This Is A Cold War (The Hunt For Red October)

Monsters are real. I should know. I'm one of them.

We've talked a bit about gravity in the past. Certain video games have massive gravity, fueled by the dread beast NOSTALGIA and its alchemy. Words have power in this realm. Mario. Zelda. Metroid. Mega Man. Alchemic black holes that compress time into one singular instant. Sometimes this gravity is only felt by a few people. For an unfortunate number of my comrades, The Hunt For Red October has a gravity. A terrible pull that we can still feel in the cold of night. It's November 12th, 1984. It's sometime in 1991. It's August 2011. It's August 2013. All at once, I am pulled by the nightmare.

Some explanation is in order. The Hunt For Red October is another game based on a movie. The 1990 film starring Alec Baldwin and Sean Connery was quite good. This game is not good at all. From the moment you hit start, you are assaulted. You've landed on foreign ground. The heart of Soviet Russia at the height of the Cold War. You must escape. The socialist regime will do all it can to crush you... including sensory attack. The music in this video game is horrendous. I'm sorry to have to do this to you, but if you haven't heard it, you must. Please be wary. This track plays for the majority of the game. It can mercifully be stopped. You should just stop the game though. It gets points for being one of the few submarine action games out there, but all of this is negated by it being a poor video game. Lack of post-damage invincibility means touching a wall for four seconds results in thermonuclear death. How lovely.

Why, then, does its gravity affect us so? To anyone unfamiliar with this electronic storm, it would be unremarkable. You'd play it and go "Oh, well that's quite shit" and move on. That is not the case with me. This is where I enter the Nintendo Project. This is the game that made me a hard game beater, a blood-
soaked beast in the shape of a man who left fragments of his soul within 8-bit hells. I am a fucking Lord Voldemort of a video gamer, and this game is why. Oh, it started innocently enough. Much like Doctor Who, really. It started in the Queen's England. An Internet fellow named MegaGWolf had this game as a child. He knew, even then, of its gravity. Of the absence of quality found within. The gravity's pull never left him, and it stayed. August 2011. NES talk between two friends. A half-hearted joke is said. "Maybe I'll beat that Red October game you hate so much.". Then the wager. Beat it and you get a sonic screwdriver. It is very nice and can play Wii games.

None believed in me. They knew of the gravity of that planet well. It pulled me into its depths, but I had a weapon. I had the power of emulation on my side. The notion of the save state. The scientific method of practice makes perfect. So I charted the thing out, section by section. Every step of the way, the game was designed to surprise and trap me. To cause my death. To drain my lives. No continues. Why would it work any other way? This place is damned, its gravity immense and all-encompassing. No human could chart it. Yet, in that darkness, I became more than human. I became beast.

Three days in that void, and I had my victory. A 40-minute video of the entirety of The Hunt For Red October on NES. My prize was won... but the collapse of the cosmic entity OCT-BR had its costs. Of course it did. Now I knew how to survive the darkness. Other worlds beckoned to me with their black songs. The realm of the Ghouls and Ghosts, obsessed with the cyclic and the Ourobouros. The Battletoads, born from a culture that only lives on through the dread beast NOSTALGIA. No explorer of that Yggdrasil Labyrinth made it past the Turbo Tunnel without losing part of themself... and what lay beyond was worse than any you could imagine. Even realms that are not in this project's scope were charted. The deep depths of despair that the Hungarians call "Ecco" with hushed whispers. A world of meat and sawblades. These places have been seen by many monsters... but this monster has charted them. More worlds of horror call to me. The planet Touhou, its atmosphere swirling with bright specks of dust that can kill. There is only death there.

Don't play The Hunt For Red October. Keep your humanity. Watch me lose mine.

Let's Play The Hunt For Red October, in one sitting.