Truth or Tokobots

Maybe I’m getting old.

Maybe I just don’t have the chops anymore.

Or maybe I never had them to begin with.

I’ve never considered myself to be some kind of Fatal1ty- second place has always been good enough for me- but I like to think I’m no suxxor.

The truth is, though, that I told my friends and family I didn’t get into the semi-finals at the Nintendo Power Fest because I took an elbow from the asshole next to me in the middle of Rad Racer. That never happened. I was really just shit at Rad Racer.

And I said I lost the Street Fighter II: World Warrior tournament in the back of Lou’s Mini Putt Putt in the Chester Shopping Center because the other guy had already taken Blanka (you couldn’t use the same person back then and you only had your choice of, *gasp*, 8 characters) so I was stuck with E. Honda. But the other guy only had one hand.

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So a decade and change of delusion later, it’s a beautiful sunny Friday, and I’m coming home from work on NJ Transit. We’re stopped for some idiot freight train piddling along the track in front of us but I don’t care, figuring I’ll just fire up this light-hearted Tokobot game my big bro cracked for me.

I flip through my New Yorker during the intro, and breeze through the tutorial and first board before we reach Union. The second level starts out just as ho-hum, with me whipping and curb stomping my botz through some fat grimace-looking motherfuckers, and then I get to this elevator.



I take it up to the edge of this cliff, approaching with my guys lined up to hurl across the gap when- “blah blah blah blah blah! Press the R button to chain the tokobots together and press [] to hurl them across the blah blah blah blah-” yes, thank you, if you’ll just let me…I resume my advance on the precipice. Except the camera angle is such that I don’t so much leap across the abyss as walk into it.

Back at the elevator minus one heart. Fine. You live you learn, little setback never hurt anyone, I go back up. I recall from the tutorial (I really do pay attention to those things when they don’t belittle me too much) that the camera angle can be adjusted with the L button. Except it snaps the camera behind your back, which is the same angle that caused me to walk off the cliff in the first place. Not one to make the same mistake twice, I turn to face the wall, adjust the camera, and resume. But my movement after a couple steps centers the camera behind me. So I face the wall, re-adjust, and resume with the L button held down. This works for a second before activating first-person look mode. I take a deep breath and make my best attempt, but by this point I’ve shuffled right up to the edge and, lacking the requisite momentum, not so much walk off as tumble.

Two hearts down- this time for real. I line up the camera and make my leap, but it turns out you’re supposed to hold the R button down to chain the tokobots before jumping with X and pressing []. So at least I came closer this time.

Three-fifths dead and not fucking around anymore. I line up the camera, hurl the bots across, and climb up their backs to the other side. There’s another grimace except bigger, and fatter. He slides on his stomach toward me but I jam the analog stump to the right and deftly maneuver around him, off the cliff.

I finally got around the thing with one heart left, and, thank god, didn’t fall off the second cliff behind him, where I found a gear-turning, animated ledge-moving, tokobot hurling puzzle.

I just turned it off.

I haven’t lost my touch. I could get back to that stupid puzzle, maybe even with two or three hearts left. I could figure it out and slog through likely another 10 hours of abject depth-perception misery. But would I respect myself afterwards?

Tokobots. More like TokoFuckYourself.