Put on your BaD-O-Vision goggles, ladies and gents, cause it's that yearly time of BaD again! Woohoo! This year I plan to various series of blogs based on some ideas I have, and my first series is "Gaming Under the Influence," where I regal you with tales of inebriation and hallucination!

When I was in high school, I did a lot of drugs. Not the best time for such experimentation, but not the worst either. Anyway, I sacrificed my soul to the three pillars of Fucked-Upness - alcohol, weed, and hallucinogens. Sometimes by themselves, and sometimes all together! 

While I played a lot of damn games when I was a kid, once I was about sixteen that puttered out. I was into girls, drugs, and music mostly. There was the occasional gaming, like Street Fighter or Madden with friends, but mostly this hobby fell by the wayside. Instead, my friend and I fucked ourselves up.

However, there was some instances. One night, a school night no less, I had a terrible idea – I would take all six hits of LSD I had been saving for my friend and I for the weekend. Yes, I did it. And it was insane.

During this night, I did turn on my Sega Genesis and powered up Sonic and Knuckles. You might not think such a game could be especially psychedelic at first, but once you load up the first screen and see the dancing mushrooms and pattern-based robots, you’ll see you were wrong!

I think we forget sometimes what the experience was like back then, with the colored light streaming out of our analog tube TV’s. Was the color warmer than now? I don’t know. It had a certain look though that LED screens don’t have. My eyes basked in the glow of the pretty colors as I ran through the level, which switched from spring, to summer, to fall, before I faced the boss. 

Sure, it’s an easy boss, but I don’t remember if I bested him that night. Maybe I got distracted, I don’t know. I just remember the earlier parts of that forest level, and how it changed seasons, and its beauty.

It’s funny – that was so long ago now, and while I keep it as a memory, it’s hard for me to believe it was really me. So much has happened, and technology has changed to such a degree, that those days almost seem farfetched.

But regardless, they did happen, and I was fucked up on LSD at the time. ??