Alternate Reality- An memoriam stanza by Josh "randombullseye" Hayes

**This is a long article. I assure you, it is long. I put it in chapters, so if you don't feel like reading it all right now, you can pick it up later, or next year, or never. There are nine chapters listed with links after the introduction.



Whenever the term alternate reality gets mentioned, I picture something like how computers looked when presented in movies like Lawnmower Man and Hackers. A sort of strange way to present cyberspace, or any sort of simulation of a video game for sure. Even that Dire Straights video, which is surpassingly homophobic, has that same look that I think of when I hear the word. so

But the concept of an alternate reality presented in a game form has to be more than that, at this point that video is a one note joke. It only functions for something to be laughed at, just like those two movies, and just like any mention of video games in anything, typically its looked down upon and presented wrong. Except in that movie BIG, where it was presented right. That was cool. Tom Hanks played a computer game not unlike a Lucas Arts adventure, and I liked that. Even if his game never existed or couldn't exist, it was a cool idea to live in a world where video games are part of the mainstream.



And now video games are part of the mainstream, and I've not hated anything about video games more than that. Even the sequel to Zombies Ate My Neighbors I hate less, and I loathe that game, Ghoul Patrol. It isn't something I can change, and it isn't like games weren't in every home before, but now it seems like everybody is into gaming. To the point where even the least interested person could play hunting and fishing on their system as well as several four wheeler games. Around these parts, nobody calls ATVs by the proper name, they're always four wheelers. I hate it here.

The fact that within twenty years, I've gone from being laughed at as some sort of nerd to be looked down upon for playing so many games, to being some sort of grandmaster with sage like wisdom for my expertise of video games surprises me. I never thought this could happen to me Destructoid, but it totally has. I'm called a "game master" at least once a year by someone and I've never felt less like one.

"Your 'reality', sir, is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say I have no grasp of it whatsoever!" - Baron Munchhausen



There was a time when I did. I used to brag about how much time I put into games and how much I loved them, not that I don't do that every Sunday on this very user blog in GAMES PLAYED THIS WEEK, but I used to be proud of how into gaming I was. Now I feel that being into games nobody else cares about puts me in some strange category, that even when things go mainstream I'm still somehow on the outside looking in because I played Operation Darkness and can't shut up about the Splatterhouse games. That I'm some sort nut.

Fact of the matter is, reality is subjective. I don't believe everything I read, especially when it comes to video games. Somebody might say a game is coming from one console to the other, and may even have played it on that system, but several years after the fact said game is still an exclusive to a certain system. The reality that I'm in now is one of not caring about exclusives, I bought them all. So much as which platform has what, and what was worth playing. That new normal that I never thought could ever happen to me. Super Nintendo and a Sega Genesis, when I was dead broke I never pictured this. I even have a forty inch screen with a black leather, chair, but still yet. Biggy smalls lyrical references aside, I'm in a reality that I never expected. That just a few years after finding Destructoid I would start various trends and work for the toy website, such a strange and bizarre world this 2010. If you told me where things would go from 2000 to 2010, I'd think you were from universe 928 instead of 616 like the rest of us. A strange world where the Hulk has a lizard tongue, Spider-man is a Mexican, and Doctor Doom is president. No really, that all happens in Marvel's 2099 universe.



That's what I love about Marvel. Continuity. What happens today gets referenced twenty years from now, even if it was retconned, it still happened and is referred to as having happened weeks ago. Unless I'm wrong, officially only thirteen years have passed in the Marvel universe, despite the Punisher existing as a Vietnam veteran in the modern day he never ages a bit, in the 616 universe. If you're over in the non-numbered MAX universe, that Punisher is easily in his sixties and could kick some teeth out of a guy twice his size and half his age. But they're the same character, sort of. The multiple reality existing within parallel worlds idea, string theory, I always thought that was cool. I mentioned it a few times in the main text, but I thought I'd go ahead and talk about it again here in reference to comic books.



There was a book a few years ago that you can easily find online, called "Exiles." I'm a big fan of this comic book for many reasons. Chief among them that it takes the concept of string theory and runs with it. The book takes place within the Marvel comics mythology, but has the characters all being lower tier characters you never heard of, even lower than a Daredevil or Moon Knight level of "Who is that guy?" The Falcon feels more popular and well known then the majority of the exiles team is how obscure these people are. But within the context of the book, it makes perfect sense. The premise is something within dimensions is broken and a team is assembled by the "Timebroker" to go solve problems in various earths. So you get stories featuring Professor X as a bad guy, Captain America as a vampire warlord, and a really cool story about a world beset by the Phalanx. I liked the Exiles so much, and when they started going to places that already existed, it sort of fell apart. Once they visited 2099, Age of Apocalypse world, and a couple other "What if" alternate Marvel earths that only a true believer would be into. But I still loved it! Such a cool idea.

The great thing about fantasy is that it lets us escape, maybe not a great escape, but it lets us reject our reality and substitute our own. And unlike the Exiles, we can simply turn the game off. But for those characters the story keeps going, or kept going until the 100th issue when Marvel canceled it, did a crossover with X-Caliber - a book I read only for that tie in and have no interest in reading again unless there is a cool crossover of some kind with something I'm already reading, and then revamped it as "NEW exiles" for six issues until canceling that. So yeah, anything great comes to an end. Any escape or fantasy you can imagine, it is there in video games somewhere. Want to be a Cowboy? Got that. Soldier in the military? Got that. Detective from a show like Twin Peaks, this year we got a couple games like that. Ever want to be a WW2 soldier but fighting vampires, as a werewolf? Got a game that lets you do that with some alternate history sub-sub genre niche strategy RPG that somehow got localized. Any game fantasy you can think of is out there, and I want to discuss a some fantasy worlds that I really got into.



The strange part is, I like the fantasy worlds that were more realistic where I was still me, but in a world of violence and madness. I could have picked comic book games, Splatterhouse for my Jason Voorhees fix, or countless others to focus in on. But I could only write so many pages. I can't do fifteen page masterworks every time. Still, this is what I came up with for this month. I hope you guys like it. I submit for the approval of the midnight society,

Alternate Reality

Introduction
Chapter 1: The most spectacular thing ever!
Chapter 2: Hell on wheels!
Chapter 3: Back to reality.
Chapter 4: Popping with robots and negativity!