Occam Thoughts: Things I Cherish

Hello everyone. How are you? How's the weather where you are? Its cold here. I'm wearing a robe currently and sipping a Bud Light Lime. I feel like a metrosexual Nescafe commercial. A while back community member Randombullseye posted a blog featuring some of his cherished Godzilla toys with some of his cherished games. Well, I Ioved the concept of it so much that I decided to do my own combination of stuff/games that I cherish. Thanks for the idea, Random. So without further ado, I give you all some of my favorite games with some of my favorite stuff:




-Here we have my Juggernaut figure with my copy of The Secret of Mana. I like the raw strength and blue collar persona of Cain Marko coupled with the gentle, more playful style of Secret of Mana. Its like someone has the word "fisting" tattooed on the neck but its in a very dainty script.




-This is my copy of Xenogears standing next to my crushed marble cast of Mary's face from the Pieta. The Pieta, as we all know, is Michelangelo's statue of the Virgin Mary holding a recently deceased Jesus. It has always reminded me of beauty and grace and the raw potential of mankind. Xenogears made me aware that video games could be complex and thought provoking without sacrificing beauty or style. These two were made for each other in my wizard eyes.





-One of my most cherished comic books along with a game that kept me in good stead long into my young adult years. Picked the comic up at a shop a few years back and felt like a piece of the puzzle fell into place. The game has been crushed into my heart like a digital bear hug and stuck behind my eyes since I was 12. As a life long fan of the Punisher, I have to say that these two items are my most cherished possessions regarding Frank Castle.




-Earthbound. A prosthetic claw arm. Two things that make me a better man and arguably the best Occam I know how to be. When I found Earthbound I was but a boy, lost in the dark wood of puberty, grasping blindly at the concept of boobs and the Grunge movement. Then Earthbound broke the hormonal chains that bound me and I was free to experience life in its most sacred and profane moments. This game is a life changer in terms of how you see video games. The prosthetic claw arm is memento from a time when medical science was a bit more draconian in how it dealt with people. But as scary as the claw can be, there is also a certain badass quality to it. Like yeah, I might be missing an arm but I could pinch your nipple off and eat it like a pepperoni if you fuck with me. There's a cold comfort to be found in that thought.




-Cthulhu with his deathless sleep in R"yleh has always been a monster I admired. Trapped. Waiting. Cephalopod. I think we can all relate to the ideas of being stuck and waiting for our moment to shine (or devour the souls of the human race, either/or). Now Rule of Rose, that's a rare gem. This game is without a doubt one of the most fucked up games I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing. In the same way the thought of a city designed using Non-Euclidian geometry makes my head ache, so do the memories of the horrifying cut scenes of Rule of Rose. I want to recommend this game to all of you but I'm not sure if its a matter of "had to be there" much like being a life long U2 fan or if the subversiveness of it would get under your skin and fester.




-These are the crown jewels of my strategy collection tiara. The Earthbound guide especially with its clay figures for enemy portraits and scratch and sniff cards felt so right to a young named Occam. These games had a huge part in my education and upbringing as a child of the 90's who played video games. They are the foundation on which I would grow to build my likes and loves for rpg's and story and characters and video game music and so many other aspect of the medium. These guides are damn near friends to me, in part because I'm a dreamer and in part because I was in a boating accident that left me with minor brain damage so I talk to inanimate objects.




-Fun fact: Dark Crystal is my favorite movie of all time. Its a perfect creative moment for me so in my adult years I have tried to acquire tangible manifestations of that love. Enter my statues. I'm proudest of my Garthim I think. Its a beautiful design, cold and wicked and neat. Now Jet Grind Radio is another perfect creative moment for me. I remember playing this game and something suddenly clicking in my head like I'd just figured out I was the kwisatz haderach of my own world. I know a lot of good and wonderful folk who cite this game as awakening a desire in them to search out new art and music and try something new. How lovely is that?




-Shadow Hearts: Covenant will go down in history as one of the most creative, quirky (not in that fake Zooey Deschanel way) and imaginative rpg's ever. There is a character who is a vampire luchador that at one point uses a model of the Nautilus submarine as a weapon. Jesus Christ folks, thats a perfect fucking sentence to me. Along with this glorious game is my sleepy kitty, Pris. If I ever get married she will be the ring bearer. Along with her is my fetal rat Templeton. He's a tad bit anti-semetic but we are working on that.




-I remember playing the digital shit out of this game in high school. I loved it. The Ra-Serus on your arm that grew as you leveled, the fighting styles, the creatures you could summon. It was like a book I never wanted to put down. So my friends and I played this and completed it and we still talk about how much fun we had playing it. My copy sits proudly next to my General Dog picture. I don't know much about General Dog beyond the fact that the war took his family and left his heart cold and his mind hell bent on destroying the enemy. Oh and that he comes in an antique frame. So that's neat.




-Final Fantasy 2 (as my cartridge says) is one of those games that helped define a genre for a generation. It, along with Final Fantasy 3 (as my cartridge says) were the two games that got me into this whole "video game" craze and kept me going well into puberty. The Rancor has to be one of my favorite Star Wars toys ever. It looks like King Kong fucked a giant flea and this was made. Its that hard "brain a new born" plastic that they stopped using when toys had to be safe in the mid 90's. Its just a great toy. So my Rancor holds Final Fantasy 2 high above its head. There's pride in its eyes and bits of Gamorean flesh in between its teeth.




-As some of you may know, Mike Haggar is my biological father. He's a good man who stands up for whats right and isn't afraid to wear a belt instead of a shirt. He beats gang members to death with metal pipes while wearing khakis. Khakis, folks. These are the pants of servitude. That takes a fully realized human being to do that. I love you dad. The monkey statues are old and creepy and look like they were witness to a murder. So yeah, that fits all the Occam criteria right there.


So there you are folks. Some things I cherish along with some games I cherish. Hope you enjoyed it. Thank you for taking time out of your busy lives to walk down the cobble stone streets of my Wintergreen Life Saver mind with me.

- Sent from my Lisa Frank Dungeon

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