"Regina George," she said.
"Perf," I said.
So, yeah, I have a roommate, and her name is Regina George*, and I sorta maybe accidentally got her crazy into video games. She attacks everything in the LEGO series with a manic completionism that makes me proud. I also have this theory that if you cut all her hair off, she'd look like a British man.
Recently I bought a(nother) digital version of Super Metroid because Nintendo had it on sale on the Wii U e-shop for thirty cents. I mean, duh. And one day shortly thereafter, with no prompting from me whatsoever, I found Regina playing it.
"OMG I LOVE SUPER METROID," I said. My roommate is quite a bit less verbose than I am, so most of our conversations get a little one-sided.
"OMG IT'S SOME DEAD SCIENTISTS," I said. "OMG IT'S A METROID IN A TANK. WHAT'S GOING ON? CAN YOU PICK IT UP? WHAT'S THAT GLOWING EYEBALL DOING THERE? AAAHH IT'S RIDLEY HE KILLED YOUR PARENTS oh, by the way, you can jump and shoot at the same time."
"OMG LOOK IT'S PLANET ZEBES. OMG SPACE PIRATES."
Unfortunately, I had to work that day, but I continued my barrage via text, because I have a serious texting problem.
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| A one-sided text conversation where I rant about how great Super Metroid is |
Luckily for everyone, Regina George did want to watch me play Super Metroid. As of this writing, I just headed into Norfair to beat up Ridley. (Maridia is still the worst, am I right, bros?) Playing old timey games on the Wii U game pad is great, except that Super Metroid uses the select button pretty heavily, and it's kind of far away from everything else. I got used to it, though, and most games don't use select at all, so I don't see it being an issue for most people.
And playing Super Metroid again gave me an excuse to tell my roommate about this guy:
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| The y cant metroid crawl? guy. He's my boyfriend. We're dating. |
I'm not the type to whine about how games were so much harder back in the day, because most of that difficulty was artificial. As much fun as it is to talk about how back in my day we had to walk back to the castle to save and we were grateful we could save at all, updates like more save points are a good thing, because they make long, story-based, "hardcore" games more accessible to a wider variety of people. It's just funny watching people who are used to several-hours-long tutorials and insta-respawns go back and try to play games which, due to technical limitations, have a basic introductory premise of "I DUNNO, FIGURE IT OUT."
In any case, Regina had a good time dipping her toes into the lake of retro Metroid gaming, before she got stuck in a pit and gave up.
"Do you like Super Metroid?" I asked her.
"Umm, yeah, it's cool," she said. "If I had a SNES when I was younger, I probably would have played it a lot." Then she asked me if there were other old games available on the Wii U. To which I said:
"Check out my sexy Nintendo Virtual Arcade library. Pokémon Snap, anyone?"
*My roommate's name is not Regina George
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