I mention my wife every so often in blog posts and videos, but I seldom talk about being married. I am lucky and blessed to have found someone so compatible with my interests, values, aspirations, and sense of humor. She is the best ever, really really really. [Editor's note: Don't go writing about your wife when she's sitting directly behind you and can swoop in to add her own sentences. Really really.]

::ahem::

The key here is not being identical, but compatible. Our political, social, and religious beliefs, for example, are anything but identical; however, we share enough common ground and are open-minded and articulate enough to have conversations about these topics that don't end in fisticuffs. We also thrive on making each other happy, so when one of us gets grumpy or depressed, the other one instinctively goes into damage control mode until morale improves. It's rare for us both to be in a lousy mood, because we don't share all the same emotional triggers. We're not identical, but we are compatible. Or, as Oblivion would put it, "We are an effective team."

As is to be expected from two people in constant company with each other, some of our mannerisms, idiosyncrasies, tastes, and opinions have rubbed off on each other. Our compatibility makes us malleable, particularly in areas where we have no strong opposition to change. She talks with her hands and listens to James Taylor more often than she used to, she makes video game references from games she's never even played, and she can name all the Mega Man bosses from the main games in the series (and sing most of their theme songs). She's influenced me a great deal as well:

- I routinely overtip at restaurants. Call it a greater appreciation of working in the service industry, as my wife once did...or call it adopted laziness, because 20% is easier to figure out than 15%.

- We meow at each other. Like cats. This is a surprisingly efficient mode of communication, because with the proper inflection we can convey queries about where the other person is going, or annoyance at the other person stealing our last bite of brownie, in a single meow.

- Meow meow meow me—oh, sorry. Forgot I wasn't just writing this for my wife. I've become decidedly more Earth-conscious (and I was already pretty good about switching off lights and recycling) and slightly more sympathetic to the vegetarian cause. I've had a salad for lunch once or twice.

- I listen to David Bowie. Outside of "Space Oddity" and "Changes," I didn't care much for the minimal exposure I'd had to his music before meeting my wife the superfan. Now I can truthfully say I like Bowie's work, but ironically, I prefer his more recent material (circa Reality), which my wife seems to like least. Again: compatible, but not identical.

- I go on regular cleaning sprees. This may merely be a consequence of having twice the number of people in the home, thereby doubling the amount of work and halving the amount of time between cleaning sprees, but I find myself being far more attentive to dishes and laundry than I ever was in my old apartment on my own (as my poor sister, who lived with me for a summer, can attest to).

- Other people don't seem so weird anymore. Trust me, this is a compliment. Her acceptance and understanding of alternate lifestyles has helped me to see beyond the labels people bear. I still don't like or agree with everyone I meet and hear about, but I'm also not as quick to judge.

- I wear cologne. And I've figured out how to apply it without bathing in it. Apparently women like it when you do that.

- The ratio of Asian to American movies I watch has become far less unequal. Netflix has a wide variety of subtitled films from China, Korea, Japan, and elsewhere, and my wife has every one of them on the Instant Queue. Actually, that's an exaggeration; she has every anime on Netflix in the Instant Queue, but I watch more of those, too.

- I know what a philtrum is. The mind boggles at how frequently this term has come up in our relationship.

- I need to consciously restrain myself from making a kissy noise and saying "I love you" every time I'm getting off the phone with anybody at work.

- I let my facial hair have free run of my face. I still shave on occasion, but the pouty face and dejected "meow" I get in return are the driving factors behind why my chiseled jawline primarily stays ensconced in fur year-round.

- I've become more sensitive. I used to be a cold snowman, switching off my emotions as a defense mechanism any time I read a tragic news article, heard about some outrageous inequality, witnessed anything deeply unsettling—I might've gotten emotional about my personal life, but I taught myself to resist feeling anything about things that didn't affect me personally. Too much pain and anger in this life to get worked up about more of it than necessary. My wife weeps for every plane crash, bleeds for every person unfairly denied the same benefits and privileges the rest of us get. I've started to reopen my heart to people in situations beyond my control, praying more earnestly for those I've never met; though it hurts sometimes, it makes me feel more human.

The list goes on. Funny to think about how much the people in a relationship can shape each other. You hardly notice until you take a step back and consider how much you've changed. Extended exposure to anything makes an impact on us, one way or another. Better for compatible people to gradually become more like each other, I think, than to lose your identity trying to conform to someone with whom you're not compatible—unless you don't like the person you are in the first place.

The woman I love brings out the best in me, or at least the silly and innocuously different in me. I know I do the same for her. We may not be identical, but we don't have to be—this relationship works, in no small part, because we naturally compliment and balance each other in our similarities and our differences. Sometimes it just sounds like we're meowing at each other, but that's a sign we're growing toward each other as the years go by.

There's a fascinating website called Ex Astris Scientia (EAS), which is a Brobdingnagian compendium of Star Trek data—everything from starship galleries to timelines to forgotten alien emblems across every flavor of Trek. In contrast to Memory Alpha, a straightforward wiki with minimal commentary on the facts discussed therein, Bernd Schneider's Star Trek site picks apart the littlest details of the long-running franchise and presents some thought-provoking observations and arguments about how everything we know about Star Trek fits together (or doesn't fit together, for that matter). While the rest of us are watching cool action sequences with ships blowing up everywhere, Bernd is trying to figure out why the USS Defiant can't decide whether it's 50 or 200 meters long when compared to the sizes of the other ships it's flying alongside.

This absurd attention to detail is right up my alley.

Yes, EAS points out countless inconsistencies with everything from warp travel to Klingon physiology, but you'd be hard-pressed to create an airtight continuity with five decades of writers, directors, set designers, prop masters, actors, and so forth making their various contributions to the canon. Of course there will be issues—and with this level of scrutiny, practically anything can be shown to contain some degree of human error. After reading through the exhaustive lists of definite and probable continuity mistakes in J.J. Abrams' reboot universe as well as the preceding ten TOS and TNG films, and after digesting two refreshingly longwinded and nitpicky reviews of the latest films, I think I've finally come to terms with the Abramsverse...and it's thanks to the mistakes of the old Trek.

When you look at the inconsistencies with the Prime Timeline movies, you find some unexplained extra scorch marks on the Enterprise hull between STII and STIII, a turboshaft that reaches Deck 78 on a starship with no more than 23 decks, and some confusion about whether the Son'a are a whole race of people or merely a merry little family of face-stretching misfits. Logic and precedent are occasionally flexible for dramatic effect, minor historical details are sometimes fudged or overlooked, and the writers don't always consider the ramifications of introducing big new ideas, such as a sub-culture of Romulans who we swear have been here the whole time. Still, the majority of glaring continuity issues from ST:TMP to Nemesis can technically be explained away if we're creative enough, or swept under the rug as an obvious but essentially harmless goof.

When you look at the reboot, you see the USS Kelvin firing phasers mere seconds after the weapons are reported to be offline, an astoundingly massive starship (the Vengeance) being constructed in utter secrecy in less than a year (it took 20 years to build the Enterprise-D!), and the only time travel story in Star Trek history where the time-traveler (Spock) makes no effort whatsoever to restore the timeline to its original state. It's not free will, but rather destiny that guides these characters. The Abramsverse disengages itself from all the wrong parts of Star Trek, abandoning a fidelity to canon and an attentiveness to the logic of any given situation. Freed from these shackles, it can boldly go absolutely anywhere it wants...which, ironically, is back to Nemesis and Wrath of Khan, but in a format more accessible to youngsters who've never seen Star Trek but will watch it if it looks like what they had wanted the Star Wars prequels to be.

As summer action flicks based on a popular sci-fi property, these new movies are a great success...but as a reboot of the Star Trek franchise, they are an abject failure. One, they aren't really a reboot; two, they aren't really Star Trek. They are half-remakes more influenced by Star Wars than the show they're based on, and from my own observations and from what I've read on EAS, it's clear to me that the new movies fall spectacularly short of meeting the standards laid out by every other Star Trek. Even the worst of Star Trek—"Plato's Stepchildren," "Genesis," "Threshold," and "These Are the Voyages...", for my money—has its heart in the right place, even if the execution is uncomfortable, ridiculous, or downright awful. Whereas old Trek tries to tell a good sci-fi story and does't always succeed, nuTrek uses somebody else's universe as a playground for gonzo action sequences and tells a story that isn't even internally consistent, let alone in relation to the rest of the universe.

Yes, it's fun to watch these new movies, but I can get fun anywhere. I would've loved the Abramsverse as pure remakes, a pure reboot, or something that didn't claim to be Star Trek but was otherwise identical--I don't hate these movies. But when I order a bacon cheeseburger with onion and lettuce, I expect a bacon cheeseburger with onion and lettuce, not a turkey burger topped with blue cheese, vegetarian bacon, scallions, and cabbage. It might look the same from a distance, and it might even taste great, but it's not what I ordered.

Was it possible to reboot Star Trek without incurring the ire of curmudgeonly fans such as myself? Absolutely—though I think Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future is a big enough place that we could've had another 50 years in the same continuity before even starting to consider the need for a reboot. After all, there's plenty of the Beta and Gamma Quadrants left to explore, there's a lot of history to fill between ENT and TOS, I hear the USS Titan is a fine ship, there's no telling what the universe might be like a century after Nemesis, we've never had a TV series at Starfleet Academy or centered around anyone non-Starfleet, and a Eugenics Wars movie could be interesting...but nah, let's do Kirk again.

Tell me how this sounds instead:

EARTH, 2385: Scene opens in a classroom at Starfleet Academy. Camera pans across a sea of diverse students—humans, primarily, but the likes of a Denobulan, Edosian, Caitian, Bolian, Vulcan, Klingon, Tellarite, Trill, and a Benzite or two make up a fair portion of the class. The instructor begins to speak. "Suppose..." At that moment, one last student attempts, unsuccessfully, to slip into the room without detection. "Suppose you're late for class," the familiar accented voice continues. "Again." Chuckles from the class. We see the instructor is none other than Miles O'Brien.

"Except this time it's not just a...a slap on the wrist, or a few points off your next test."

"Or being pulled out of recreation hour to practice Vulcan meditation with Professor Somak, who won't let you go until he's convinced you've learned the value of every minute," interjects one of the students. More chuckles.

"Or that," continues O'Brien with a half smile. "This time, the Academy wants to expel you. Off you go, back to your family farm in Kendra Province, or your old job shelving bottles of yamok sauce on Pelios Station. Of course, you don't want to go back. You want to stay here with your friends, attending Professor O'Brien's riveting lectures. So you do what any soon-to-be-expelled Starfleet Academy student would do: you find a way to travel back in time to fix your mistake before it happens."

O'Brien asks a few students in rapid succession about their preferred method of time travel. Chronitons and triolic waves. Time portals. The slingshot effect. Politely ask the nearest omnipotent being to send you back. Wait a few centuries and hitch a ride to the past on an Aeon-class vessel. The class grows more animated with each comment.

"What about you, Professor O'Brien?" asks one of the students, bringing a fleeting hush of curiosity to the room.

"The holodeck." Another round of chuckles. "I hate temporal mechanics. At least with a holodeck, the past is just a holographic simulation. You can make mistakes without worrying about how they'll affect the future you came from. No matter where the story takes you, no matter how much you change history, your home is still there, just beyond the doors, same as it was when you left it. And no one's going to stop you if you want to help the Texans win the Battle of the Alamo for once...well, no one except Santa Anna."

O'Brien smiles to himself for a moment. Clearing his throat, "But, somebody's got to watch the engine room when the captain orders a slingshot around the sun, and that's what we'll be talking about today."

Fast forward to the end of class. O'Brien steps out a little too quickly into a busy hallway, and Chakotay—now a professor of Anthropology at the Academy—slams right into O'Brien's bad shoulder. I haven't worked out the rest of it from there, but I figure they exchange dialogue as they walk, tying up a few loose ends from the TV shows in passing ("My family on Dorvan V says you'd almost never know the Cardassians had been there"), foreshadowing a little bit of what's to come, and hinting at the whereabouts of people we haven't heard from in forever ("Starfleet Medical is planning to expand next year; Katherine Pulaski asked me to look over some of the schematics"). They pass a group of students and teachers huddled around a viewscreen, and stop to take a look: it's a live news report of [insert situation that sets the plot in motion—the destruction of Romulus, for example].

TIME TRAVEL ensues! Doesn't need to be obvious time travel, either; whatever's featured on the news may simply vanish, for example, or appear to be sucked into a black hole, or what have you.

EARTH, 2159: Orbital shipyard—perhaps Copernicus, or San Francisco, or Utopia Planitia. A nice, long shot of a handful of starships in various stages of construction. Work Bees go about their business. All is pleasant. Then all heck breaks loose. Whatever it was that disappeared from the news broadcast in 2385—say, Nero's ship—suddenly appears, and begins firing on the shipyard. Widespread destruction, and half-built ships nearly fly themselves apart as they mobilize to defend the shipyard. NX-02, the Columbia, soon joins the fray. NX-01, the Enterprise, isn't far behind. The attacker, enraged at being unable to find what they were looking for, warps away (possibly in search of another means of time travel to get to when they want to be), leaving the shipyard in ruins and the ships—the ones that survived—in no condition to go anywhere.

EARTH, 2267 (or 2255, if we insist on having characters too young to plausibly run the ship): Oh, look. It's James T. Kirk.

There, J.J. I've set things up for you. An olive branch has been extended to the fans of TNG, DS9, VOY, and ENT. Maybe it's not a gripping space battle right off the bat with heroic self-sacrifice and women dramatically going into labor IN SPAAAACE! But spending six or seven minutes in Starfleet Academy, or anywhere else in the Prime Universe, might be all it takes to get a curmudgeonly fan invested in the new direction of the franchise. We haven't forgotten about you, and we still care about this universe—we're just excited to put a new spin on it, and we hope you'll come with us. And blowing up a whole shipyard in the early days of Starfleet seems like it'd do a whole heap more to affect the timeline than blowing up just one, a ship whose only notable accomplishment was that it carried both of Kirk's parents, in a century when Earth has more ships to spare anyhow.

I'm sure Bernd would have a field day with my movie.

Ah...victory. What better way to come out of a losing streak than by winning something for a change?

It only took me 59 hours and 12 minutes, but I have at long last completed—not beaten, but 100% completed--Mega Man X: Command Mission. The last time I explored every nook and cranny of an RPG was three years ago, when I played through Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls, slogged through all the bonus dungeons, ran in circles in the hopes that this random encounter would complete the last entry in my Bestiary, and swore I would never again dump that much time into such wasteful sidequests and achievements in a game. Since then I've passed up 100% completion on everything from Golden Sun: Dark Dawn to Mega Man ZX Advent with minimal or no remorse, and little ambition to ever go back and fill in the gaps. What was so different with Command Mission?

For starters, it was fun. I should've realized this far sooner in life: Fun is what should encourage me to keep playing a game, not the fact that there's so much left to do. Solid gameplay, varied challenges, visually appealing locations, interesting character models, and catchy atmospheric music made for an enjoyable and engrossing experience. I liked the character customization, the freedom to explore and backtrack at my own pace, and—though the plot and dialogue could use some work—the way the story expanded the Mega Man X universe while still paying homage to what came before. Command Mission delivered so much of what I look for in an RPG while still feeling like a proper Mega Man game; pursuing 100% completion, for the most part, was merely an excuse to keep playing this game I was enjoying so much. For once, I wanted to tie up those loose ends to see everything the game had to offer, not to avoid some sense of guilt about giving up too soon.

Another crucial factor was the way the optional material was integrated into the main game. When I played Final Fantasy VII for the first time a few months ago, I was prepared to wholly commit myself to 100% completion...up until I read about breeding and racing Chocobos. It didn't matter that I liked the game enough to subject myself to impossible optional bosses and endless grinding for rare items—anything having to do with Chocobos might as well have been a separate game entirely, of a genre I had neither the patience nor skill to beat. In contrast, Command Mission's optional content never asks you to do anything you aren't already doing; normal gameplay is rewarded with some extras, exceptional gameplay is rewarded with more extras, and the rest are the rewards of thorough searching and persistent fighting. In other words, if you're good enough to beat the game, you're good enough to complete it—no unrelated racing skill or complicated spreadsheets required.

What's also critical is that the extras are worthwhile. More Action Trigger options; stronger Hyper Mode transformations; better Force Metals to equip; different scarves for X to wear; neat concept art; cool figurines of the friends and foes you've encountered...whether for their artistic value or their impact on the gameplay, the unlockables in Command Mission are so much more than some silly golden crown next to a challenge you've completed. Sure, some of the rewards might feel silly or pointless, but they're at least tangible rewards.

Furthermore, Command Mission is very transparent about most of its secrets. Almost everything unlockable is neatly organized into lists and collections so you can easily track your progress. The in-game map aids with collection quests, indicating where any items are in each room (albeit in a poorly chosen color that blends in with the rest of the map). You can equip the Analyzer Force Metal to see exactly which items can be stolen from each enemy, and which items they might randomly drop when defeated. Finding all the secrets might be a challenge, but the game makes every effort to let you know they exist—and best of all, it's never too late to go after Perfect Game status, because there's always a way to go back and get whatever you've missed.

It's been a long time since I put this much effort into completing a game, but it's been even longer since it's been worth it to complete a game. Granted, those last few hours of grinding for a Tractor Net and systematically retracing my steps to discover that one overlooked Sub-Tank part were a bit tedious—but it's better to run around in circles in a game you enjoy, isn't it?

I don't necessarily mind losing. Sometimes it's my own darn fault—I bet against poor odds, discarded something I should have saved, didn't pay enough attention to the board, got sloppy trying to rush through a stage, etc. If I can blame myself for the failure, and learn from my mistakes for next time, I'm usually cool with it. If my opponent is simply better than me, I'm often okay with that, too. Provided I've played my best, I don't mind conceding to someone who has more experience or natural talent, so long as they're not being a jerk about winning. I can even live with the times when I should win, but my opponent gets lucky or bests me at a critical moment that turns the tide of the game. I play games to have fun; winning is merely a bonus, but one that should be both visible at all times, no matter how far out of reach it may be.

I have been losing a lot these past few weeks, and I'm getting tired of it. Pardon me for a few paragraphs as I get this tirade out of my system.

After spending hours trying to record the perfect 10-minute boss rush for my YouTube playthrough of Mega Man 7, I finally had a good, useable take...which I had to throw out when I discovered the video was unwatchably choppy: I had overlooked a single setting I always have in place before recording. After hours of retrying, I finally came up with an equally good take...which I had to throw out because being on Skype earlier that day had recalibrated my audio settings, so the clip was recorded without sound. As much as I enjoy MM7, I wasn't spending two days straight replaying the same 10-minute span of the game just for fun. I was playing to win, and I lost. Twice.

Having recently played 8-player Mario Party 7 with some friends, I've been on a Mario Party kick, trying to unlock more of what the games have to offer in advance of the next time we have guests over. My wife and I have both been chipping away at various games in the series, and we've discovered one critical flaw with the solo Story Modes: nearly all the 1 vs. 1 Duel games are a matter of button mashing or sheer luck, and the computer doesn't have to physically press the buttons on the controller, fight off button-mashing fatigue, or guess which rope is arbitrarily the right one to pull. Humans need to overcome their corporeal handicap before they can stand a chance against a computer opponent of supposedly equal skill. There's little joy in playing a game when the challenges are deliberately or—worse—unthinkingly rigged in favor of an opponent who should be able to hold their own.

Not even the mindless grinding of Mega Man X: Command Mission could provide me a break from losing. Now that I've beaten the main game, I'm off to clean up the last of the optional material—Force Metal recipes and Treasure Tokens and rare item drops. As close as I am to marking this game off my Backloggery as Completed, I've been willing to put in the extra hours to have another Mega Man game under my belt that I've played inside and out, especially when it's mostly a matter of following a checklist and waiting for enemies to drop rare items. Well, last night I spent something like an hour and a half going through different paths of the Eternal Forest, which is an enemy gauntlet with no save points in sight. Halfway through the last battle before the exit, my GameCube crashed. That lovely black screen with white text that instructs you to consult your manual to see what the problem is. Sorry, Nintendo; my manual's not going to tell me how to recover nearly two hours of gameplay and that rare item drop I'd been trying forever to get. I lost again.

Then I decided to try fighting the first of nine optional post-game bosses again. The first time I'd tried was a disaster: no matter how much damage my party pumped out, the boss was recovering to maximum health every round. Clearly, I would need to level up, and come back to the battle with my strongest characters using their strongest attacks right out of the gate. That's exactly what I did, and it helped—it took the boss two rounds, instead of one, to get back to max health. I lost again.

Unlike any other boss battle, there was no way to salvage this—a single turn doing anything other than railing on the boss, and you might as well have marched into the battle with half your health and all your Hyper Mode activations exhausted. Like that accursed Neo Shinryu dragon boss in Final Fantasy V Advance, or—actually, all the examples I'm coming up with are from Final Fantasy games—you need to have a very specific party lineup with exactly the right equipment follow a precise strategy with no room for error or improvisation. Otherwise, you won't survive the first round, let alone the entire battle. A difficult fight requiring adaptable strategies is a challenge; a boss like this is a gimmick, and it strains my patience to guess at the exact combination of factors required to reveal that victory is possible in the first place.

All the walkthroughs say this is an easy boss. Just do these seven things that have to be executed perfectly, and he's a cinch. Silly me, I'm only doing six of these things and can't seem to get his health below maximum for more than fifteen seconds at a clip. You'll forgive me if I'm not enjoying blind trial-and-error to see if this strategy will keep me from having to reload the game, spend five minutes reorganizing my party, spend five minutes getting from the save point to the boss, and find out in the first few turns that all my preparations were a waste of time.

But hey, I at least managed to shut off the game without tripping over the power cord, so maybe I'm not a total failure after all.

Back in college, I started a little project to watch Star Trek. What started out as a simple matter of borrowing the first season of Next Generation from the library soon turned into a mission that would make V'Ger proud: Buy all that is buyable; watch all that is watchable. I set out to own every film and season of every Star Trek, systematically watching them with my roommate, my family, my wife, and anyone else who would join me on this five-year mission. Which turned into two five-year missions. Which...very well may turn into three five-year missions if I get too distracted by Doctor Who.

But last night was a triumph, for my wife and I finished Deep Space Nine.

I'm no stranger to long, drawn-out projects. Look at any of my Mega Man videos for YouTube—this latest recording endeavor, a playthrough of Mega Man 7, had been on hold for over a year. But in the last two months, I went from having only the intro stage recorded to having everything but the final stage and end credits. Over the course of this past week, my wife and I marathoned the entire second half of DS9's seventh and final season. More than likely, tonight we'll be watching the Season 3 finale of Voyager or kicking off Enterprise with the double-length pilot episode. Things are picking up, and it's exciting.

There's something to be said for a leisurely pace—taking my time through The Original Series and The Next Generation was enjoyable, because I'd already seen many, if not most, of the episodes and savoring the continual presence of my favorite sci-fi franchise in my weekly routine. An episode here and there was fine by me.

Things were different by the time we got to Deep Space Nine—I'd watched most of the first two seasons (and a scant handful of episodes after that) when the show was first on the air, but lost interest when they didn't boldly go anywhere! Now, two decades later, I have a greater appreciation of the character interactions and darker themes explored by the show. Entranced by the compelling stories and recognizing the huge gap in my Star Trek education that demanded to be filled, I was eagerly watching two, three, even four episodes at a clip whenever we sat down to watch DS9. I was hooked.

As soon as I had my first special weapon for this playthrough of Mega Man 7, I started discovering and remembering all the ways I can show off and goof around in the game. I was having a blast—some of the most fun I've ever had recording videos for YouTube, in fact--and couldn't wait to (a) try my hand at the next stage, and (b) share my enthusiasm for this oft-derided game with the online community. I was hooked.

Having spent so much time with the same few projects in progress, it is supremely gratifying to reach a major milestone, an ending, or even a point where I can see a milestone or an ending. It's rejuvenating to actively feel the anticipation of starting the next phase of something. I've set aside my other side projects to concentrate on these two, but I think I've needed a break from all the short-term satisfactions of blog posts I write in an hour and chipping away at one of the random movies on our ponderous Netflix Instant Queue. It's become a fact of life that I always have two Star Trek series and a Mega Man game going at any given time...but turning the status quo into a temporary situation with a clear endpoint is what I needed—and what I suspect we all need, sometimes—to pull me out of a comfortable rut and place me on a fresh path that's even better.

Looking back at my online endeavors, I see that June was a time of creative renewal. With a fresh perspective on my writing and a rekindled enthusiasm for recording, I'm very satisfied with what I was able to produce—and there was plenty more going on behind the scenes, as usual.

This Blog:

One incidental verbal kick in the pants was all it took to shake me out of the bitter, complaint-filled rut I had fallen into. This is what happens when I smile, let my brain wander, and trade in emotion-fueled criticism for objective critique.

- Retrospective: May 2013
- I Used to Be Funny Once
- Top Five of the Last Five
- Every Doctor Who
- Impermanence

GameCola:

My attention was completely elsewhere this month. This barely counts as participation, considering the podcast was recorded in May, the first Q&AmeCola response was also written in May, and the second one was a hasty at-the-deadline addition after initially having nothing to contribute.

Columns:
- Q&AmeCola: Most Exciting Thing at E3 2013
- Q&AmeCola: Worst Playthrough

Podcasts:
- GC Podcast #62: Game Companies Hate the Players

YouTube:

It felt good to be back on a regular recording schedule. Anyone keeping up with my Facebook page saw me change my cover photo at least once a week to reflect the stage I was currently practicing for my long-awaited playthrough of Mega Man 7. At the same time, I finally got around to assembling videos of the Crystalis-themed Dungeons & Dragons podcast I DMmed (DM'd?) for GameCola toward the end of last year. I also had the pleasure of helping my buddy Dash Jump edit the footage of our Mega Man 8 livestream down to a length YouTube would tolerate, breaking the game into the first of two parts.

GeminiLaser:
- Mega Man 7 Teaser

GCDotNet:
- Crystalis D&Dcast - Part 1: The Adventure Begins...If We Ever Leave the Inn
- Crystalis D&Dcast - Part 2: Cave Story
- Crystalis D&Dcast - Part 3: The Slippery Slope
- Crystalis D&Dcast - Part 4: Like Stealing +9 Armor From a Baby
- Crystalis D&Dcast - Part 5: Don't Entrust Your Corpse to These Heroes
- Crystalis D&Dcast - Part 6: Killer Queen

DashJumpTV:
- Megathon 2012: Mega Man 8 (PlayStation) - Part I

The Backloggery:

Don't...don't judge me. I needn't remind you that I am a student of old video games, playing them for the exposure as often as for my own amusement. GOG.com had another one of their dirt-cheap sales on game bundles; I figured I'd give Leisure Suit Larry a chance. Decidedly more mature (or possibly immature) than my usual fare, but nonetheless a classic adventure game series I'd never tried. Unbeknownst to me, they slipped another "adult" game into the bundle, which I have dutifully added to my collection in the off chance my curiosity gets the better of me. The things I do to call myself a Sierra fan.

Also on the list are a game from the Humble Something-or-Other Bundle I was gifted with a few Christmases ago, an RPG that's consumed more hours than I've allowed any RPG to consume since the SNES era, and a long-neglected omission from the short list of other people's games I beat but never owned. (Seriously, how did I miss that?)

New:
- Mega Man X4  (PS)
- Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (EGA)  (PC)
- Leisure Suit Larry 1: In the Land of the Lounge Lizards (VGA)  (PC)
- Leisure Suit Larry 2: Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places)  (PC)
- Leisure Suit Larry 3: Passionate Patti in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals  (PC)
- Leisure Suit Larry 5: Passionate Patti Does a Little Undercover Work  (PC)
- Leisure Suit Larry 6: Shape Up or Slip Out! (VGA)  (PC)
- Leisure Suit Larry 6: Shape Up or Slip Out! (SVGA)  (PC)
- Softporn Adventure  (PC)

Started:
- Jolly Rover  (Steam)

Beat:
- Jolly Rover  (Steam)
- Mega Man X: Command Mission  (GCN)
- Mega Man X4  (PS)

Resolutions for July: Release Part 1 of Mega Man 7, play Command Mission to 100% completion, ignore GOG.com and its dirt-cheap game bundle sales.