Overachiever – Living Xtra Large

Author’s log 225684

Today I ventured beyond the laws of the known universe: everything I understood and believed in disappeared before my very eyes. As I watch my hands typing this log, I find myself wondering if my fingers are really striking each key, whether the letters are really appearing on the screen before me, or whether it’s just a trick of the light designed by some divine being. What is reality? Nothing seems real anymore, not after today, not after the shit I’ve witnessed.

3D: you say it all the time as if you really know what it is. Let me tell you something: you don’t know squat.

This is 3D:

Since experiencing this thing – this mysterious device, for want of a better word and an appropriate adjective (those existing do little to qualify its technology) – I’ve been seeing everything in 3D. I’ve tried returning to books to regain some normality in my life, but it’s no good. The words just crawl off their pages and into my face, smothering me with their fragmented semantics like severed zombie limbs, hungry for attention. They become 3D.

I finally admitted defeat and gave in, replacing the words with actual zombies through a program known as ‘Resident Evil: Revelations’. How they tortured me, tearing at my flesh. It was horrible, nightmarish, but somehow… comforting? It scared me yet it pacified me. It was soothingly familiar, it was… it was like it used to be, before all the chainsawing and the gross mutations of perspective resulting from incestuously mating the first- and third-persons. I don’t want to peer over your shoulder Leon S Kennedy; it stinks.

There are other programmes that are also capable of inciting nostalgia. This 3D thing, it’s not just a gimmick: the games are good. Super Mario 3D Land goes back to basics, providing unadulterated fun with environments and gameplay served neat, like they used to be. So neat that I feel they’ve been designed with me in mind, rather than the girl who doesn’t really care for games to be honest but might buy this one this time because it’s simple and has a dog in it but then not play it for the same reasons.

I found the Super Mario 3D Land programme to be unapologetically challenging at times, something I’ve missed from Nintendo. My only objection was the golden racoon leaf that I found myself being presented with whenever I’d died enough times to warrant the aid. This leaf made me invincible and, because invincibility on its own is of course never enough, also gave me the hovering raccoon ability, just because I’m that inept. It’s the leaf that mocks me with every golden flash of its yellow flesh. I’ve grown sick of its scorn. I don’t need that leaf. I won’t take it. I won’t.

So, log entry number 225684, I’ll sign off now, one day older and wiser than I was yesterday in my search for the Ultimate Truth [in entertainment media]. World-weary and battle scarred [from overindulging in entertainment media], I’ll leave you with my lesson from this episode.

Lesson learnt: Nintendo’s kissing our burnt fingers better.