Letters Time: Continue a Quest

Dear SHELPSHOT:

I've been a video game player all my life, but once my daughter was born (she's 4 now) I noticed that I had less time to play games. Working over 60 hours a week doesn't help either. That's why I want to tell you about my method for fitting games into my schedule.

One of the last games I purchased was Dragon Age for my Playstation 3 control deck. I had barely played long enough to complete the Joining ritual, when I became a father.

Life moves quickly as you get older, as I'm sure many of your readers know. But playing Dragon Age put me in a strange headspace. For some reason I was thinking about Dragon Warrior for the NES a lot; another game I never completed. I would find myself humming the Alefgard music to myself while walking to work, and I would doodle the funny slime character on Post-it notes over and over. And that's when it hit me! I bought Dragon Age exactly twenty years after getting Dragon Warrior for my ninth birthday!

To make a long story short, I started a new quest on my Dragon Warrior cartridge and named my character "Birthday". Every year on November 3rd, I dust off my NES and continue my quest for as much time as I can spare. It might be the only game I play now, but it also helps me reflect on the last year and quantify the passage of time.

Tomorrow is my birthday, and I should be able to play long enough reach the town of Garinham. I'm excited for my daughter to learn how to read so that she can help me complete my quest!

Kind regards,

Andrew Piest

Dear Andrew, 

Thank you for your letter to SHELPSHOT's Licensed Professional Video Game Counsellors. To answer your question, the powerful Silver Harp can be found in the Grave of Garin, but you will need a magic key from Rimuldar to open the door to the tomb. Gain EXP by battling many foes!

Letters Time!: Calm at Snowpeak

Dear SHELPSHOT,

I read your magazine all the time! My name is Ashley and one day I hope to write about the greatest and latest games too! I play games with my older brother Mike and usually tell him how to solve all the puzzles. We mostly like Xexyz and Harvest Moon, but our absolute favourite is the Legend of Zelda series. We’ve played every Legend for every system there is except for the ones on the GameBoy Colour. Every year, we go back and play through an old one just because they are just that good!

This last year, I found something while playing The Twilight Princess Zelda that I thought I should tell you about, since your magazine likes secrets and I think that this one is a doozy. My brother was busy at school, so I was playing on my own and got up to the Snowpeak ruins. I was just about to continue on with a quest when I moved to the edge of the mountain and the way the camera turned surprised me. I was shocked that I could see out over the mountainous horizon! 

Even though I played this game with Mike a bunch of times before he had never stopped to look out over the mountains like this. I had a quiet moment of reflection not just on the story of the Twilight Princess game, or really any other games I’ve played; but I reflected on the analogues of all games I’ve experienced with the life I’ve lived and the people I’ve lived it with. It felt like, for one moment, that I was really alone at the apex of the snowpeak, and that the mountain range I looked out over was made up of a myriad of possible pasts and futures--most of which I would never experience, but many of which I had the sudden understanding of how they were directly possible to achieve. I could almost plot a path across the pixels to some utopia of existence I had always suspected was there, but that I had never dreamed to know. There, atop the snowpeak, I felt my humanity laid bare--as though I were both completely empty and a compounded vessel of all things in the universe, simultaneously.

When Mike got home I showed him the level but couldn’t articulate the feeling very accurately. We kept playing though and beat the game in only one more sitting! Can your Expert Game Counselors replicate this secret? I’ve tried it again since, but the feeling is not as intense and seems fleeting. I’m going to try not to play the Twilight Princess again for a few years, and maybe when I finally go back through it, it will feel new and strange again! Love the new Magazine!

Ashley Megan Hill
Melbourne, VIC

Dear Ashley: 

Good find! After a mini marathon of gaming, the Licensed Professional Video Game Counsellors here at SHELPSHOT have been able to replicate your secret! We can confirm a drawn out sense of euphoric wholeness when taking pause at the Snowpeak in Twilight Princess.  

The presence of moments of protracted melancholy or rapturous reflection can become pronounced around particular portions of certain games, creating unintended anchoring points that provide an influx of insight into the unconscious mind! Taking a fifteen minute break every hour is a good way to minimize this effect, which comes about through a state of mind similar to lucid dreaming.  

These pockets of epiphany usually come in the quiet moments after a particularly dark dungeon or in the calm quiet right before a new leg of a journey. The nature of intended actions in games actually integrates a sort of surrogate experience in your mind, so maybe you feel like you are in two places at once: on your sofa and on Snowpeak! Thanks for writing, and for the letter art!

Can you find other moments of elongated ephemera in your games library? Write in and let us know!

Letters Time: Massively Effective

Dear SHELPSHOT:

I am a 38 year old construction worker from Providence, RI. I also dabble in drawing a little, and my secret hope is to one day be hired to design a game pak instruction manual.

Anyway, I grew up reading SHELPSHOT, but this is the first time I've ever written a letter to you. My favorite game paks are Commander Keen: Goodbye Galaxy!, Mass Effect 1 and 3, and Angry Birds in Space.

Mass Effect is actually the reason I'm writing to you today. I usually work 12 hour days, then go home and play games for a while before going to bed. Around the time the first Mass Effect game came out, my boss moved me to a new construction site with a bunch of workers I didn't really know. No big deal, except that the new foreman made life miserable for all of the workers. He accused us of using drugs on site, even though I definitely tell people not to use drugs (not just for health reasons, but because it lowers your high scores). I was very unhappy, and I found myself feeling very lonely and out of place.

It was satisfying to go home to Mass Effect, exploring unfamiliar planets, and interacting with strange peoples. I wished I was more like Commander Shepherd in real life (except not a lady!)

Then one night, I was playing and I reached a high enough experience score to visit the Local Cluster. There was something about seeing my own little planet amidst the familiar sights of Sol and Luna that touched me deeply. After spending so much time in unfamiliar settings both at my day job and within the gamescape, I was almost moved to tears by something so simultaneously familiar and distant.

While I'm writing, there should be a Mass Effect game where Wrex can be commander of the Normandy. Wrex is the best!

Sincerely,

Gary Thompson
Providence, RI

Thanks for writing Gary! Wrex was unavailable for comment, but we'll make sure he sees your fantastic envelope artwork-- providing he doesn't try to eat it first! We agree, the Mass Effect series is wonderful, but doing drugs can seriously hurt even a professional game player's scores. Here's hoping your coworkers will soon realize that you can't zap all the Reapers if you're zapping your brain with dope. See you in the Local Cluster!