memory lane (is sometimes unpaved and kind of dusty)

[arethinn]

I've been perusing PDF's I made of my old high school zine Lucida 10 as I combine them into one-PDF-per-issue rather than one-per-page (and the scans are kind of bad, too; I can only assume I must have saved them as PDF from Photoshop at a time years ago when I didn't also have Acrobat and didn't know about PDF stitching software), and came across this perplexing little dedication in the masthead of issue 3:

This issue of Lucida 10 is dedicated to the memory of Lisa (Wh. Wiz) and Mike (Bl. Wiz), who turned themselves to stone, and Miranda and Morrey, who got fried by Nyarlathotep.

The part about Miranda and Morrey, although I don't remember this specific instance, is almost certainly a reference to a game of Call of Cthulhu, which we played a lot of in high school. (Miranda, I think, was Sarah's character's name. Morrey was probably one of the guys, Mike, Aaron, or Ehren most likely since Jeff was the gamemaster -- what do they call it in CoC -- "Keeper"?)

The first part is what is confusing me. On one level it is obviously (at least, nowadays I think it is obvious; at the time I wasn't into console RPGs in the slightest) referring to Final Fantasy IV where the twin kids Palom and Porom (black mage and white mage) do this to save the rest of the party's asses. I think it might still be referring to a Cthulhu game, in which I suppose my character and Mike's character got petrified for some reason (probably shortly before Nyarlathotep did his frying), and either at the time or after the fact someone made a Final Fantasy reference out of it. Or it might be the case that someone had an FFIV game going and had either renamed the characters thusly (can you do that in IV? I forget) or they were getting so referred to (why?) among the group of people watching the playing (which probably included me, although the game apparently made no impression on my brain).

In short, I really no longer know what's going on there. It's a part of my history simply lost to memory. Nor can I fathom why I would choose to write it into the masthead (aside from the major crush I had on Michael).

Comments

[enotsola]

well, I obviously have no idea, but that's still awesome..

And yeah, Namingway FTW!

[talonstrike.livejournal.com]

Agreed. Also, FFIV is the best game evar in the history of evar. Word.

[arethinn]

For some reason I was thinking there was only a Namingway near the end of the game (possibly I was thinking of the bunch of them on the Moon?), but enotsola informed my misinformation that in fact they're in most inns. (I've never actually completed IV, you see -- my emulator saved game is somewhere around the Cave of Summons, I think, and I haven't touched it in literally years.)

[talonstrike.livejournal.com]

I played that game obsessively on a rental in about 1992, got really close to the end, and failed to beat it before it was due. I didn't rectify the situation until last year, as part of my quest to play through the whole series. Since last July I beat 1, 4, and 2, and I'm a good ways into 3 at the moment, but I got distracted by GTA4. Such is life... :D

But seriously. Best game evar. And yeah, you probably were thinking of the Namingway village. I hear in the DS remake they took out the renaming feature and replaced Namingway with lots of other -ingway people who send you on various quests related to their names. One of these years I'll have to check out that version. BTW, had you heard that the FFIV sequel (previously only available on Japanese mobile phones, rather predictably in Japanese) is coming to North America via WiiWare? :)

[arethinn]

I've only finished VII and X, but when I say "finished", I mean like with doing the extra crap like beating Emerald and Ruby WEAPONs and Nemesis (although I think we cheated and GameSharked getting the base items of a few of the celestial weapons in X because we were having the worst time with some of the mini-game stuff). Although at that point it mostly becomes a question of how bullheaded you are about that kind of thing, because even at power levels that let you be auto-Hasted, auto-Full-Lifed, and consistently doing 99,999 per hit (in the case of X), it still takes a bloody long time to wear down things with friggin' millions of HP. I think when I finally defeated Nemesis it was well over half an hour just of that one battle.

Actually, I may possibly have finished VI, too, but I'm not sure (that would have been on enotsola's SNES or else the emulator we had for his Dreamcast, which I seem to recall ran FFVI rather slowly). Besides IV I've made a decent dent in X-2 but I haven't played that in a long time either. I was barely started on XII, to judge from my memory of where I stopped vs. walkthroughs. (Way too many complicated politics plot threads in that one; I kept losing track of who were the sort-of-bad guys, who were the actual bad guys, who were the just misunderstood guys, who was historical, who was playing what double agency...)

BTW, had you heard that the FFIV sequel (previously only available on Japanese mobile phones, rather predictably in Japanese) is coming to North America via WiiWare? :)

Not that we have a Wii...