3/15/2021 Ghasts'N Ghouls: The Game that Never Wasby Dain Q. Gore
The Ghosts’N Goblins series (Makaimura 魔界村 in Japan) celebrated its 35th anniversary last year, a year before this year’s iconic Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda’s 35th. A new game, Ghosts’N Goblins Resurrection, was just released for the first time since 2006.
The first eponymously titled game in the series didn’t captivate my attention, but its sequel certainly did. I have been obsessed with Ghouls'N Ghosts since its inception in 1988. It was a much darker, more sinister (yet oddly creepy-cute) sequel to an already odd game about a hapless bearded and fragile knight that was contemporary with Super Mario Bros and would share infamy for its unforgiving difficulty. As I now believe, Ghosts’N Goblins has, over time, become its own genre. I wasn't able to find Ghouls'N Ghosts as a kid at any arcade or convenience store, just the Golfland amusement park in Mesa, Arizona... until it was made available on the Sega Genesis. Maybe not the first time I wanted to get a console just for one game, but certainly the one that stuck. Ever since then, I was fascinated by the entire world and mythos of it. I even sent ideas to Capcom (and they very politely declined). Eventually I would make a website devoted to these ideas for a sequel, and would reach out to an equally obscure, but far more successful, website devoted to Video Game Bosses (Destroy All Monsters! no less) and write a review of many of the symbolic, mythological references "hidden" in the game (along with many notes from Mike Bevan, curator of the now defunct site): by Austin RossI didn’t know that Oscar, the baby in the movie, was actually played by twin actors: William T. and Henry J. Deutschendorf II, nephews of the late singer John Denver (real name, Henry J. Deutschendorf, Jr). John Denver, of course, tragically died in an infamous plane crash—a cataclysmic mix of low fuel and some homemade modifications to his airplane meant he couldn’t switch fuel tanks in time and crashed into Monterey Bay. Then the next trivia line: “Henry J. Deutschendorf II, one of the twins who played Oscar, died June 14th, 2017, by suicide, at the age of 29.” And below it: “33 of 42 found this interesting.” A life, summed up in its entirety as an item of trivia. Nine people deemed it unnoteworthy. But I can’t stop thinking about it. My son was born the same month that Henry died, a month that I myself was 29. My boy arrived seven weeks early, stranding us for a month in a NICU in the middle of Manhattan, a city we didn’t know but were visiting for a weekend family reunion. The uncertainty of life’s arrival seems to match the uncertainty of its departure. In Ghostbusters II, you can’t tell which baby is which. In some scenes, Oscar is portrayed by someone who is no longer with us; in others, he’s played by the surviving brother. Life and death share the screen in equal measure. I wish I could know which is which; I wish I could pinpoint Henry’s scenes, to give them extra care and attention, to honor the memory. But there is no way to know for sure. Austin Ross's fiction and non-fiction has been published in various journals, magazines, newspapers, and anthologies, including Hobart, Necessary Fiction, and elsewhere. He is a part of the editorial team at CRAFT Literary and lives near Philadelphia with his wife and son. You can follow him on Twitter @AustinTRoss. 3/8/2021 Worst. Birthday. Ever.by Mariah MoonIf you bore witness to the golden age of MTV (right after they swapped the music videos for reality shows that were as awful as they were amusing), you remember "My Super Sweet Sixteen." The epitome of noughties decadence; teenagers running amok, making demands for cakes, ice sculptures, and gifts. Though, realistically, there was only one acceptable gift for the birthday girl who starred on her respective episode of that show, and it was a very specific brand of car. Her meltdown rivaled that of any infamous "Bridezilla" if things did not go as planned. Growing up middle class, I was never destined to have a super sweet sixteen. I honestly don’t remember my sixteenth birthday party at all, and not because of any teen drinking hijinks, as my friend group’s notorious Prude™. But I’ll never forget my worst birthday ever. April 12th, 2020, almost a month to the day after Washington, DC’s lockdown to reduce transmission of COVID-19. I was excited for a birthday surprise that hadn’t occurred in years: I would celebrate my day the same day as Easter! Unfortunately, one month before my birthday, the entire city shut down. I planned a Zoom call with a friend who lived in Canada, I bought a pot roast to make myself a Sunday dinner, and I even bought myself a special dress. I chose an old-fashioned aesthetic, a white floral number with a sweetheart neckline, just begging to be fluffed up with a petticoat. As much as I tried to turn a day of isolation into celebration, I realized there was nothing I could do to fix it. I got so drunk on the Zoom call that I ended up talking to someone’s sister on the phone somehow once everyone else fell asleep or logged off. I spent my birthday worrying about my father, hospitalized after a stroke and then a diagnosis of COVID-19 pneumonia just a couple of weeks prior. The pot roast came out dry. Party planning is hard, even without a pandemic in your way. After hosting the kids' suite at several weddings, I entertained the idea of creating a company that specializes in planning and chaperoning children’s parties. As a professional nanny, it is something I have already had years of experience doing - corralling a bunch of kids with various activities while their parents get drunk in the background. Even before COVID, celebrations were changing. The DIY/rustic wedding trend began a mainstream takeover of the more illustrious and debt-inducing services. My company holiday party was held at an escape room, a fun departure from the same reservation we made in the banquet room of the chain restaurant across the street. A part of my culture is to make a funeral a celebration of life instead of a dark reminder of our mortality, with worship music instead of a dirge. I have noticed that is becoming a more acceptable practice for others to honor their dead as well through recent years. But an essential part of the funeral is the repast, the meal afterward where, depending on which side of the family, drinking, smoking weed, and laughing along to stories about old times would go on for several hours, until there was nothing left to cry about. This cannot be a part of a Zoom service, and it cannot be done socially distant without embracing and passing the joint and joining hands in prayer. With another quarantine birthday approaching in April, I am left to wonder what the future of the celebration will look like for me, and for others, as we find our way through this pandemic into a new epoch of our human history. Whether we will continue to watch each other through our screens and cheers separately for months to come, I cannot say. We can all breathe a collective sigh of relief at what could be the very last of the era of “destination weddings.” My hope is that we can take that cheesy phrase, “together apart,” give it true significance, reimagining our long held traditions instead of yearning to return to them exactly as they were. I am reminded of the first New Year’s Eve I spent in an actual relationship, when I was about seventeen. Since neither of our parental units were the type to let us spend a holiday away from our own families at that age, we created a new tradition to replace a lost New Year’s kiss. We were on the phone counting down the ball drop, and at midnight, we both ate a Hershey’s Kiss. Mariah Moon is a writer from Detroit, Michigan. You can find her on Twitter at @mariahmmoon.
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