residential evil.
Another freshman year story.
I had a Nintendo Gamecube in my dorm room that year. It was the only console I owned back then. Honestly, there weren’t a lot of good games for it and it wasn’t a very good system in general, but I guess back then I was just a helpless Nintendo fanboy.
Evan was really into the Resident Evil video game series, something I never really got too much into myself. One of the Gamecube’s more well-known attempts at branching out from the “just for kids” stereotype that Nintendo had earned was a remake of the original Resident Evil game on the Gamecube. It had really good graphics for the time and as I recall actually had to be put on two of those little tiny gamecube discs.
Anyway, so one day Evan asked me if he could use my Gamecube to play Resident Evil if he bought the game. I said sure—it wasn’t like I used it very much anyway. So he bought it, and he was hanging out in my room playing the game.
Evan, I love you dude, and obviously I would learn to eventually live with all your little foibles (and you with mine, I’m sure) when we ended up as roommates for our last two years of undergrad, but at the time, I was used to having my own room to myself and I didn’t have to deal with anyone else normally.
The thing was, Evan would play it in long runs. Like, three or four hours at a time. It was no big deal, it’s not like I had anything else going on. But after a while, having the TV on blaring Resident Evil was getting annoying. He would really get into it and have it really loud. Sometimes he’d yell in reaction to something that happened—I guess it is a “horror” game and enemies would pop out unexpectedly, resulting in a cry of surprised and frantic working of the controller. I remember there were like permanent sweat marks on the controller after all was said and done—that’s how into it he was.
No big deal, I thought. All I had in my dorm room was my pissant little 13” TV, but one cool thing about it was that it had a normal headphone jack right on the front. I told Evan how the sound was bothering me a bit, so I offered up my headphones and asked if he’d play wearing them. Evan’s a cool guy and he understood and obliged right away.
It was great. Silence permeated the room. Aside from the hum of the TV, there was really no sound in the room. I was really getting used to it, and I was thinking that actually him playing Resident Evil in my room wasn’t going to bother me at all—he could now play till the Gamecube burned out for all I cared.
Some time went by, maybe twenty minutes. And then, suddenly, out of the calm silence, Evan’s shout suddenly filled the air, coupled with frantic movement of the sticks on the controller. I guess an enemy had popped up unexpectedly or something. The thing was, while the game itself could be put through headphones, Evan’s own reactions couldn’t.
This was worse. Before, the noise was annoying and constant, but at least when he would have a loud reaction to the game, it wasn’t such a break in the atmosphere. It could almost be expected. But now, I had quiet tranquility pierced by the occasional “OH FUCK! SHIT!!!” or something along those lines. Honestly, I wasn’t even playing this game and it was still scaring me, because Evan’s unpredictable and unexpected reactions would surprise me and make me jump too.
It went on like that for the night. I think in the future I just told him to forget the headphones, I’d rather just put them on myself, play some music, and block out all sound. Fortunately I think he beat the game to 100% completion within the span of a week or something, so it wasn’t that bad.
Those were the days.
