When I came back home from college a few years ago for Winter Break I was low on funds and trapped in my nice sleepy little beach town, lovely but a tad dull. I figured it was a good time to finish the old backlog, to put my gaming fingers to the grindstone and finally actually finish the games I had started many years before and had forgotten about. That winter the game that was on my mind the most was Final Fantasy IX, I had gotten to the beginning of the third disc a few years before but had never finished this nice nostalgic rpg from the mind of Sakaguchi. In my years of game lethargy I had lost my original PlayStation memory card and could not start from my last save point! Having not played the game in quite some time I figured I might as well use the loss of my memory card as an excuse to start from the very beginning of the game and get the whole experience.

I wanted to get Final Fantasy IX out of the way, there were a lot of games that I needed to plow through during the break, or so I convinced myself. So I decided that the best way to beat the game was to do it in one seating, to challenge myself to a endurance match of old, when I was so excited about games like Mega Man 4 that I would just not quit the game until I had finished. My friend also somehow convinced me that this idea was somehow awesome, that it actually made a little bit of sense. So I began my moronic quest at my friends house. I rushed through the first discs of the game fairly easily, it was a breeze! Using my patchy peripheral memory of the game I plowed through the adventure at a nice clip, arriving at my previous spot in the game in 16 hours. This is when the game changed, the combination of the now unfamiliar with my growing tiredness made the next sixteen hours a different story, a tragic dorky tale. 

When I reached the Desert Palace, the unholy union of me choosing a terrible party, the various puzzle elements and my growing schizophrenia from sleep deprivation, led to me wandering around that palace like a lost child in the Mall of America. Everything that followed was just as hard, my mind was being reduced to a pile of gelatenous gooy substance as I continuously stared at my TV screen. Only sheer insanity drove me to finish out my lofty but ill-concieved goal.

Finally at the thirty-two hour mark I somehow had gotten through Pandemonium and its last series of boss battles. I was almost there, just two hours in the final dungeon Memoria I thought to myself. Kuja was going down, I had been born under the proper star and the end was nigh! "God I'm going crazy, I muttered to myself one eye lazily gazing at the ever present Television screen, I better finish this up so I can get some damn sleep!"

I put in the fourth disc with heavy anticipation. I had decided by this point that my eyes no longer had the will to pick up the dialog. My solution for this was to just keep beating down upon the X button to get through the a story that had become insufferable in my depraved state. Then, the game went black, omnipotently black, treacherously black! The game refused to go to the next scene, to show the heroes playing out the story I had long ago abandoned. My PlayStation sat there, a maleficence beast, making click and whistle sounds that signified that it was trying to load my game. But I knew, of how I knew, that it never would work. The disk was mysteriously scratched to all fucking hell, the game was dead and all my effort was for naught. The world had turned its back on me, my world was crumbling, I was haggard, confused, befuddled mess of a human being who was depressed, and a little hungry. I was not in the kind of state to come up with a solution for my unresponsive FFIX fourth disc, so I gave up on my quest, the dream was dead!

At least that is how I felt at the time, watching a television screen for thirty-two straight hours will fuck with your mind and transform the smallest slights by the gaming gods into a grand scheme to crush my spirit. Is there anyone else who has a similar story of woe, of a game or piece of hardware that failed on you when you needed it the most? Lets all share a beer, take a seat and lament on the woes of the gaming life.