired watches and asked me about nonexistent scenes in movies he owned when he was drunk on the sweet juices of the University of Dayton's Ghetto. He now owns a house and fixes anything he can get his hands on. The only time I have ever blacked out while drunk was on his front porch, and a certain cell phone (belonging to a guy named Alex who I have been friends with since we were both in the fifth grade) has a video of Mr. spraying me down with a hose when I vomited on his porch from imbibing the large majority of a bottle of Jagermeister that I cannot recall having started to drink.
The second roommate of my freshman year was a guy named Bill. I don't know Bill's last name; I never will. He will forever be simply Bill to me. Bill, the college student who looked like he was middle aged, had somewhat tan skin, a big bushy black mustache, those wire rimmed glasses that have the second bar across the nose at the top (not quite aviators, but somewhat suggesting that kind of frame). Bill never washed his laundry, and the way our room was laid out meant that getting to my bed consisted of jumping and/or climbing over the pile of Bill's dirty clothing that would remain ever-present just inside the door of our second floor room. Bill rarely washed himself, despite our room being across the hall from the best shower on campus (the water pressure being a perfect balance between so powerful that the dirt felt blasted off of your skin, but not powerful enough to hurt).
For spring break, Bill stayed in the room, not going home to visit his family. I went home, and spent the break playing video games with a bunch of friends from high school and pining over not seeing my girlfriend (yes, the same girl that finally dumped me this past September) for a week. When I arrived back in Columbus, Bill was nowhere to be found. For four days, nothing. NO one told me anything, and Bill never showed up. Even his closest friend, a guy who bore a striking physical resemblance to Beavis, didn't stop by to ask about him, and when I ran into him in the hall claimed ignorance. Finally, my RA stopped me walking in the hall, looking like he has something to say, but false starting a few too many times for it to be anything casual.
"Um, Bill is in the hospital right now. He tried to kill himself over Spring Break using your kitchen knife. The cops have the knife if you want it back."
Well shit. I didn't want it back. I didn't particularly want Bill back, per se, but not like I had much choice in the matter. When Bill moved back into the room, he seemed fine. Actually, he seemed highly medicated, the way a person on a lot of antidepressants seems simultaneously perfectly fine, and perfectly not present. And the rest of the year pretty much consisted of Bill and me not talking, and me occasionally spraying him down with Lysol when he was asleep.
Then he got drunk.
It was the weekend before Spring finals. Saturday night, he went out with Beavis and some other people, and I had my girlfriend over to spend the night, figuring Bill would be gone for the night. We both were well asleep when Bill and Beavis burst into the room at approximately 3 in the morning, punching, kicking, and choking each other until Bill was on the bed. Beavis was yelling at him to go to sleep, and at some point Bill gave up and agreed. At some time in this, my joystick (bought to play X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter and the Descent Freespace games) was broken. Bill passed out.
At approximately 6 a.m., Bill woke up, and being still quite intoxicated made a large amount of noise as he stumbled to the door to our room, opening it up and walking into the hall (the hall that constantly smelled like a public swimming pool, a clean one, yes, but a public swimming pool nonetheless), where he quickly proceeded to vomit. He closed the door, and passed out again, only to repeat the performance at around 7 a.m., only without the whole making it to that hallway part of the equation. Upon his attempted return to the comforts of slumber, I decided to ask Bill if he planned to clean up the remnants of his expedition which were currently spreading across the linoleum floor of our room.
"Maybe" was heard from his mouth as the body attached to it made a rapid descent into sleep.
OK, so I ended up getting an RA to yell at Bill until he mopped it all up. The whole time he kept saying rather loudly with a giant grin on his face "You only get drunk your first time once!"
Bill gave me 25 bucks for the joystick. Being in college, I blew this money on something completely different, probably another video game or something. The moral of this whole story is that a broken joystick sucks.
Sengoku didn't have a broken joystick, per se, just the usual first player stick being a little too loose. I wouldn't have noticed, except that I never was able to establish if there was a dash in the game. This doesn't matter to the game. There are more pressing issues.
Apparently it is based on the whole Nobunaga Oda thing. Mr. Apol explained all that. It really only barely applies to the game. What does apply is that the game is only going for about ten seconds before your character (who is either a man in a red thriller jacket and yellow pants with kneepads held on by the will of god alone or a gay cowboy) is warped off to a land somewhere above the modern city he started in, to fight some random enemies based on a strange interpretation of Japanese...umm...whatever.
The Gay Cowboy is important. He wears purple and baby blue. The third move in his combo is a capoeira kick. He might just be Soiree Meira for the Max Impact series. Does Falcoon have mad love for the Sengoku? If he does, he might be the only person in history to love it.
At some point, Thriller and the Gay Cowboy gain the ability to transform into anything from a ninja who only moves by cartwheels to a dog. They may also gain the ability to shoot fireballs, or wield a sword, or make blue dudes fly forth from their palms like so many projectiles. There really seems to be no logic to when these abilities are gained, though they roughly correspond to the collection of floating orbs of various colors. There is never any guide as to what these colors do, and the ones that give you swords can give you anything from two swords to a very phallic single blade. In the end, they will even give you a (PLEASE BECOME ILLITERATE IF YOU CARE ABOUT SENGOKU SPOILERS) seven donger, you know, the "Seven-Branched Sword" that seems to show up in any game where there might be a katana.
This end fight (YES THE SPOILERS ARE CONTINUING BECAUSE I DON'T GIVE A FUCK.) take place while Thriller and/or the Gay Cowboy use their mighty seven-dongers against Nobunaga. Interestingly, there was a game I played as a kid, though I had no understanding of it, called Nobunaga's Ambition. A friend of mine, Alex Parker (who is not the Alex who filmed my vomiting and subsequent being hosed down), used to take the game out of the Cleveland Public Library back when they loaned out games on 5.25 inch floppy disks that were breeding grounds for every computer virus that ever struck Cuyahoga County. He had one of those old Compaqs, when the name actually meant compact. Well, as compact as a computer the size and weight of a significant suitcase can be. We used to play it on that tiny monochrome screen and lose almost every time.
Up until I played Samurai Warriors a few years ago, and beheld with joy what China and 80's cock rock could do to Japanese history in gaming, I pronounced it 'Nobunga'. No typo. 'No BUN (as in hamburger bun) ga'. Fuck you, literacy.
For his birthday each year, Alex Parker used to rent an SNES and a bunch of games and we would play the shit out of them. Alex’s parents didn't really want him to own a game system aside from the Atari they already owned, but for some reason they had no problem throwing down some cash on renting him one for his birthday. I made him rent Final Fantasy 2. Because of that he fell in love with videogame soundtrack and last I heard was in Japan because of that love. That was some time in 2002. Lord only knows where he is now.
Alex Parker should play Sengoku.
Not for the soundtrack. I don't know if there is a soundtrack. I was too distracted by the strange combination of complete tedium with the mind-bending lack of anything approaching coherency to notice any sort of music being played. The fact that the left speaker kept falling off of the top of the Neo Geo cabinet I was playing on certainly had some influence over my ignorance of the soundtrack. The screams of boredom, terror, and bewilderment from my co-player and myself certainly had more of an influence.
I'm sure the Everclear screwdrivers didn't hurt either.
Oh shit, wait, there was totally a soundtrack. Yes, yes. Yes! YES! It was chanting, rhythmic, Japanese, poorly digitized. We turned it up loud, since the music was so quiet. It didn't add anything noticeable to the game, except an extra layer of bewilderment at the goings on, which are clearly taking place in some sort of future land, and would therefore seem to suggest there should at least be some sort of beats pounding behind all that chanting. Maybe there were.
I stopped writing this review there for a moment. By a moment, I meant like twenty-four hours or so. It is now four in the morning in Cleveland, Ohio and I should be sleeping, as sadly I will need to resume some sort of non-nocturnal schedule in the near-foreseeable future.
I like being nocturnal though. It tends to happen slowly to me at any time when there is no guiding force such as a job or school in my life. Currently, there are neither of these, but yet I still get a paycheck, and I am still in school. Higher education is wonderful like that. Cleveland is wonderful at these hours, especially in the winter. It is never darker in this city than at four in the morning in the depths of winter. My first regular experiences with this hour came from the NDA, NDA being short for New Devolutionary Army, or course.
The first time I went to band camp (fuck you and your American Pie snickers, you bastards. I was a nerd in high school and I am a nerd now, and this was pretty much my first experience with absolutely anyone at my freakish all dude overachiever high school, so it is fitting that something happened there) I met a dude named Nathan Jun. He was specific about being called Nathan. At a school full of all guys, nick names and last names were the usual for people, and he didn't particularly seem to like either of those in his case.
Because of this trend, lots of people didn't know I had a name besides Pinner. Many didn't know if it was a nickname or somehow my real name. A few friends, by the end of my junior year of high school, were surprised to find out my name is actually Chris.
Nathan was a giant antisocial mess. He somehow loved being in the band and hated almost everyone else in the band. He blasted Talking Heads and the first Ramones album over his little shitty boombox during our respites in the cabins from marching our asses off for the new band director. The band director won an award for dressing like a traffic signal.
Nathan loved Devo.
Now, to a quiet nerdy kid from the Cleveland Public School system who had spent the last eight years of his life being the smartest kid in the class and having the black eyes and broken noses to prove it, Nathan was perfect. So we became friends.
Nathan got kicked out of the band by the traffic signal. He had been singing "Loser" by Beck to the flag corps on the bus, except he replaced "kill" with "blow". When the traffic signal yelled at him to shut up, he yelled right back, sparing no expletive in the process. Though about half the percussion section would miss him, self included, he got the boot.
So I didn't get to hang out with him as much.
However, I did start hanging out with Ryan, pretty much because we were both nerds and wanted to go see They Might Be Giants on the Factory Showroom tour. Which we did. Cub was their opening band, being the ones who actually wrote the song "New York City" on the Factory showroom album. Cub was a three-piece girl band from Canada. One girl was some kind of Asian; the drummer looked like my grandfather, making the same silly face he always made when somebody took a picture of him, no matter how hard they tried to get him to make another one. It was a pretty good show. I lost the hearing in my left ear for a day and ended up spending the next day at home, "sick". Ryan went to school and fell asleep on the stairs while walking up to his fourth floor English class.
Somehow, Ryan and Nathan started hanging out.
At some point, Nick, Nathan's best bro from back in the days of like first grade came into the fold, and the New Devolutionary Army fell into place. Nathan had gotten Ryan and me into Devo, and Nick had been a Devo freak for years, and somehow our love for all things spud-like brought us together. I don't really know how it all worked. A bunch of other people were part of it too, roughly corresponding to the kid's in Stephen King's It.
I kinda wish I were kidding.
We got really good at Q-Zar, a particular brand of laser tag in Cleveland that turned out to be a lot more strategic than one would initially think, given the way the guns were designed. Basically through properly holding and aiming your gun in a way that violated no rules at all, one could effectively limit the areas in which one could be hit. It worked pretty well, and we played a shitload of laser tag.
The problem with this being that laser tag was located on the exact opposite side of town from myself. And I usually didn't want to come home and face down my mother and deal with all the problems of the divorce she was still struggling to accept after spending a night doing this.
Which is where Nick came in.
Nick's parents didn't give a shit who stayed at their place or how late we were out. We stayed at Nick's a lot, even if he gun dealing 'Nam vet dad did scare the shit out of us and at one point corner Ryan for 6 hours of documentaries about 'Nam that Ryan still tries to forget.
This all meant that we were out at all hours of the night, doing whatever we felt like. Sometimes it was talking in a Denny's (oddly enough, possibly the same Denny's that Ryan now manages). Sometimes it was putting an empty shopping cart up against the flat front bumper of Nick's car, accelerating up to about 30 miles an hour and then hitting the brakes, sending the cart careening off into one of those yellow concrete blocks that divide parking spaces, thus usually launching that cart up into the air.
Because of this, I saw 4 a.m. a lot in those days.
Paradoxically, I sleep best in the 4 a.m. darkness, yet I also enjoy seeing its existence, as if by witnessing it on a regular basis I am assuring myself that the NDA did happen, that Nathan and I did end up going our own separate ways and talking so rarely that we can only manage to barely catch up before losing contact again (but that that fact isn't so bad after all), that I was Ryan's best man, and that there is some cosmic order to the universe of northeastern Ohio.
There is no cosmic order to the universe of Sengoku. None. Someone may try to claim it, but they are wrong. When they tell you there is order to it, that there is some mytho-historical background behind it all that explains who the bad guy is and why he is fucking over Neo Tokyo, they are destroying what is beautiful. When you are sucked into Heaven just ten seconds after starting the game, can any explanation do anything more than take away that which is free and lovely?
The final fight is free and lovely. The seven dongers makes its first and final appearance, in the hands of the heroes. Random super evil bad dude who may be No-Bun-Ga is there and somehow you end up flying upward. There is no ground, though you move like you're on the ground. The background is a bunch of motion lines. Thriller and the Gay Cowboy swing their collective 14 phallic objects at the evil guy. I think he transforms. It doesn't matter. It is all formality at this point.
When he dies, there are credits. Correction: SNK credits. Lovely nicknames combine with wonderful Engrish. Oh, Butch! and Dirty-H Miyakami lead this rag tag band of game-ish rogues who obviously went into this with the best of intentions, and unfortunately somehow failed miserably. People may say that they got it right in Sengoku 2 and 3. I don't know that I ever want to find out. Free and lovely.
I take it back, Falcoon. I love Sengoku, too.
Wait. No I don’t.
Next: Page 2
1 2 3 4 5
