Just a Week, Now

Skyrim is coming out really, really soon. All pretense of holding onto my shit is gone. I have no shit.

This mouth-frothing level of anticipation has only happened for me two other times:

My first oh-shit-I-must-have-this-game-now psychotic breakdown was for The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. When this game was delayed for a few months I was inconsolable. At one point my mom told me that there was a truckers' strike and that's why Toys 'R Us didn't have the game yet. I still don't know if that actually happened or if she was just looking for some way to shut me up.

The second was Final Fantasy 3 (FF6, if that's your thing, but we both know what was written on the fucking box). I had this tiny preview of the game in Nintendo Power that I would literally fawn over for hours. When the game finally released and I had a copy, my life should've been perfect, but I had two stupid brothers with equally distinguished taste in video games.

We all dreaded that stupid egg timer we kept on top of the television, but it was the only way we maintained any order in the house. By the end of the first day, we'd played the game a measly two hours each. Just enough to whet our appetite. Just enough to let us realize that all of the hype we'd built up for this game didn't even come close to justifying how good it was.

I'd just played the best game ever, I only played it for two hours, and now I was supposed to go to bed?

I'll admit, I got greedy, but there wasn't a chance in hell of me sleeping that night, and if my brothers were capable of slumbering when Final Fucking Fantasy 3 was sitting in the house then didn't that prove that I deserved to play the game more than they did?

Nobody knew I was up all night. Nobody, that is, but Final Fantasy 3, which logs every second of playtime and displays it right on the file selection screen.

When everyone woke up and realized that I was hours ahead of the pack, I wasn't allowed to play for the entire day. It was horrible.