We’ll be honest with you: this week’s APU Cinema blog post was supposed to center on one of our students, a powerhouse production major, yet-to-be-named and soon-to-be-featured. Film shoots forced a brief postponement, so please return next week for an inspiring and mind-blowing student profile.
For now, however, let’s talk about last week’s Game Night. It’s already been four days since, four days of trying to return to our normal selves. (Thank goodness for 3-day weekends.) Now that our voices aren’t hoarse and our eyes have re-acclimated to natural light, a remembrance is in order. And—not that we want anyone to feel bad for missing out—but this should serve to remind you that you that events like these are truly essential.
As a non-gamer, I’ll put this in first-person speak. I won’t pretend to know what I’m talking about when it comes to Super Rash Bros, Immortal Kombat, or Connect Four (I know a little about that last one). Suffice it to say, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was in for. The event planners alternately threatened to put me in the big tournament brackets and/or relegate me to the Atari Corner, no doubt replete with my own fitted dunce cap. (For the record, Atari is old even for me.)
Acting as an extraordinary MC, our own Amber Overholt nearly brought the house down at the outset, amping up over 100 already-amped-up attendees still gorging themselves on Chick-Fil-A. Amber’s trash-talking enthusiasm deserves its own televised game show, effectively kicking things off and raising the stakes, terrifying a button masher* like yours truly. The energy was straight-up electric, not unlike a few hours earlier in the same room when I was going over the attendance policy for my Film & Social Issues class.
Shortly thereafter, the Super Hash Bros tournament commenced and the mass dispersion along with it. As for me, I (very predictably) headed to the edit lab to engage in some Super Mario Kart on what I think was a Nintendo 64. Reader, if you could have only seen those glorious, clunky pixels working so hard at becoming recognizable images...you would have done what I did: stared in awe at the nearby screen with a Nintendo Switch version of Mario Kart, and wished you were playing on that console.
I don’t have an exhaustive report of the entire evening—that would’ve required a team of on-the-ground reporters documenting games of nearly every kind—but I was present to eyewitness the victory of one of our freshman students in the Super ‘Stache Bros tournament. In a stunning upset over all those upperclassmen who were convinced they would cement their legends in APU Cinema lore, a prodigious—nay, preternatural—newcomer earned a 4TB hard drive and more than enough streetcred to get through freshman year.
If only we could list the names of all the winners—and, for that matter, losers <coughJayNew>—spanning dozens of board, video, and card games. But take it from this non-gamer: it was...a night. You had to be there.
*I’m told that “button mashing” constitutes an act of incompetent video game-playing, in which the subject simply “mashes” the buttons without a clear sense of what distinguishes said buttons from one another.