September 2020 archive

Nostalgia bop for the ages: Marvel Land.

This was another game that I grew up on, just as obscure as Kickle Cubicle. Although it came out for the Wii’s Virtual Console in Japan, it never came out over here in the United States… and I wish that it had, because I spent hours playing it as a young child, nearly obsessed with the carnival (or was it more of a festival?) theme that it had, trying as hard as I could to get as far as I could in the game in spite of the increasing difficulty. Without using any cheat codes, I could generally manage to get approximately midway through the game, which was ironic because my favorite “fairy” in the game was Sweetie, which was the last fairy in the game that you’re supposed to rescue — in the third world — and I also liked Princess Wondra, who you rescue at the very end of the game, which I could never get to without using our Gameshark. At some point I’d like to play this game as an adult and see if I can finish it. I know it’s difficult.

All of the games to play, so little time to play them!

Since we have a Nintendo Online subscription (I’m pretty sure that’s what you call “having paid for additional services”, seeing as how they are the cheapest of the three… add-on services, between Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony, and definitely worth it for what you can get), Bub and I have been playing Kirby’s Adventure, Super Mario Bros. 3, and Splatoon 2 online with people whenever we’ve had some additional time as a direct result of that. Reacquainting with games that I used to play as a child has been really fun, as has being able to show them to my own child… not to mention getting good at some of these games again in front of said child, much to his amusement and my own delight. As time goes on, I’d also like to introduce him to Dr. Mario, some of the Donkey Kong games, Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2, Wario’s Woods, and Yoshi. I may also introduce him to The Legend of Zelda since it’s also on here. There are also the old Super Nintendo games, and Kirby’s Dream Course, Kirby’s Dream Land 3, Kirby Super Star, Super Mario World, Yoshi’s Island, as well as one of the old Mario Kart games, and possibly another Zelda game that we can play together. These are a lot of additional games free with a subscription!

There’s also the fact that a Nintendo subscription is half the price of a Microsoft or Sony subscription now.

I don’t mind continuing to have a Nintendo subscription for this reason, because we have been utilizing ours.

One other thing that I don’t think people get.

I’d like to say that I’ve done a fairly good job setting out doing what I want to do, which is beginning to forget about the person that gave birth to me, raised me, and spent as long of a period in my life as she did. But when people ask me about forgiving her for what she did to my child (which I have written about in here for anyone who might be curious, and do not intend on rehashing since it has already been mentioned), or whether or not I have forgiven her yet for what she did to my child… a lot of people don’t ever seem to put themselves in Bub’s shoes, which was a point that I tried to make in my last post when I stated that I didn’t know if I could forgive her even if she had apologized to me for whatever reason before she had passed away. At the end of the day, it wasn’t really about me, although I could have — and did have — my own opinions on the matter, and ultimately came to the realization that even if she had apologized for what she did, I personally could not forgive her because I would never know under what circumstances she had apologized and would never really know if I could trust that apology. But as I think I’ve made clear, Bub is free to feel about her whatever he pleases. If he’s forgiven her, that is just fine with me. And it’s just fine with me if he hasn’t yet, or if he never does. Because all of this took place to, or with, him. All of this involved him.

Imagine being close to someone your entire life, loving and trusting this person, and then having this person’s behavior out of the blue push you away. Even if it had a distinct pathology, that still does not make it right, because she had periods of lucidity where she knew better and should have taken some kind of responsibility for her actions, and no one else wanted to help her take responsibility for them — if anything, they wanted to make every single excuse under the sun as to why she was “doing what she was doing”.

I don’t think Bub has forgiven her as much as he has more or less forgotten about her, and in time I aspire to completely forget about her as well. But I’m not going to give her the luxury of retaining good memories about her until that point comes, and we are at that point now. I no longer retain any good memories about her at all, and I am fine with that. In the interim, I don’t mind people knowing how she was before she died, though. I can give her the luxury of taking “a good death” away from her in the same sense that she took away from me the ability to make good memories of and spend peaceful time with her in the six months that led up to her own death. While I’m forgetting her, she should be remembered exactly as she chose to go out.

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