it's sunday night, just before the first day of freshman year of high school. you're at your grandmothers house playing on the WII she got you for christmas a while ago. you beat Bowser Jr, then Diddy kong, and now the only one left is petey. you realized a long time ago your team captain and the players you selected were nowhere near the best in the game, but you're too far in to turn back now. you make it all the way to the championship, and win the first game 4-1, and lose the second 1-0 on a fluke goal. it all comes down to this. you go up 2-0 early, but petey surrounds himself in mud and sends up 6 orange megastrike goals. you only stop one. you eventually lose 7-5, trying desperately to come back, but every time you score a goal, he just scores one right back. all hope slips away as the 0.0 second horn sounds, and you just stare at the screen for a whole minute in silence. you have to start again. "this isn't fair, the sensor bar doesn't work right" you say, but petey doesn't care. he is a cold, uncaring set of binary digits designed to destroy your faith in humanity and make you angry. "there has to be an easier mode than this" you say, but the developers knew full well the agony they were unleashing upon their players. it's 12:02 AM. you need to get sleep; you have to get up at 6 AM tomorrow. maybe next time. maybe tomorrow. maybe the day after that whenever you inevitably make it back to the championship and lose. but it doesn't matter. you will never stop trying. day after day, petey may make you mad and make you redo the entire season, time after time again, but he will never break your resolve. he will never break your determination. you have something he doesn't, and you and him both know it. one of these times he will slip. one of these times he will lose. he is scared, but you have surpassed anger. you take solace in the fact that one day you will win, and when you do unlock him, he will be the worst character in the game and be so much weaker than when you played against him
Fun, useless fact: If you save your game here on the PS2 version, it's simply called "Prep Hideout" on the save file. However, Scholarship Edition renamed it to "Beach Clubhouse"
Whenever I'm practicing shifting from 1st to 3rd position on the violin, this track comes to mind. I'm not sure if any lone soul out there can relate to this, but that up and down slide at the beginning is just... too iconic. Makes me feel like a lone prospector sitting in goodsprings, playing around on an old fiddle.
Saw some comments on the Undertale song “In My Way” say that this song inspired it. And honestly, I can really understand that. Edit: apparently in my way is just the song Anticipation slowed down by 400%, so never mind I guess?
How is it that I feel deep nostalgia for a game I only recently played? There are good games, there are great games, and then there are games like this
