You Shall Beeee Like Uzzzzzz (The Mutant Virus, Mystery Quest)

My my, we've been in this realm for a while. This is a milestone, of sorts. 26 letters in our alphabet, and once we sort out these last two mediocre bits of electronic entertaiment, the Nintendo Project will have mapped out 13 of them. As there aren't equal games represented for every letter, this isn't a true halfway point but a spiritual one. A Valyan one, if you will. As we sit here and ponder what the wonders of the letter N will bring (not much, and then a shitload of really interesting things, incidentally), one must ponder. What is a bad game made of?

If you believe The Mutant Virus, it's made of a literal infection at the very core of the microchips of the thing, spreading and multiplying and taking root of everything. I've oft called the magic of the NES "microchip alchemy", so let's see what went wrong here. At its core, a game is but an idea. The heart of The Mutant Virus is an idea about a spaceman inside a computer fighting off a computer virus by shooting at it and stopping the spread of the infection. It could have been a fun game, but there's a vagueness to it that comes when one dredges through a emulated file. In the absence of microchip alchemy, the game about microchip alchemy's infection has no equivalent exchange. It cannot function, and thus it loses its soul. A shambling infected husk, the virus spreads and spreads. You can shoot at it all you want, but the infection doesn't slow like it should. It keeps spreading, and even coming near it is hazardous. Worse yet, the system itself has gotten wise to your attempts. It is now turned against you, and can smite you in one blow. The grey box can create worlds with but a thought. One hit of a fireball may not seem like much, but the fireball is a representation. A construct. What is really happening is nothing less than the unmaking of your player character. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Game over.

Mystery Quest, then, is a bit better. Platforming, shooting things, and a lengthy segment inside a castle where the only way to progress is to shoot at nondescript walls and find hidden things. So, Milon's Secret Castle territory again. Great. I want to discuss my own experience with the game. I accidentally brought forth a portion of the true experience of playing it, screaming forth from 1988 or whatever. I was in the castle, and I discovered that holding up and firing shot your projectiles upward in an erratic spread. It appeared to be a useless move. Later, as I was wandering, I came back to an area with an item above me, stuck in an alcove. I could not get it, and I didn't know where else to progress. I tried the up-shot, and broke the block below it. I got the item, and I discovered this by thinking it out and experimenting with the buttons. No walkthrough, no Youtube. All me. It's still not all that good, but by god did I do it all by myself.

On to N, then. Hold tight. It's going to be a bumpy ride.

Not A Time Warp, But A Time Rip (Motor City Patrol, Ms. Pac-Man, Muppet Adventure: Chaos At The Carnival)

(Before we begin: holy mother of God, I'm on TARDIS Eruditorum! I wrote everyone's favorite Mr. Sandifer a guest post on Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock. I had choice words about it. Choice words you can go read. If you jumped here from Eruditorum: Hello! I'm Frezno and I write longwinded words about old video games! I'm about to do it again! See below.)

Motor City Patrol is weird as hell. Like, unsettlingly so. We're dealing with late 1991/early 1992 here, according to the Internet. So the SNES exists and the NES is dying. I expected a crapfest when I booted this one up. What I got was a crapfest that just disturbed me to look at. The point of this game, as far as I can tell, is to drive around and patrol buildings as a police officer and catch people who speed or something like that. It's a game about driving in circles. Dull, but look at it. The perspective and vehicle-based gameplay resonate with our futureminds. This is a proto-Grand Theft Auto. Except it's not designed at all like that and it's only the trickery of the mind doing it. It doesn't help if, say, the person playing Motor City Patrol has beaten Retro City Rampage... which is a GTA-esque "retro" game that doesn't have nostalgia bombs so much as nostalgia thermonuclear warheads. It's been said before, but with the collapse of video games and the impending heat-death of the NES, reality is growing thin. That's how things like this can bleed through into our world. Things from futures that never were.

This thin fabric of reality is what lets other things through. Things like Ms. Pac-Man. The version I played is the official one, released in 1993 by Namco. In dragging itself forward 11 years on a dying grey box, it created a splinter of itself. A splinter capitalized by Tengen, themselves an arm of Atari, itself a major leash-holder of the dread beast GREED. Before Ms. Pac-Man arrives in 1993, she has already been here. Under GREED's command, this splinter-Ms is an embodiment of Lady Capitalism, eating all in her way and demanding quarters for the honor of assisting her. Ghosts, dots, cherries, pretzels... none stand in the way. The 1993 version is no quarter-muncher. It is a simple diversion from a simpler time, and does not kill you outright with unfairness early on. That comes later. The dread beast is still at the heart of things, but its death will come. He has been tricked into a dying realm, and there is no escape from the swinging blade. Ten hearts stop beating and this iteration is slain. All hail Peko the Destructor.

And then Muppets. I suppose this one is penance. I inspired a man to play this game live, and now it's my turn to experience it. It's not very good. What I played was playable enough, but it's not very good at all. It's from Hi-Tech Expressions even. My favorite publisher in all the land. The two segments of this game I played and beat were Kermit's and Gonzo's. White water rafting and bad Asteroids controls, respectively. Playing this incites memory of the Muppets. I sort of missed the Muppet Show, but I did have a stuffed Kermit the Frog. He had a Muppet University jersey and I took him everywhere with me. I remember the Muppet Christmas Carol, a film which I take pains to watch every year when the holiday approaches. I remember Muppets Tonight, and I liked it because I was 10 and didn't know any better. Remembering these things is what this game is supposed to siphon off of. My memory of Muppets precludes me buying this. I refuse the call. My memory is too powerful for even this bit of alchemy to exchange. The power of a man's Kermit impression is too much. The power of a Hard Game Beater can best Gonzo's gonzo space bullshit with minimal fuss.

It's about time we get away from the letter M. This corruption needs cleansing.

I Am Everything You Ever Were Afraid Of (Monster In My Pocket, Monster Party, Monster Truck Rally)

Monsters are real. I know. I'm one of them. The entire idea of video games is monstrous, in a way. We take concepts and grand worlds born from our imaginations, and then perform arcane rituals to squeeze them onto tiny discs and plastic cartridges. Witness the jam that led to Konami's Monster In My Pocket, a game that ties in to a toy line of tiny monsters, not unlike the M.U.S.C.L.E. toy line. Difference is, this game is pretty good. It is also an exercise in madness. Look at the included screenshot. Really look and comprehend what is happening here. Frankenstein's monster is standing in front of a tape deck while a zombie comes after him. Both are a few inches tall. The first two stages of this game are the domestic clashing with the monstrous. Jump on a giant bed while witches warp in. Leap across the kitchen counter as goblins hurl sugar cubes. Avoid the stove burners and press onward, eventually fighting a Yeti. Not in the loo in Tooting Bec, but in your freezer. To gaze upon the monster is to go mad; you cannot grasp the true form of its creativity. The deadlights beckon you, and you go mad. The laughter of the damned echoes through your house as you continue to play, controlling Frankenstein's monster, itself a symbol of flawed alchemy and what happens when creativity goes too far. We have stolen video games from the gods, and now our guts belong to the fucking crows. We are the Nintendo generation: the modern Promethea.

So now that sanity has left us in one brutal swipe of the monster's claw, it's time to have ourselves a party. Monster Party is madness itself, filtered through a CRT screen and rendered with an 8-bit processor. Men in Japanese school uniforms shoot psychic blasts at you. Pills turn you into a dragon man. A spider apologizes for being bead. Halfway into level 1 everything melts and becomes a blood-soaked hellhole with spotted mandogs and oozing skulls. Level 2 has a fried food boss that transforms into an onion ring and a piece of shrimp. A later level has a kitten in a box that angrily hurls kittens at you. A wishing well attacks you with coins. I write these things to help emulate my own experience with Monster Party. I got to read about it in a Nintendo tip book. It was text only. When you read the phrase "swing your bat at the Bull Man and his tiny Bull Kids" at the age of 10, it leaves an impression. Eventually I found the game and it was even wilder than I had anticipated. My own gazing upon the monster. Was it that moment that gave me power? Hell, look at Doctor Who(as I so love to do); the moment that gave the show the power to last for 50+ years was not two schoolteachers falling out of the world, or being yelled at by cave people. It's the moment when a woman is threatened by a plunger and screams in absolute horror. Doctor Who got its longevity when the monsters came. So, too, did video games.

Sometimes we went too far. Monster Truck Rally is awful. I hate it. I hate it for one simple reason; I am bad at it. I race against the CPU in my monstrous pink truck with the huge wheels. It always goes faster than me. I do not know how to accelerate as fast as it. I do not know how to beat it at the myriad of events the game gives me. I do not know how to overcome the perfect machine, and it angers me. I accept that it is my fault, but at the same time I doubt we will get any defenders of Monster Truck Rally who are offended by my dismissal of it. Maybe it's fun with another human player, when the odds are evened. Fighting the machine is no goddamned fun, however. This is the truth of the NES. It, like Doctor Who, draws its power from the monstrous. The Dread Beast GREED and the holder of its gargantuan leash, the Lady Capitalism, know this. 50 dollars for the privilege to get defeated time and time again by a machine-mind, created with dark alchemy. That's the real horror here; the fact that you cannot win. They have your money, and soon they will have your life. You've gone mad now. You're part of the Nintendo generation, and you're a monster now too.

Which makes what's about to come even worse.

Happy Birthday, Nintendo Project Resumed!

What a difference a year makes. The Nintendo Project has been resumed for a year now. Hooray hoorah and many happy returns. Allow me to indulge myself and tell a little story. Once upon a time there was a nice man named Phil. Phil had a very bad series of days and subsequently decided to write about old Nintendo games. All of them. From A to Z. The writing was fresh and exciting, but also very sad in places. Eventually Phil started writing about a TV show called Doctor Who, from 1963 to the present day. It was very very good writing, and Phil eventually decided to shelf the Nintendo Project somewhere around the letter H.

In 2012 or so, a weirdo named Frezno found Phil's Doctor Who blog as it was dealing with the exorcism of the Colin Baker years. He quite liked it! He continued to read and even tossed some money to Phil's Kickstarter, reading the entries in book form. Then the Nintendo Project was found and its arcane tomes consumed. Being a Hard Game Beater, Let's Player, and general old video game fart... he appreciated the idea.

August 2013. Poor Frezno was going through a bad series of days of his own. Somehow or another, the Nintendo Project came back to him. The idea of continuing took root, and the seed was planted. To continue the Nintendo Project, to go through Nintendo. Letters H through Z. Could it be done? Would it even be allowed? Phil was consulted, and his blessing was given. He even said he was honored... and with that, the Nintendo Project was resumed.

So hi. Here we are a year later, and what have we learned? Writing for Nintendo is fun, if not interesting and a little narrow in scope. A lot of the NES library is unremarkable, or even outright bad... but there's enough magic in that grey box to make all of it worth it. Something else interesting happened to the blog, after the first few rocky months. In its infancy, there was just a lot of straightforward talk about video games and whether they were good or bad. Then I went and took a break for a month to write a novel for National Novel Writing Month. In it was a smart-mouthed teen with psychic powers who, as it turned out, had a precognitive sixth sense that allowed him to dodge danger before it came at him. I came up with a name for this power, and that name was Valya. Nothing special. Just the Valeyard from Doctor Who, made a dash more exotic and otherworldly. I always write with cute little in-jokes like that, it fuels the word count and keeps me going. When I came back, more Doctor Who had inspired me. The Key To Time saga, featuring a White Guardian representing Order, and a Black one representing Chaos. I turned this into a battle for the state of video games. Lady Valya, standing for the powers of innovation and imagination that led to classics like Mega Man and Zelda and whatnot. The Nightmare, the advocate for everything wrong with the 8-bit. Cheap cash-in licensed dreck. Terrible controls. Awful and abhorrent things that existed only to make a buck. As time went on, we saw other deities approach. The dread beast GREED, the Trickster Beast ROMHACK, Peko the Destructor, Lady Capitalism and Captain Communism... the list goes on.

The second major shift in the blog happened about two weeks later. Some thoughtless human being went ahead and proposed to his girlfriend on a livestream, and I got to wake up and read about it on Twitter. I was happy for those two kids. They were great friends of mine! Then they went and invited me to the wedding... and happy feelings bubbled forth. I had to pay tribute. I went non-linear. I tackled Kirby's Adventure before I was supposed to, and made it about them. About the daydreams of travelling to a big city and meeting my good friends. Non-linearity would also become a Nintendo Project thing...as would dreams. So now here we are. I've taken an abandoned blog about old Nintendo games from an academic, and turned it into a ridiculous and esoteric pantheon of pretend gods, all vying for control between the years 1983 and 1995... and beyond. That's got to count for something, right?

Here's to the Nintendo Project. We cleared out five letters of the alphabet in a year. That's about a fifth of them! It's in no way close to being done, especially since I'm prone to vanishing or dicking around with other things... but it's my own little pet project for now. One day I might give up on it and pass the reigns to someone else, but I'm happy with what I've got here. A small handful of people read and (hopefully) enjoy my ramblings about old video games, and some of the big names have gotten above-average view counts. Time to give thanks, I suppose. To Phil Sandifer; it couldn't have happened without you. You started the machine, you gave me the go-ahead, and you were even nice enough to write about Mega Man 3 for me! I don't know how many of these you actively read (my fanboyish heart hopes the answer is "all of them") but credit where credit is due.

To the many Constant Readers; I would be talking to a void were it not for you. Some of you have even spread the little blog around to blossom its readership; mostly the big-name games. I appreciate it. You keep coming back for words on these old games, and I adore you all for it. Very special thanks to everyone who has contributed a guest post or otherwise collaborated with me. That would be John, Phil, Rainiac, CarpetCrawler, and Froborr. It was great having different perspectives on things, and I thank you for putting up with me.

Let's blow out our candles and divvy up this cake. Here's to you, silly red and white blog. Here's to you, grey box. Hell, why not? Here's to me. Now how about we see about that next year, and get a little farther this time?

The Castlevania Adventure

The Castlevania Adventure is not a very good game. I'll defer to a happier nerd than I on this one, but to summarize: You move too slowly to avoid hazards and enemies, your whip can be downgraded by taking just one point of damage, there are no subweapons, and the platforming feats the game asks of you are ludicrous. It is a product of its time, a novelty of action platforming in the palm of your hand that was limited both by the grey rectangle it was created for and its design decisions. A miss from Konami, and not a game many people like.

Which makes it all the more astounding that I kind of grew fond of it.

Not in its original version, though. Not quite. I cheated here. I sought the darker side of alchemy, the neutral path. The Trickster Beast ROMHACK's domain of madness. Many come to its realm to improve their favorite games... or some evil clerics of the Nightmare come to turn the beloved classics of Pure Platforming into bloated hellscapes. Witness how they formed their own nation, the shadowland of Kaizo. We are not going there. Nestled deep within a faction, I found it. The Quick Fix. Once applied, some of The Castlevania Adventure's flaws melted away. Your Belmont walks at a faster clip. Direct damage does not downgrade your whip. This makes the game "playable" but it also defangs it. I just beat it this morning, and suffered a single death. You see, Adventure is designed for a certain speed and jumping style. Mucking with that breaks it, but this brings to light how the game is made; it has been designed on a foundation of obnoxiousness. The whip downgrading, for one. With a fully powered whip you are king of the mountain, but all it takes is one or two hits to give you a weak whip and hinder your offense. After thinking on it for a minute, I realize what this is; it's the Gradius Syndrome. Early Game Boy Platforming 1080. You are punished for your mistake and ordered to do it again, but with less advantage. It's madness. Without that, you just run ahead and whip things and kind of win.

The same thing happens with the platforming. Several of the daring leaps in this game are what I like to call "pixel jumps". Leaps with no leeway, where you must have the reaction time of a saint to walk to the absolute edge of a platform, and then leap in the half-second before you walk right off that edge. The Castlevania Adventure has a truly sadistic extreme of this in its third stage, where spikes chase you up a vertical shaft. You climb ropes and avoid worms to ascend... and then they throw these platforms at you. Pixel jumps in quick succession, under pressure, some of them on platforms that fall. With that slow move speed. The Quick Fix makes this trivial. The entire challenge of the game is the "wrong" kind of difficulty; the kind that deigns to piss you off instead of terrifying you. With it removed, The Castlevania Adventure has but one thing to terrify you; its atmosphere. Despite knowing that I could actually navigate these platforms, I was still a little spooked and thrilled at the danger of death!

Which of course leads us to Castlevania: The Adventure Rebirth. A 2009 Wiiware game that takes the name of this game and makes something completely different out of it. Polished graphics! Bombastic sound! No whip downgrading, perfect control, and lots of loving touches and nods to the Castlevania games of old! I adored it in 2009. A flawed game, finally improved. Last night I was part of a large Twitter discussion about the original Game Boy game. The nice fellow tweeting about it was not fond of Rebirth. Here is the wild daisy chain, but Rebirth is basically a piece of dread NOSTALGIA in his eyes. It references things and incites memories of old Castlevania things in the name of lighting up those neurons that remember Castlevania... but it lacks the atmosphere. The Castlevania Adventure filled me with the "silent horror" even with the Quick Fix.

Rebirth is just a pretty game. This is all confusing. Play them both or something.

If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich (Mission Impossible, Monopoly)

I put this off for far too long. Turns out there was a reason for that. Due to wanting to hit a naming theme of three next time, we only have two games today. Neither of them were that good. Mission Impossible sure does live up to its name. We were six years away from the Tom Cruise vehicle with the guy getting crushed by the elevator and that real tense hacking sequence and blowing up a helicopter with exploding gum and shit. Instead we get this. Blah blah accept your mission, message self-destructs. I begin the game, walk forward, and shoot the first person I see... prompting a helicopter to arrest me for killing an unarmed civilian. Lesson learned. I switch to a black guy who punches things and don't punch that person as I move forward. A car comes and sends me flying. The third person is a guy with boomerangs. He accidentally kills a civilian. Game over. Back to start. Okay, so then I explore, get a tip to go into an alley, and... keep exploring. Nonlinear levels. Ah, good. Aimless wandering and unsureness of what to do. Molotov cocktails that drain your health. Men with riot shields in sewers who push you into the water and kill you. Great. This is just great. It lives up to its name alright. I wasn't fond of it.

Nor was I all that fond of Monopoly on NES. I feel obligated to waffle a bit about it, considering that I've made Lady Capitalism into A Thing here and this is a board game all about capitalism and the free market and bankrupting everyone else to win at capitalism. It's what I thought M.U.L.E. was. Why does this need to exist? Game show adaptations I understand, but this? You can play this game at home, on a table, and the price of entry is far less than the electronic video game version. Okay, you lose out on being able to play Monopoly by yourself... but was that a high demand? I played Monopoly tonight with a CPU. It wasn't as fun as playing with a real person. I do have memory of the board game, of course. Snow days with my young niece. Frigid winter days stuck in the house with no school, and she demanded to play Monopoly. Ours was the Canadian edition with Canadian street names and railroads, but it was the same game. Newfoundland was represented by the cheap purple squares. Come to think of it, I just remembered another Monopoly game we had. The CD-ROM version. That one had fancy 3D graphics for moving across the board, and you could play over the Internet. There's a reason to buy the game version; bankrupting some silly son of a bitch from Iowa, in the comfort of your own home. Not this one. Even if it was legitimized by Howard and Nester. We lost. They won. Arthur the machine mind out-capitalized me after 15 minutes and made all the money and net worth. Lady Capitalism sings his praises... for now. She's underestimated me, and all the other hard game beaters out there who suffer through the things her acolytes create via microchip alchemy, in order to make her monopoly of video gaming.

We're monsters.

Use The Shrink Potion On The Glove But Beware Of Bugs (Mike Tyson's Punch Out, Millipede, Milon's Secret Castle)

Well, we've got another whopper here tonight. Mike Tyson's Punch-Out. What could have been another licensed disaster, saved by the first party. Everyone loves Punch-Out! Oh boy, video boxing! This is quite the good NES game and it's beloved by many. I think it's pretty good. Now to continue waffling about it for a paragraph. Unlike the other usual licensed adventures we've dealt with, this one is more of a direct challenge. Look no further than the commercial. Iron Mike is laughing at you! The world heavyweight champion boxer of two realms, he is! Both our planet, and that weirdo Nintendo land where mushrooms sing and fairies dance. The WVBA needs an underdog to rise up. Little Mac has become his own character, but he's basically a character expy here in 1987. He is You. Hell, the arcade original just had a wireframe man. Little Mac is you, and you're facing gigantic hulking boxer brutes created from the finest microchip alchemy that nonexistant lands have to offer. Appropriately enough, when I played for the blog tonight I made it to Soda Popinski before getting floored. The Cold War's not ready to end in 1987, but one might make it to Mike Tyson. God help you if you do, because he's tough. I've never done it. Daniel Sexbang's never done it. Mike Matei's done it! How in the hell does Iron Mike not make it on the top of hardest video games list? Forget the Turbo Tunnel, forget beating Ghosts n Goblins twice, forget goddamn Silver Surfer. This is the shit right here. Perfect reflexes and split-second timing are required. Iron Mike was a tough champ in 1987, and he's a tough champ here. Life imitates art; Mike Tyson is a son of a bitch to beat in the ring.

Then in 1990 they took him out for a white guy named Mr. Dream. Valya's champion boxer packs just as much of a punch. Everything else is exact. What's next? Bugs.

I've spoken a lot about tabletop gaming in some of the off posts. It's relevant here because of Incompetence Quest, one of the campaigns I'm involved in. A nice fellow is playing an evil cleric whose loyalty lies with the god of death (not Peko, but Nerull). His favorite trick is summoning gigantic monstrous centipedes to distract the enemy forces and take care of them. Stelle would be right at home in Millipede. Another Williams arcade port from Hal Labs. Millipede is fun! The dread beast GREED's lumbering specter really only rears its head in the later days of the arcade, when the games actually ended. Millipede is bottomless. It was created to suck up quarters and eat away time at pizza parlors. Its main form of control, the trackball, is lacking here. Funny enough, it isn't even the millipede that causes death frequently here; it's those goddamned spiders. They like to crash into you. Little bastards. The dread beast doesn't know when to just let you have a good time. I checked. Millipede's high score is over 10 million points. I didn't even get to 150k. Oh well. I still had fun!

Then we come to Milon's Secret Castle. How lovely. Once again we're haunted by the Nerd. This is the sort of game that thrived in Japan, but Japan was not our shores in the late 80's. It is a nonintuitive adventuring platformer where the goal is to discover all the required hidden nonsense the creators stashed away in nondescript blocks. It also appears to require an exact order to go about things and purchase items, barring continue codes or some way to exit levels. I am willing to blame my mild dislike of Milon here on a culture shock. Someone like Shinya Arino can do it, and has. He seemed to enjoy it, while over here our western nerd yelled about its cryptic nature. Here I stand, in the middle. Milon is not the best, but is not the worst. Were I younger, and had the head start of discovering that things could be broken and blocks could be shoved, I could see myself dredging up the hidden goodies in this one. Maybe I'll get at it someday. Maybe I won't. Who knows? We've got a lot of Nintendo games to play.

Seems like an impossible mission, don't it?

Saturday French Toast (August 2nd, 2014)

August! It's the birth month of the new Nintendo Project! In just two weeks, this ridiculous idea of reviving an abandoned blog from a better writer than me will be a year old! Here are some things I have been doing in my off time.

-The Maximo games! I beat the first one and am about halfway through the second. It's an interesting attempt at putting Ghosts n Goblins into 3D except not really because there's only about two things in these games that feel like classic Ghosts n Goblins. The rest... well, they can get kind of obnoxious. The first game has limited camera control, tricky jumps, and obnoxious enemies... along with a save system you have to pay in-game money for. That meant a chunk of my time was spent replaying level 1 to grind out lives and cash. The second game has camera control and free saving! It also added a mechanic where you grip a platform's edge with your sword! Sadly, it feels like putting that ability gave the developers carte blanche to put in very wide "pixel jumps", or it feels that way.

-The Cornetto trilogy! I'm finally going to sit down and watch all three of these since I've not seen The World's End. I viewed Shaun Of The Dead last night, and it's still great. I remember seeing this movie in theaters during the start of my second year of university. That was 10 years ago. I am officially Old As Fuck. It's a great film though. Today's agenda is Hot Fuzz, and maybe The World's End tonight.

-Time And... The... Rani...? I had this on the computer last night at 12:45 and I wanted to ensure I fell asleep. So I threw on a piece of classic Doctor Who that not many people like. It's the only McCoy story I've not gone through. Let me tell you, my experience with this sort of matched the Doctor's own. He regenerates and wakes up as a confused Scottish man in a tacky coat. I fell asleep and woke up to Bonnie Langford screaming as a monster held her in place, while the Doctor was hooked to a machine and his thoughts were being transferred to... a giant purple brain. W-what?

Alright, comments section is officially a free-for-all. Talk about anything you like. Back on Monday.