It Is Finished

At my house, we don't have a television, or internet. We're off the grid, just in case the robots come looking for me. Therefore, I don't play video games during the semester. I [SARCASM BEGINS] focus on school work [SARCASM ENDS] instead. This was the original purpose of the Pankration - to provide a video game binge after a semester in rehab. Thus, I spent months (literally, months) of deliberating which game I would play, oscillating between titles like Dragon Age: Origin and Fallout 3. Last week I sat down with my little brother in the fraternity, Tim Yopp, and asked his advice. After a solid half hour, we decided on Final Fantasy VIII, a RPG released in 1999 for the original PlayStation. I had to go back a decade to get the proper Pankration experience. That's why I'm the Laser Wolf (which I just decided is the title of the head of the Pankration. I'm shooting from the hip, but I think it will stick).

Final Fantasy VIII uses Roman numerals instead of Arabic characters to communicate that it is a very serious game. It uses four discs, and Tim told me it took him ninety (90) hours to beat the game. That's like four days. Without ever sleeping.

I fell asleep around 3:30. At that time, I had been playing for ten hours, and I had completed the first disk and turned off the console in order to put in the second. That was my mistake. I should never had given my body a chance to escape. Curse my flesh! It can't even play a video game for ninety hours!

I love Japanese stories. They are entirely too melodramatic; they always involve young people embroiled in strong emotions. There's always an unexplainable, spiritual element circulating. Some nights, I will go to Blockbuster without a specific movie in mind, just with the parameters that it must be anime, because I want to experience emotions so over the top that human actors couldn't pull them off.

Final Fantasy VIII is no different. It's everything I hoped for in my own life, but cannot have, because the leading scientists it the world still can't figure out how to make swords in the shape of eight foot long planks of wood.

My pledges all reported in yesterday. They all saw the sunrise; most fell asleep immediately afterwards, around 5:30. One, David, made it to 7:02 exactly. I'm not sure what's significant about that. I talked to Tim Yopp around lunchtime. He still hadn't slept. He was just starting his third game.