Last week, at the end of my blog, I asked you all to send me some of your gaming stories. Here are my favorites from the three of you who did this:

Dan Grabowski:

– I went to some other kid’s house in the neighborhood to hang out. He had Super Mario 2, and I had never played it before. I refused to stop playing, and the kid had to get his dad, who turned it off. I threw a temper tantrum, was kicked out, and never hung out with him again.

– I once found a battle mechanics guide for Final Fantasy Tactics and studied it to run a table top role playing game, complete with writing small programs to do the insanely complicated calculations for me.

Ben Verbeck:

– I went to a party at a family friend’s house when I was 7 and we set up a six player Wrestlemania (NES) tournament. After my first round win I went outside because my mother wanted to show me off. I went back inside to find that no one told me my match had started and the 13 year old I was playing in that round had beaten my character to a near pinfall. Being that I knew that game like the back of my hand, I was able to mount a comeback and won the whole tournament.

– I saved up money to buy a Sega Genesis and would play Sonic the Hedgehog so much that I would urinate in my trashcan instead of going across the hall to pee in a toilet like a normal human.

Mark Ciemcioch:

– One of the most deeply ingrained childhood memories I have is finishing the Sunday paper route with my buddy, coming back to my house and playing Zelda/Zelda 2 for hours on end. We never got past the second dungeon on Zelda 2. 20 years later I finally beat that damn game on the Wii Virtual Console. It wasn’t the greatest moment in my life, but it’s probably top 10.

The rest of you can go to hell. After you read some more of my stories, of course:

– In first grade, one of our assignments was to write a journal entry every day. Our teacher said they could be about whatever we wanted, so I wrote about all of the awesome Neo Geo games that I fell in love with on my last trip to Putt Putt. After I wrote my fifth entry, which was about the classic beat-em-up Robo Army, which children of the ’90s might remember as one of the more frequently played Video Challenge games on Nick Arcade, my teacher gave me a C+ and demanded that I write about something else. I cried.

– The first time I beat The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, I stood up and saluted the television for the duration of the ending, because that’s what you do when you save a kingdom.

– My cousins and I used to love the EA Sports NHL games for Super Nintendo. We had our own scoring system: most body checks wins, bonus points for penalties. Goals are for geeks.

– I almost got beat up by a 20-year-old at Putt Putt on my 10^th birthday. I was playing Tekken 2 with my cousin and the 20-year-old put two tokens on the machine, which I now know means, “I challenge the winner of this fight,” but which I then thought meant, “Here are two tokens! Happy birthday!” I took the tokens and gave them to my cousin because he was out of money and wanted to play another game. The 20-year-old noticed they were gone and got into my face and screamed, “WHERE ARE MY FUCKIN’ TOKENS!” I gave him two of mine and ran away.

– A friend once told me that he paused a game of Tekken 2 so he could masturbate to Nina Williams. I made fun of him even though I had done the exact same thing.

– The only first-person shooter I’ve beaten without using cheat codes is Chex Quest.

– A friend of mine once borrowed my copy of NFL Gameday ’99 and wouldn’t give it back no matter how many times I asked him. One day, I called him about 10 times. He stopped picking up after the 3^rd call, so I started leaving him threatening voice mails. Since that didn’t seem to be working, I rode my bike down to his house and banged on the door and screamed for about 45 straight minutes, at which point a neighbor threatened to call the police. He let me in, I took back my game, and I rode home. I never played the game again.

– I used to play an AOL role-playing game called Black Bayou, or, as I like to call it now, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Vampire: The Masquerade! The game was mainly played in a chat room called The Symposium, which was a “nightclub” where wiccans, psychics, vampires, werewolves, and other assorted creatures of the night supped upon the succulent teat of Lady Absinthe, danced like the dead dance to Dead Can Dance, and talked like living Sylvia Plath poems. (Herr God. Herr Lucifer. Beware. Beware. Out of the bed I rise with my matted hair and I eat Doritos like air.) My first character was a wiccan biker named John Lockhart, who got seduced, murdered, and literally ground up into dog food by a lady vampire named Brenna Miakoda about a week after I created him. My second character was another wiccan biker named Robert Joseph Stelanio, who died after I got bored and decided to role-play him as a bumbling oaf with an inner ear disorder who constantly tripped over his own feet and bumped into high-level characters and spilled their drinks and what not. One of these high-level characters got sick of Robert’s buffoonery and punched him in the face until he died on the floor of the bar. Then I stopped playing. And yes, I am ashamed that I remember all of that in such detail.

– In my senior year of high school, my friends and I went to the movies every Friday night no matter what garbage was playing. The only week we didn’t go was the week we found my friend’s Genesis in his basement. We planed on playing NBA Jam: Tournament Edition for an hour, then going the movie. Six hours later, we realized that we missed every single show time and the theater was closed. So we played some more.

– I put a PS3 on our wedding registry. Some of my in-laws disapproved (disapproving of things is how they exhale, but that’s a whole other thing), but my wife said it was OK, so on it went. I didn’t technically get it as a wedding gift, but we returned a bunch of stuff to Target after our honeymoon and I used the store credit to buy it along with Portal 2 and Batman: Arkham Asylum, so the in-laws pretty much bought it for me anyway, so HA FUCKING HA.

– When I first heard about Pandora Bracelets, I assumed they were an accessory in a God of War game.

– Even though I don’t even like the Elder Scrolls games because elves and orcs can Scour my Shire, when people refer to Skyrim as “that new Oblivion game,” it takes every ounce of my mental fortitude not to go on an hour long rant about how Oblivion was the fourth game in a series that dates all the way back to MS-DOS (the first game was on floppy discs, for Akatosh’s sake), and how gaming didn’t start with the XBox 360 so you should learn your goddamn history or shut the fuck up, and how I didn’t like you anyway, so go ahead and walk away, see if I care.

– Elite Beat Agents made me kind of like the song “Sk8er Boi.”

– Most comics want to be Richard Pryor, George Carlin, or Bill Hicks when they grow up. I want to be Erik Wolpaw, Chet Falziek, or Jay Pinkerton. They wrote Portal 2. Yes, they wrote countless other hilarious video games and internet things, but Portal 2 is the only one that needs to be mentioned here because it’s fucking Portal 2. Seriously, as much as I love stand up, if someone hired me to write funny stuff for video games, I’d leave the stage faster than you can say, “Have you seen this, people?” I have my last performance all planned out. I’d do a regular set, but in the middle of it I’d get a phone call. I’d put the phone on speaker and hold it up to the microphone and be all like, “Uh, hello?” and the guy on the phone would be like, “Hey! We want you to write funny stuff for our video game!” and I’d be all like, “WHAAAAAAAAAAAT?” and my dick would explode. (Not really. I’d have a blood squib rigged up in my crotch that would blow up and create the illusion of my dick exploding. But then again, if the squib was rigged up incorrectly, my dick could literally explode, which would make this next part a lot more realistic than I intended.) Then I would “die” (remove the scare quotes if my dick actually does explode) and a guy cosplaying as Valtiel from Silent Hill 3 would drag my body off stage to impregnate me with his dark god or whatever it is he does. It’s gonna be awesome (again, not so much if my dick really explodes).

Featuring:

Kyle Turner

Jamie Travale

Tyrone Maclin

Josh Potter

and your host Tony Rizzo

Stay tuned for any additions to the already fantastic lineup.

$10 cover that includes one drink.

A variety of appetizers will be available also.

Check out @OComedyBuffalo on Twitter for chances to win free drinks and other interesting prizes.

Space is limited, so call ahead to reserve your spot! 716.877.8788

A Los Angeles based sketch comedy troupe featuring Lisa Best, Andrew Duvall, Greg Kashmanian, Paul Laier, Heidi Lux, Clint Orr, and Harry Valentine.

Pineapple Monarchy
pineapplemonarchy@gmail.com
@pinemon
facebook.com/pineapplemonarchy

Pineapple Monarchy is:

Clint Orr
Harry Valentine
Lisa Best
Andrew Duvall
Heidi Lux-Gillion
Greg Kashmanian

People hate fat people. Not all people, but a whole bunch of them. We fat folks know this. You may think you are putting on a face of fake happiness. Instead, I just want to smash your face. Yeah, I’m talking to you, tiny fuck with a beard at GNC when I was in there asking questions. I saw it written all over your face. Here is how the conversation went.
Rick: Hey, how’s it going man. I was wondering if you guys carried Raspberry Ketone? I heard a lot about it.
Fuckface: Yeah, it’s right here(Hands me bottle) It’s 30 bucks though, just so you know.
Rick: Oh, right on. It says this capsule has 100 MG per. The one at Feel-Rite has 300. Is there a difference?
Fuckface: Well, it was only tested on like lab rats, so I have no idea. Dr Oz said 100, so your call.
Rick: I’ll shop around more. Thanks for your help….
And Scene.
This is how it actually went down. Doesn’t seem too bad. If you are just reading it. However, with body language and eye contact, this is how it went down.
Rick: Hey, how’s it going man. I was wondering if you guys carried Raspberry Ketone? I heard a lot about it.
Fuckface: Yuck. You nasty fat fuck. What are you doing in this store. We don’t sell cheeseburgers. I bet you saw this on Dr Oz, and now you think it will make all of your tits go away at once, without ever going into a gym. Typical fucking pig.
Rick: Oh you pretentious ******* (Insert any word that might offend you). I go to the gym, but I heard this stuff can boost your metabolism. And yeah, I may have heard it on Dr Oz, but fuck you.
Fuckface: Yeah, here it is fats. It’s 30 bucks though. Bet you can’t wait to pour your money out for this. Maybe if I make it seem way too expensive you’ll take your smelly fat self out of here now, and let me get back to listening to Wilco.
Rick: God Damn you and everything you stand for. I want to take you by the beard, and fuck your eye out. I want to take you to your parents house in the well landscaped suburbs, and beat the shit out of you in front of them. I’m better than you no matter how fat I ever am, because I’m not 34 years old working in RETAIL. You fucking failure of a human being. I bet you tell your friends you are a manager. It’s basically a fucking kiosk with tons of protein powder. Eat shit you 5’5 poor excuse of a douchbag. You look like the only thing you ever did well was run Cross Country in school. And we all know running Cross Country was just training to dance without a shirt in a gay bar.
And Scene.
This shit gets old. I want to go back to that place when I am thin. Act all Pretty Woman on him. “Big Mistake”.
Fucker.

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This weeks show includes:

Adam Hernandez
Chris Gullo
Travis Worth
Grant Fletcher
Aaron Zak
Jamie Bono
Josh Potter
Kyle Turner
Patrick Higgins
Mark Walton

Doin’ Time Tuesdays at Nietzsche’s
248 Allen Street
Buffalo
8pm
$5

Thursday May 17th

Broadway Joe’s-Main Street-Buffalo

Lamont Bellsarios (Headliner)
Tyrone Maclin
Brandon Trusso
Matt Nowak
Russell P
Jacob Nietopski
Heather Stack
Mike Deitz
Joe Agen
Colin Stewart

$.35 cent wings, $6 Pitchers of beer. $5 cover. starts 10pm

Doin’ Time comedy is partnering with Canvas 1206 to bring you a new open mic room.

Walk up sign up style, ALL AGES welcome.
Folks wishing to perform should show up at 7:30 to sign up.

Drink Specials! Amazing Food Menu!

EVERY MONDAY NIGHT!
NO COVER!

EXCLAMATION POINT!

Hosted By Jamie Bono and Kristen Becker

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When I subscribed to Nintendo Power magazine in the mid-’90s, they had a sidebar in the letters section called something like “Hardcore Stories,” where deranged gamers would tell tales of how they elbowed an 8-year-old in the chest to snag the last copy of Super Mario Bros. 2, or how they got so pissed off while playing Super Dodge Ball that they threw the controller at the system hard enough to crack the cartridge but the thing still kept working because Super Nintendo stuff was made out of ultra-strength unbreakablanium.

I never sent in any stories, so consider this blog my way of making up for it. And not all of these stories are “hardcore,” per se, but they’re all true, and what’s more hardcore than that? (Aside from porn. Or ECW. You know what? Let’s just move on.)

– I used to send 15 to 20 Christmas lists to Santa every year because, for some reason, I had gotten it into my head that I could only ask for three games at a time, and I could never decide which three games I wanted, so I’d make an addendum to my Christmas list every time I changed my mind. And these lists weren’t just me neatly writing down the names of the games I wanted. I would draw the logos of the games I wanted with as much exactitude as a little kid who’s pretty crappy at drawing could muster.

– If you asked most gamers my age what their favorite Nintendo game was, they’d probably say something like Super Mario Bros. 3, or The Legend of Zelda, or StarTropics if they were feeling indie. But if you asked me, I’d have to admit that my favorite Nintendo game was American Gladiators.

– The intro music to Mega Man 2 for the NES makes me tear up. I never played this game as a child. I’m just lame.

– My dad had to show me how to get to the first dungeon in the in the Dark World in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. You have to go through a hedge maze and talk to a monkey named Kiki so he can push the switch that opens the door. My dad had to talk me through all of that. My dad had to show me. I still haven’t quite gotten over it.

– When I was 10, I ran up a $600 phone bill calling the Nintendo Power Line, a number that you could call to get game advice from certified Nintendo “game counselors” for the not-so-low price of $600 divided by however many minutes I spent on that thing. Most of the time, I’d call for tips on games that I didn’t even own just to imagine what playing them might be like. This was before I had the internet, so I like to think I was just really fucking stupid and not irrevocably brain damaged.

– I didn’t just read game magazines. I studied them. I would stare at each page for no less than 10 minutes at a time and then feel a pang of guilt when I had to move on to the next one because I didn’t feel like I’d completely absorbed all of the information from the last one. I would read them over and over again until the pages fell out, then I’d stick the pages back in and read them more. I’d do this for an entire month, every single day, until the next bunch of magazines came out, and then I’d obsess over the new ones in the exact same way. (My wife thinks I have some form of mild autism or OCD that’s never been diagnosed. It’s hard to argue with her.)

– I once pretended I was sick when my friend asked me if I wanted to go out and play because I wanted to keep playing Illusion of Gaia. It didn’t matter that I’d already played it for three hours that day, I was at a really good part in the game and I was going to play until my eyes shriveled up into little eye-flavored raisins (eye-flaisins!), vitamin D and human companionship be damned! Of course, knowing this friend, if we did hang out we probably would have just gone over to his house and sat in the dark playing Sonic the Hedgehog until his mom kicked us out for swearing at his little sister, so whatever.

– Once, when my dad took me to the video store to rent a game, he suggested that we get Mortal Kombat II. He actually pointed to the box and said, “I heard this game is pretty cool. How about that one?” Most kids would have grabbed that game, pedaled home as fast as they could, and hunkered down for a fun-filled weekend of decapitation and evisceration. But I was an obsessive rule follower when I was a kid and I was terrified of getting into any kind of trouble. So I panicked. I couldn’t play this game in front of my dad! It has BLOOD in it! If he sees how bloody it is, he’ll ban me from playing video games FOREVER! Never mind that my dad had never explicitly set down a rule against me playing violent video games. I just assumed there was a rule because he never told me that there wasn’t one. So I pointed to the age rating in the corner of the box and yelled, “NO! IT SAYS I CAN’T PLAY THAT UNTIL I’M 17!” and rented Super Bowling for the 20^th time.

– The only reason I hung out with the kids next door was because they had a Genesis with Mortal Kombat 3.

– The only reason I ever went to the skating parties that my school threw for us at Rainbow Rink was to play Samurai Shodown on the Neo-Geo.

– I once played the Super Nintendo version of Street Fighter Alpha 2 for so long that I got a blister on my thumb that was roughly the size, shape, and texture of a fully ripened white grape. I lanced the blister with a sewing needle, drained the fluid into the bathroom sink, put a bandage on my thumb, and continued to play for several more hours.

– When I first got my Playstation, I didn’t have a memory card, so one day I played Tekken 2 for 12 straight hours so that I could unlock every secret character and see all of their endings (side confession: I used to care about the stories of fighting games.). I got a memory card the next day and played the game for another 12 straight hours because losing all of the content that I worked so hard to unlock made me uncomfortable.

– I was an active soldier in the Playstation army during in the 32/64-bit era Console Wars. For you normals out there, the Console Wars are pretty much the video game version of jingoism, i.e., my console is the best because it’s mine and the rest of ‘em might as well be fucking French. (It’s exactly as stupid as it sounds.) I used to hang out on an AOL-only video game site called Antagonist, Inc., and we PSXers would attack our mortal enemies, the N64ers, by invading their chat rooms and making them unusable by spamming them with things like giant middle fingers made entirely of zeroes or endless repetitions of NINTENDO SUXTY-FOUR. They would then retaliate by doing the exact same thing to us, which would cause us to retaliate, and so on and so forth. (Like I said, it’s exactly as stupid as it sounds.)

– I used to want to learn Japanese just so I could experience anime and role-playing games in their purest form, untouched by greasy gaijin hands.

– The only role-playing game I’ve ever actually finished is Final Fantasy VII.

– I once went camping with a couple of friends at a campground that had a power supply. We brought a TV and a Playstation with Syphon Filter and Doom. It was the best camping trip ever.

– Anti-video game crusaders could have used my cousins and I as a perfect example of how video games cause violent behavior in young people. Whether we were playing something violent like Tekken, something neutral like Gran Turismo, or something sunny and bubbly like PaRappa the Rapper, someone would inevitably get punched, kicked, bitten, choked, gas pedaled (this is when you lift a guy’s legs up in the air and grind his nuts under your foot until your uncle can’t take the screaming anymore and threatens to hit all of you with the buckle end of his belt), etc. It got so bad that my aunt forbid me from ever bringing that damn Playstation over to her house again. Of course, my cousins still had their Super Nintendo, so PROBLEM NOT SOLVED.

– When I say, “No, I don’t want to play Battlefield of Honor 3: Modern Black Ops with you. Multiplayer first-person shooters bore my bullet-riddled tits off,” please take it with an entire salt lick, because the first and only multiplayer first-person shooter I ever tried was Kingpin: Life of Crime, a PC game that came out in 1999 whose only notable features were some Cypress Hill songs on the soundtrack, “exit wounds,” which just means that they slapped some bullet hole textures on the fronts and backs of the people you slaughtered, and its exhaustive use of the word “fuck.” But seriously, I don’t want to play with you.

– During the second semester of my freshman year at Fredonia, I worked approximately 300 times harder on getting pirated arcade games to work on my laptop than I did on my schoolwork. I eventually got my shit together and passed with something like a 3.23 GPA, but I also had a nervous breakdown that took pills, counseling, and a total reevaluation of what I was doing with my life to get through. (Note: I may still be having this breakdown.)

– I once got so mad while playing Ninja Gaiden Black that I shoved my controller into my mouth and bit down as hard as I could. I almost broke several of my teeth and my jaw was sore for the whole rest of the day. I was 20 when I did this. Another confession: beating that game on Hard mode was more satisfying than graduating from college.

– I love the Fallout universe, but not so much that I’ve played any of the games for more than a few hours. The sheer amount of stuff there is to do overwhelms me and I just go, “Welp, never gonna finish this!” and quit playing forever. If someone could write a series of novels about the history of the game world, I’d totally buy them. I wouldn’t be able to read them after a while because I’d get the pages so sticky, but… yup.

– Now that I’ve got a full-time job, a comedy habit that I’m trying to turn into a full-time job, a wife, and other adulty stuff to take care of, I spend more time reading about games on my iPhone than I do actually playing them. But don’t cry for me, Mushroom Kingdom. Every once in a while, I still find time to shirk my responsibilities and stay up until 3:30 a.m. playing JUST ONE MORE LEVEL. I hope I can do it until I die.

Got slightly embarrassing gaming stories of your own?  Send them to eric.p.lingenfelter@gmail.com.  I want to post them in a future blog and also prove that people are reading these things all the way to the end.

347. This is wear I’m at. This means I have lost 13 pounds so far. I’m not trying to say anything with this. I want to be super happy. I can say I am pretty darn. I have been here before though. As self-defeatist as I am sounding, I am not. I am just trying to be as real as possible. Without being a braggart either. I don’t wanna be cliche, so I am not going to say that I am now starting my “Weight Loss Journey”. However, I do feel like I am maybe starting down that path. Yeah, that feels right. I just finally figured out how to get the latch up on the gate, and now I am starting down the path. Okay, enough with the cheesy self esteem ooze. On to the truth.
I hate the look of cheeseburgers. They call to me like sexy sirens. The drippy burger juice, the melty cheese. It’s horrible. Last night I wanted to fuck potato skins. This is truth. I wanted to eat them in front of kids that were starving, and then laugh. I wanted to eat fries. I was looking at the fries, and lusting. I was lusting over fries. I smelled chicken wings, and my mouth turned into a vicious whore. The point of this nonsense, is that I am an addict, living in a world of needles. I’m obsessed with eating garbage. I miss pizza. I’m Miss Pizza. However, I declined all of it. I had nothing. I fought the obsession. I didn’t eat anything bad. I’m the best. I have the most self control in the world. Nothing can stop me. I’m king of the world.
The beer tasted amazing though.

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