A Nice Guy: Difference between revisions
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So I snatched up the little tidbit and brought it on home. I was excited to play it. Admittedly, I was actually too young to have ever owned an SNES (I was around three when Earthbound first came out), but I had secured a fresh, well-weathered console from eBay. The game went in fine—I had to clean out the cartridge a tiny bit with rubbing alcohol, but otherwise, it booted perfectly.
It was really fun to play Earthbound on its original platform. I navigated Ness through his neighborhood to the meteor, watched Porky have his ass kicked by his parents, met Buzz-Buzz, defeated a Starman, and learned the true nature of my destiny. Though I had done it time and time again in emulators, it was still refreshing and fun. I wandered through the library, grinded for experience on a few spiteful crows, and upgraded my weapons and equipment. Everything functioned normally until my first encounter with a Shark, a member of the town's gang. I ran up to one of them and got myself into the whole
I paused, and stared at the screen. That certainly had never happened before. I ignored it, however, and clicked bash again.
When I had come out of the battle, there was a large crowd of NPCs surrounding me. I talked to one, a man wearing a fedora, who said,
The game continued pretty normally after that, but with random, eerie messages spliced into NPC dialogue here and there, like
Just as well, the complaints of pain and suffering dominated NPC conversation. In the Twoson Hospital, around thirty or forty NPCs were packed together, all saying similar things.
I don’t know what was happening, but I was beginning to get stressed out by the game. I’d have frequent headaches and backaches, or just general joint pain. I was beginning to have nightmares, but not the vivid kind—they were the kind you just wake up from, sweating profusely and feeling terrified, but not knowing why. And still I played the game. I knew there was something wrong, but I wanted someone to tell me what. I wanted someone to outline it for me. I just wanted an easy answer.
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I was wandering through Threed, still low in levels, and with no one else in my party, when an old man NPC came forward. He spoke without me initiating conversation, as if it were a cut scene.
My eyes widened. What was going on?
I stopped the game and ripped out the cartridge. I didn’t care about properly ejecting it—I just took it out and threw it at the wall. I was sweating. My face was contorted into rage. I grabbed a hammer from a nearby drawer and rushed the cartridge. However, I stopped when I saw the singe mark on its corner. What was I doing? I suddenly felt ridiculous. I dropped the hammer and put the game back on my shelf. I turned to look at the clock, and in the darkness, the green numbers read
That night was when I first heard the screams. They were distant, but blood curling. They echoed down corridors, and bounced off the walls of my room, making my hairs raise and my eyes widen. At first, I had tried to search them out, and find their origin, but everywhere I went, the screams were just as faint. Were they all in my head? There weren’t only screams either. I could also hear gunshots, and the tightening of ropes. I could feel wind flying by my face in my own room, wind that would accelerate rapidly and stop abruptly, and then repeat. And with every passing hour, the screams grew louder. They were depriving me of sleep. And anytime I did sleep, I had those night terrors. And the pains shooting through my body became even more intense.
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I eventually put the cartridge back into my SNES. I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t want to tell my friends, because I knew they’d think I was crazy. I probably am. The game and the NPCs felt like the only people who understood me. The old man had said he knew why I was experiencing the pain. So, I went back into the game, intending to search him out. I didn’t need to go far, though; he found me again and came over.
I just sat there with my arms wrapped around my legs, trying not to cry as my head split apart.
I wasn’t trying to hold it back anymore. I was openly sobbing. Everything in my body felt like it was on fire.
I stopped crying for a second and wiped my face. I leaned closer into the T.V. screen. At this point, a small crowd of NPCs had gathered around.
The old man moved closer to me.
My eyes widened. I stood up and stepped back. I could feel my legs quaking as I struggled to maintain balance. On any other day I would have blown the pain off as coincidence and sought medical attention, or tried to view it rationally, but nothing made sense to me anymore. So far, the NPCs had been correct, so I wasn’t sure if I had reason to doubt them. I’m not sure if it was my sleep deprivation, or the constant pangs of this damned headache, or the emotional fatigue of this past week, but it all made sense to me then and there. Everything made sense.
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