I promise this is going somewhere.
I recently went through a tough month, tougher than I ever have professionally. You’ve been in this situation — no matter what you do, the goal posts are always changing from a client or external condition beyond your control, and you do your best to clear hurdle after hurdle. And just when you think you’ve at least finished the race, albeit with an ugly time, the track appears before you again, and you have to relive the nightmare over again. And you finish, again.
They they drag you through it again again!
In times of real-life stress, I usually randomly pick up a videogame challenge I’ve never cleared before, just to separate my brain from my problems for a minute, and to also remind myself that I have agency and a dogged determination to achieve my goals, when I apply it.
…Or SHOULD you?
Friday the 13th was one of those games that a friend down the street owned, which was the ideal way to experience crappy games. It’s not bad, actually, but the main problem (like many old games) is understanding what to do.
You control 6 camp counselors spread out across Camp Crystal Lake, while Jason invisibly roams camp, trapping the counselors you aren’t actively controlling in their cabin to kill them. When he gets tired of that, he crosses to the lake house to murder the 15 children you need to also protect to avoid game over (and probably some angry parents’ letters).
In a rare bout of Nintendo-game realism, your counselors are not exactly prepared to deal with an immortal homicidal maniac. They start armed with hard stones as their only weapons — not exactly the arsenal of Ash from Evil Dead — while only being able to take a few hits from Jason himself. You find upgraded weapons around the camp (what camp doesn’t keep spare machetes locked in woods-concealed cabins?), but that doesn’t solve the problem that, for most kids, Jason is so tough that you might as well be fighting him for real.
I was really good at videogames, but I never had enough time with the game to learn how to not get murderized almost immediately.
So I was feeling awful last week, and after I thought my ordeal was over (for the second time), I just picked Friday the 13th off my Nintendo wall.
Like many Nintendo games, it presents you with “clues” that are half-truths at best and kid-hating lies at worst.
Yeah, that’s not the goal of the game at all. If you told me, “Use the torch to light Jason on fire”, while still functionally useless that would be a step in the right direction.
In times of extreme Nintendo obtuseness, I reference text FAQs to at least understand the “meta” of the game. You need to remember that all games came with a manual, even most rentals, and you were meant to have certain info before playing every NES game. (I don’t ever use video walkthroughs — I feel like if you just watch someone play a game, there’s really no point in doing it yourself). I found a way to obtain a strong weapon very quickly, but there’s still the matter of learning Jason’s movements.
If you’ve ever played Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, the cabin Jason fights are similar, except as if Iron Mike had a giant knife instead of just his hands (and teeth). You have a “dodge” move and can also move laterally, trying to toss your weapon at him when he’s left himself open.
Insidiously, this Jason confuses his victims with his color scheme before striking.
“Day 1 Jason” attacks slowly, almost leisurely, compared to what’s coming — but you don’t know that yet, of course. You can observe his movements and figure out when to dodge. Sometimes he slashes at your twice in a row, so you really have to be paying attention. But it’s enough to think you have some control over the situation and can handle it.
The Day ends in-game, your life (and maybe real-life sanity) replenish, and you’re pretty pumped you finally conquered your obstacle.
This is exactly how I felt after “Day 1” of this terrible event I had to go through. I spent weeks of prep to do a bunch of things I had tried to warn the booking agency hiring me that I really did not feel comfortable doing or even think were good ideas, but they insisted on X, Y, and Z, so I delivered what was asked in the best way I could, with ample warnings and cautions in advance. It took me 4 extra hours on site to get everything as I promised it would be, and I had to unexpectedly stay the night in this foreign city because it had gotten so late.
But finally it was “over”. Right. Like Crystal Lake’s campers I really had no idea what was coming. Jason was coming, again.
“Stick and move, Mac Chrissy!”
The morning of Day 2 arrived, and my event was already proverbially “on fire”. A bunch of things out of my control and never mentioned before in our talks or even our previous events were now DEFCON 1 problems, and I had to go back out and fix as much as I could in 30 minutes.
Day 2 in Friday the 13th seems like more of the same, until you arrive at Jason. He has a turbo mode — a “ludicrous speed” — something even Iron Mike doesn’t have. He’s already faster and more deadly now, but he turns on this turbo mode with no warning and is lightning fast. It’s just made that until you’ve played the game enough to learn it, he’s just going to kill you at each encounter, and that’s that. Sorry, campers!
Captain Kirk in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn says “I don’t believe in the no-win scenario”. But they are real, and professionally you will come across them. And they will slice you up like Jason if you let them.
Well, the rest of us can’t reprogram a sim to deal with no-win scenarios, Captain.
Day 2 just got worse. And worse. Finally when I arrived back in my home city, emotionally defeated and physically beaten up and exhausted, I at least thought I had crossed the finish line. Much like Friday the 13th IV: The Final Chapter , the saga was far from over.
Day 3 in-game starts like the other two. You might be down some counselors (or kids), but you’re still alive and ready to tackle this one more time. When you fight Jason, he’s constantly in turbo mode, so the game is saying to you “if you just waited for his turbo mode to wear off and then attacked, you’re screwed now, buddy!”.
There is zero way to know how ridiculous his Day 3 form is going to be unless you just go through it and get torn up, no matter how good at videogames you are. But the flip side will be “now you know”, unless you were just cheating your butt off and were using a video walkthrough. Even a text walkthrough with some guidance only gives you a picture of what to do. You have to go through the experience yourself to feel out and then master the situation.
Behold: Day 3 Turbo Jason, your worst videogame nightmare
Sometimes you’re path that inevitably was leading you straight into a ditch (or a haunted cabin), and you just didn’t know it yet. How could you? You did everything you were asked, dotted all your I’s and crossed your T’s as best as you humanly could, and it really hurts when it wasn’t good enough because of whatever circumstances/perceptions/etc. And ultimately sometimes people are just terrible and all you can do is minimize the times you have to cross paths again.
Take Jason. Some games you can force a boss or opponent into behaving the way you want. Jason does not care what wimpy little actions your counselor does. Nothing you do affects his attack patterns. He doesn’t even flinch when he takes a hit. He is a powerhouse freight train of purple-jumpsuited fury. He is a force of nature. All you can do is dodge his attacks, strike back with what you’ve got, whether it’s a pebble or a pitchfork. Even if/when your last counselor get hacked to pieces, you can always start again, now armed with the knowledge and experience you gained from this last failed playthrough — your most dangerous and important weapon.
This is the ending: Jason looking like he just got out of a body sculpting class at your local civic center.
I can’t even talk about Day 3 of my real-life trevails, because it just reared it’s corpsified head this week, and I don’t even know what I’m going to do about it yet. I can only laugh that, just like in defending Crystal Lake, sometimes you’re doing everything you’re asked, and the God or the universe just piles more and more up on you, whether it’s unreasonable circumstances or a zombie killer.
But, I learn from my beatings, in games and real life. And the real reward is not money or recognition, but the pride that you survived and (hopefully) conducted yourself in a way that you’re proud of, in the face of something as ugly as Jason without his mask.
(This is the end to Jaws for NES, which only took me 15 minutes to learn and beat this week as well. Much prettier end screen. Much worse game.)
