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So this is not the 8+ page Samuraiden weirdass-pr0n-with-feelings epic I've been teasing on my Aethy acc. This was written in one day from conception to posting, and was inspired by that one Japan-exclusive Nintendo Switch Store game that's been blowing up the Internet. The idea of Hal Otacon Metal Gear playing it and raging over it (and Snavid subsequently getting uncharacteristically curious) has been living in my head rent free all day today, plus I figured it could easily have been made in Flash in the mid-aughts, so I decided to make up a serial-numbers-filed-off version of it that would make sense in that time period. So here y'all go. Enjoy.
Word count: 2389
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Dave shoved the door open, arms stacked with a load of fresh firewood. He carefully crept down the short flight of stairs to the living room in the house he and Hal shared. Taking a moment to catch his breath and switch gears into a new task, he set the stack down and began organizing it in the corner next to the wood stove that heated the house.
However, halfway through his task, he was interrupted by a sudden cry of anguish from the next room over. It was Hal, no doubt reacting badly to some main character's defeat in one of the numerous anime VHS's he'd brought with him when they moved in. Assuming he'd mentally recover soon enough, Dave went back to work, going back outside to get more once he'd cleared that stack of wood.
Once he re-entered the house, he heard Hal groan in despair again. Only this time, it was followed by him complaining out loud about someone or something not giving him the right vegetable. Confused, Dave put the next load of wood down by the door for a while and went to the den, hoping to find out what exactly Hal was getting upset over.
"What's up?" Dave asked, stepping into the small room decked with various memorabilia -- not just Hal's collection of anime merch, but also a few dog-mushing trophies and books on wilderness survival and military strategy that he himself had accumulated over the years. To his surprise, the TV was turned off, with no sign of any VHS's being recently played. However, the computer was on. And Hal was sitting in front of it, staring intensely at what looked to be some kind of game-over screen, at least from what Dave assumed based on the somewhat-familiar katakana reading ゲーム*オーベat the top of it.
Hal sucked in a stressed breath through his teeth before turning back to Dave. "This game has been eating away at my sanity," he said, pointing to the screen with a weary look on his face. "Do you see how close I was to getting a combo that could free up a ton of space? But no, they *had* to give me a pea instead of the tomato I needed to start the chain reaction!"
"T-- Tomato?" Dave asked, confused not only at what Hal was ranting about, but at the apparent premise of the game. Judging from the screenshot presented just below the katakana, there was a large jar filled with vegetables, most of which bore sad facial expressions. At the very top of the mountain of vegetables inside the jar, a single green pea poked out above a red line, implying that this was the vegetable that made the stack grow too high, thereby triggering a game-over.
"I think it's better if I showed you," Hal said, clicking one of the katakana-labelled buttons below the screenshot. After about half a minute's worth of reloading, a new game started up. The jar was now empty, with what looked like a miniscule white root vegetable hovering over the opening and bearing a small smile. "So they've started me off with a Hakurei turnip," Hal explained, pressing the left and right arrow keys to decide on a good starting point. "And once I drop it into the jar, they're gonna give me a pea." He pointed to the top-right corner of the screen, where a single, tiny green pea appeared in the centre of a gold circle with the caption "ネクスト”. He pressed the arrow keys a few more times before hitting the space bar, causing the small white turnip to drop into the lower-right corner of the jar.
"So now I've gotta decide where I wanna put this pea," Hal continued. "Now, they're giving me another pea next, so it'd probably be a good idea for me to drop this one close to the turnip. That way, I can drop the next pea next to the one I've got now..." He pointed to the bottom-right of the screen, where a group of vegetables were presented in the following sequence: peas, Hakurei turnips, onions, tomatoes, green peppers, potatoes, daikon radishes, what looked like a round cucumber, cabbages, squash, and finally, a large pumpkin with several small gold stars in front of it. All of the vegetables except for the pea wore smiles of increasing intensity, with the pumpkin bearing a wide-eyed, open-mouthed expression of ecstasy.
"And if you look over here, two peas will give me another turnip. And those two turnips together will give me an onion. Hopefully, if I play right, I'll keep moving through these vegetables until I get that pumpkin at the end. From what I've heard, only a handful of players have been able to get the pumpkin. Because as you get closer, the vegetables start getting bigger. And the bigger the vegetables, the harder it is to keep the jar from getting too full. And if you go over the red line... Well, you saw what happened, right?"
Dave said nothing, blinking a few times as he tried to process everything Hal had told him. "And they chose to give this game a cutesy vegetable theme... why, exactly?" he asked, still perplexed.
"I dunno. A lot of these Japanese flash games are like that. Anyway, if you need any help with the firewood, just gimme a call. I might need something to take my mind off of this if it gets stressful enough." Hal turned back to the screen, dropping the pea into the jar next to the turnip. Or at least intending to, because as soon as he dropped it, it bounced off and rolled to the left of the small white vegetable, leaving some space.
"Hm. I think I'll leave you to it," Dave said, turning back so he could return to his firewood organizing. As he stacked the chopped logs, he couldn't help but compare them to the smiling vegetables in Hal's game. He wondered why some cutesy Japanese flash game centred around organizing vegetables was giving Hal such a hard time. After all, he was doing something similar himself right now. Granted, the wood wasn't staring directly at him with a cloying grin, and there was no real limit to how high it could be stacked as long as it was reachable. But it didn't make sense to Dave, no matter how hard he thought about it. Eventually, he was able to push it to the back of his mind, mentally chiding himself for overthinking things. But no matter what, the idea never truly left his head, not even late at night when he was just about to tuck in.
_______________________
After laying there in the dark for about an hour, Dave couldn't stand it any longer. He couldn't believe he was about to do this, but he had to put that one thought of his to rest before he could sleep. Sliding out of bed, he pulled on a thick housecoat, turned on a flashlight, and crept downstairs to the den. Plugging a set of headphones into the speaker port so as not to wake Hal, he powered up the computer, waiting for it to fully boot up.
Once he got the dial-up connection working, he opened up the web browser and scanned through the history, wondering which of the links would open the game. He never caught a glimpse of the game's title or the website that hosted it, although he did know that it was a Japanese site, narrowing down the right location.
Sure enough, the first link in Japanese that he found led him to a somewhat familiar loading screen. As he watched the progress bar slowly fill, he prayed this would be the correct site... and that Hal wouldn't burst in and catch him. Not that he was doing anything that could seriously mess up the computer or his relationship with him -- it's just that he felt he had a reputation to uphold. Lucky for him, the game was able to load up without a hitch, and he was met with the title screen.
The large, bold katakana at the top read "パンプキン*ゲーム" -- "Pumpkin Game", if Dave read them correctly. In the centre of the screen, there was that familiar jar chock-full of smiling vegetables, with the ecstatic, gold-starred pumpkin right smack in the middle. This was it. This was the game that allegedly ate away at people's sanity. Still not believing Hal's claims about it, Dave clicked the leftmost button, one that would assumedly lead him to a new game.
Sneaking a peek behind his shoulder, Dave waited for the game to load. Once it was ready, he was greeted with an empty jar, the familiar interface of future vegetables and the order in which they'd multiply in size... and a selection of background music that sounded like it was played on cheap kindergarten instruments. Muting the game's volume and unplugging the headphones, Dave figured it'd probably be best not to have music on -- after all, if anything in this game would drive him crazy, it'd probably be that.
Taking a moment to strategize, he stared intently at the sparkly-eyed, smiling onion that hovered in mid-air over the lip of the jar. After fiddling around with the arrow keys, he hit the spacebar, dropping it in. It hit right where he was aiming. Glancing back up, he saw that his new vegetable was a pea, with another one to follow shortly after.
Remembering that two peas would fuse into a turnip, he aimed a little further away from the onion, dropping the pea down. He dropped the next pea right on top, causing the two to fuse together and become a tiny, white, smiley-faced turnip. Hal had to be messing with him -- this game was so simple a child could pick it up. But nevertheless, Dave continued, dropping vegetables into the jar and watching as some of them fused into larger, happier vegetables.
But as he noticed the larger vegetables start to stack up at the bottom with nothing to fuse with, he soon grew aware of the game's rage-inducing qualities. The game didn't seem to want to give him any vegetable larger than a tomato. And there were several stray peas and turnips getting in the way of the peppers and potatoes that would otherwise have fused into something bigger. Clearly Dave would have to use some strategy if he wanted to get farther. So he planned ahead using the limited information the game gave him, dropping new vegetables as close to their prospective mates as possible without potentially screwing up the rest of his run.
Sure enough, he was inching closer to the fabled pumpkin, watching as a series of white sparks flashed across the screen, causing a chain reaction that activated several veggie fusions. Turnips fused into onions, which fused into tomatoes... which unfortunately were incapable of fusing further because of a single stray pea lodged between them. And there was still a substantial amount of space between them and the larger vegetables that piled up inside the jar up to the halfway mark.
Dave understood Hal's pain now. Thanks to the game's unfair vegetable distribution rate and the unforgiving physics engine, he realized this round would very likely end in defeat. Yet the faintest mirage of a chance still remained -- one that he now refused to let go thanks to his ingrained urge to chase down victory at all costs. So he kept dropping the vegetables down, eyes affixed to the red line at the top of the jar and hoping his strategy kept the stack far away from it.
Eventually, with the well-placed drop of another tomato, a second chain reaction started, as the rapid-fire fusion of vegetables freed up well-needed space. But that alone wasn't what sent sparks of satisfaction through Dave's brain. The mere act of the fusing vegetables set his dopamine receptors off like fireworks. Somehow, it reminded him of the thrill of the battlefield, even though the design and object of the game was the furthest thing from actual warfare. Yeah, there was no way he could let Hal see him like this. He had no reason to be this glued to the game, and yet he was.
That thrill soon came to an end, however, when Dave realized he was inching closer still to the red line, thanks to the sheer size of the three cucumber-like vegetables occupying the bottom half of the jar and the vast amount of space created by the daikon and potatoes blocking them off. The usable space up top was getting fewer and further between with every new vegetable he dropped, and yet the chance of a chain reaction still remained. Torn whether to play it safe or cut loose, Dave's grip on the arm of the computer chair tightened like a vice as he dropped successive small peas and turnips, watching like a hawk as smaller fusions took place.
But just when he thought he'd make a breakthrough with the tomato he'd placed, he noticed the smiling faces on all the vegetables turn sour. The tomato was dropped too close over the red line to keep him in the game. This was it. He'd lost. The tension built up inside him snapped. His hands hit the computer desk as he groaned in disappointment. Why did the chance have to slip away? What should he had done different? Why did the game give him the most likely vegetable to end his run?
"...Dave?"
He whipped around, noticing Hal standing behind him just behind the den's threshold. For a long time, he said nothing, just staring back at Hal awkwardly. But when he finally spoke up, he said blankly: "There were three cucumbers."
"Those were bitter melons, I think," Hal answered just as blankly. "Anyway, I take it you got pretty deep in the zone at a few points?"
"Mm-hm." Dave knew there was no point in covering it up. He just kept staring at Hal, his blank face illuminated with the cold white glow of the flashlight. Saying nothing more, he logged himself out of the web browser and shut down the computer. "I'm going to bed."
"OK. Good night."
Word count: 2389
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Dave shoved the door open, arms stacked with a load of fresh firewood. He carefully crept down the short flight of stairs to the living room in the house he and Hal shared. Taking a moment to catch his breath and switch gears into a new task, he set the stack down and began organizing it in the corner next to the wood stove that heated the house.
However, halfway through his task, he was interrupted by a sudden cry of anguish from the next room over. It was Hal, no doubt reacting badly to some main character's defeat in one of the numerous anime VHS's he'd brought with him when they moved in. Assuming he'd mentally recover soon enough, Dave went back to work, going back outside to get more once he'd cleared that stack of wood.
Once he re-entered the house, he heard Hal groan in despair again. Only this time, it was followed by him complaining out loud about someone or something not giving him the right vegetable. Confused, Dave put the next load of wood down by the door for a while and went to the den, hoping to find out what exactly Hal was getting upset over.
"What's up?" Dave asked, stepping into the small room decked with various memorabilia -- not just Hal's collection of anime merch, but also a few dog-mushing trophies and books on wilderness survival and military strategy that he himself had accumulated over the years. To his surprise, the TV was turned off, with no sign of any VHS's being recently played. However, the computer was on. And Hal was sitting in front of it, staring intensely at what looked to be some kind of game-over screen, at least from what Dave assumed based on the somewhat-familiar katakana reading ゲーム*オーベat the top of it.
Hal sucked in a stressed breath through his teeth before turning back to Dave. "This game has been eating away at my sanity," he said, pointing to the screen with a weary look on his face. "Do you see how close I was to getting a combo that could free up a ton of space? But no, they *had* to give me a pea instead of the tomato I needed to start the chain reaction!"
"T-- Tomato?" Dave asked, confused not only at what Hal was ranting about, but at the apparent premise of the game. Judging from the screenshot presented just below the katakana, there was a large jar filled with vegetables, most of which bore sad facial expressions. At the very top of the mountain of vegetables inside the jar, a single green pea poked out above a red line, implying that this was the vegetable that made the stack grow too high, thereby triggering a game-over.
"I think it's better if I showed you," Hal said, clicking one of the katakana-labelled buttons below the screenshot. After about half a minute's worth of reloading, a new game started up. The jar was now empty, with what looked like a miniscule white root vegetable hovering over the opening and bearing a small smile. "So they've started me off with a Hakurei turnip," Hal explained, pressing the left and right arrow keys to decide on a good starting point. "And once I drop it into the jar, they're gonna give me a pea." He pointed to the top-right corner of the screen, where a single, tiny green pea appeared in the centre of a gold circle with the caption "ネクスト”. He pressed the arrow keys a few more times before hitting the space bar, causing the small white turnip to drop into the lower-right corner of the jar.
"So now I've gotta decide where I wanna put this pea," Hal continued. "Now, they're giving me another pea next, so it'd probably be a good idea for me to drop this one close to the turnip. That way, I can drop the next pea next to the one I've got now..." He pointed to the bottom-right of the screen, where a group of vegetables were presented in the following sequence: peas, Hakurei turnips, onions, tomatoes, green peppers, potatoes, daikon radishes, what looked like a round cucumber, cabbages, squash, and finally, a large pumpkin with several small gold stars in front of it. All of the vegetables except for the pea wore smiles of increasing intensity, with the pumpkin bearing a wide-eyed, open-mouthed expression of ecstasy.
"And if you look over here, two peas will give me another turnip. And those two turnips together will give me an onion. Hopefully, if I play right, I'll keep moving through these vegetables until I get that pumpkin at the end. From what I've heard, only a handful of players have been able to get the pumpkin. Because as you get closer, the vegetables start getting bigger. And the bigger the vegetables, the harder it is to keep the jar from getting too full. And if you go over the red line... Well, you saw what happened, right?"
Dave said nothing, blinking a few times as he tried to process everything Hal had told him. "And they chose to give this game a cutesy vegetable theme... why, exactly?" he asked, still perplexed.
"I dunno. A lot of these Japanese flash games are like that. Anyway, if you need any help with the firewood, just gimme a call. I might need something to take my mind off of this if it gets stressful enough." Hal turned back to the screen, dropping the pea into the jar next to the turnip. Or at least intending to, because as soon as he dropped it, it bounced off and rolled to the left of the small white vegetable, leaving some space.
"Hm. I think I'll leave you to it," Dave said, turning back so he could return to his firewood organizing. As he stacked the chopped logs, he couldn't help but compare them to the smiling vegetables in Hal's game. He wondered why some cutesy Japanese flash game centred around organizing vegetables was giving Hal such a hard time. After all, he was doing something similar himself right now. Granted, the wood wasn't staring directly at him with a cloying grin, and there was no real limit to how high it could be stacked as long as it was reachable. But it didn't make sense to Dave, no matter how hard he thought about it. Eventually, he was able to push it to the back of his mind, mentally chiding himself for overthinking things. But no matter what, the idea never truly left his head, not even late at night when he was just about to tuck in.
_______________________
After laying there in the dark for about an hour, Dave couldn't stand it any longer. He couldn't believe he was about to do this, but he had to put that one thought of his to rest before he could sleep. Sliding out of bed, he pulled on a thick housecoat, turned on a flashlight, and crept downstairs to the den. Plugging a set of headphones into the speaker port so as not to wake Hal, he powered up the computer, waiting for it to fully boot up.
Once he got the dial-up connection working, he opened up the web browser and scanned through the history, wondering which of the links would open the game. He never caught a glimpse of the game's title or the website that hosted it, although he did know that it was a Japanese site, narrowing down the right location.
Sure enough, the first link in Japanese that he found led him to a somewhat familiar loading screen. As he watched the progress bar slowly fill, he prayed this would be the correct site... and that Hal wouldn't burst in and catch him. Not that he was doing anything that could seriously mess up the computer or his relationship with him -- it's just that he felt he had a reputation to uphold. Lucky for him, the game was able to load up without a hitch, and he was met with the title screen.
The large, bold katakana at the top read "パンプキン*ゲーム" -- "Pumpkin Game", if Dave read them correctly. In the centre of the screen, there was that familiar jar chock-full of smiling vegetables, with the ecstatic, gold-starred pumpkin right smack in the middle. This was it. This was the game that allegedly ate away at people's sanity. Still not believing Hal's claims about it, Dave clicked the leftmost button, one that would assumedly lead him to a new game.
Sneaking a peek behind his shoulder, Dave waited for the game to load. Once it was ready, he was greeted with an empty jar, the familiar interface of future vegetables and the order in which they'd multiply in size... and a selection of background music that sounded like it was played on cheap kindergarten instruments. Muting the game's volume and unplugging the headphones, Dave figured it'd probably be best not to have music on -- after all, if anything in this game would drive him crazy, it'd probably be that.
Taking a moment to strategize, he stared intently at the sparkly-eyed, smiling onion that hovered in mid-air over the lip of the jar. After fiddling around with the arrow keys, he hit the spacebar, dropping it in. It hit right where he was aiming. Glancing back up, he saw that his new vegetable was a pea, with another one to follow shortly after.
Remembering that two peas would fuse into a turnip, he aimed a little further away from the onion, dropping the pea down. He dropped the next pea right on top, causing the two to fuse together and become a tiny, white, smiley-faced turnip. Hal had to be messing with him -- this game was so simple a child could pick it up. But nevertheless, Dave continued, dropping vegetables into the jar and watching as some of them fused into larger, happier vegetables.
But as he noticed the larger vegetables start to stack up at the bottom with nothing to fuse with, he soon grew aware of the game's rage-inducing qualities. The game didn't seem to want to give him any vegetable larger than a tomato. And there were several stray peas and turnips getting in the way of the peppers and potatoes that would otherwise have fused into something bigger. Clearly Dave would have to use some strategy if he wanted to get farther. So he planned ahead using the limited information the game gave him, dropping new vegetables as close to their prospective mates as possible without potentially screwing up the rest of his run.
Sure enough, he was inching closer to the fabled pumpkin, watching as a series of white sparks flashed across the screen, causing a chain reaction that activated several veggie fusions. Turnips fused into onions, which fused into tomatoes... which unfortunately were incapable of fusing further because of a single stray pea lodged between them. And there was still a substantial amount of space between them and the larger vegetables that piled up inside the jar up to the halfway mark.
Dave understood Hal's pain now. Thanks to the game's unfair vegetable distribution rate and the unforgiving physics engine, he realized this round would very likely end in defeat. Yet the faintest mirage of a chance still remained -- one that he now refused to let go thanks to his ingrained urge to chase down victory at all costs. So he kept dropping the vegetables down, eyes affixed to the red line at the top of the jar and hoping his strategy kept the stack far away from it.
Eventually, with the well-placed drop of another tomato, a second chain reaction started, as the rapid-fire fusion of vegetables freed up well-needed space. But that alone wasn't what sent sparks of satisfaction through Dave's brain. The mere act of the fusing vegetables set his dopamine receptors off like fireworks. Somehow, it reminded him of the thrill of the battlefield, even though the design and object of the game was the furthest thing from actual warfare. Yeah, there was no way he could let Hal see him like this. He had no reason to be this glued to the game, and yet he was.
That thrill soon came to an end, however, when Dave realized he was inching closer still to the red line, thanks to the sheer size of the three cucumber-like vegetables occupying the bottom half of the jar and the vast amount of space created by the daikon and potatoes blocking them off. The usable space up top was getting fewer and further between with every new vegetable he dropped, and yet the chance of a chain reaction still remained. Torn whether to play it safe or cut loose, Dave's grip on the arm of the computer chair tightened like a vice as he dropped successive small peas and turnips, watching like a hawk as smaller fusions took place.
But just when he thought he'd make a breakthrough with the tomato he'd placed, he noticed the smiling faces on all the vegetables turn sour. The tomato was dropped too close over the red line to keep him in the game. This was it. He'd lost. The tension built up inside him snapped. His hands hit the computer desk as he groaned in disappointment. Why did the chance have to slip away? What should he had done different? Why did the game give him the most likely vegetable to end his run?
"...Dave?"
He whipped around, noticing Hal standing behind him just behind the den's threshold. For a long time, he said nothing, just staring back at Hal awkwardly. But when he finally spoke up, he said blankly: "There were three cucumbers."
"Those were bitter melons, I think," Hal answered just as blankly. "Anyway, I take it you got pretty deep in the zone at a few points?"
"Mm-hm." Dave knew there was no point in covering it up. He just kept staring at Hal, his blank face illuminated with the cold white glow of the flashlight. Saying nothing more, he logged himself out of the web browser and shut down the computer. "I'm going to bed."
"OK. Good night."
