We wandered around a bit more and soon found ourselves in line for the usually always spectacular Squaresoft mini-theater. The wait was 3 hours, but I figured "Hell, it's Square! They made Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI. They're worth it." The only problem was that both of those games were made years ago. And once a game is made, it's never really made again. And apparently all of the good ideas that Square ever had were put into those games.

After sitting on the dirty dirty floor of the LA Convention hall for 180 minutes, Jason and I were finally allowed into the theater that Squaresoft had set up in their booth. We took our seats and put our headphones on (well, Jason pocketed his headphones, then bitched and moaned about how they must've been stolen until the booth babes gave him a new pair... Airline headphones were better than those pieces of shit. It made no sense to me). Then it began... with a whimper. Yeah, Final Fantasy X. Whoo-hoo. Big deal, they showed some early as fuck clips of FFXI last year. Then I think there was another gay Chocobo Racing or Dungeon game. I wasn't really paying attention at that point. A few more really lame looking RPG dung piles, and at the end came the coup d'taut: a Disney Role Playing Game. I shit you not. It looked worse than you can probably imagine too. Goofy and Donald were screwing around with some freaky freaky looking kids and a giant key that they were sticking in holes all over the place! It was very disturbing. Not only were the visuals unsettling, but the audio that was blasted in through the headsets made Jason piss his pants for the third time that morning. From Goofy's megaphone blasted "GORSH!" to Donald's earbleeding quack attacks we found ourselves in the middle of our own private little hells!

How could a company have fallen from grace so far and so fast? Square used to be the greatest of the bestest! Now they were content to use unoriginal and overused and probably retarded corporate logos to make crappy games with? Oh Square... Ye were so young when ye lost touch with reality and left to go suck that big old hemroidal ass in the sky. We hardly knew ya.

I was so angry at seeing how the demigod, Squaresoft, had pissed and shit its own pants by forgetting classic gaming and by whoring its illustrious name out to the likes of Disney that I had to find a way to vent my frustrations. Fortunately the Monopoly Man was nearby and he was checking out my ass like the old perv that he is. Since he didn't pay me for the experience (and Lord knows he could afford it) I had to teach the fucker some respect.

After my mind was wiped for fear of recalling the Square "promo" (which only truly promoted crap) I found myself lost in the E3 Jungle of Shame... The place where all the companies who could barely afford 2 employees and a free intern, let alone a real booth at E3, put up their shanty towns. One of the set-ups that was tucked way in the back grabbed my attention. The two guys representing their company at the con were sitting in big Lay-Z-Boy recliners while working on a twelve pack of Corona and munching on a giant mushroom with lots of pizza boxes, snack bags and dirty undies around on the floor. It was like Chi-Chi's apartment with a smaller draft! I felt at home so I jumped right in and joined them. While talking about which videogame chicks we'd like to see get naked on Howard Stern's E! show I took it upon myself to grab a piece of the giant shroom they had growing between their chairs. Within 30 seconds I was having a pretty violent verbal battle with the fungus in question about Star Wars and its relation to the real world's Sino Japanese War and the assassination attempt on that guy that created MAD Magazine, Alfred E. Newman. Luckily Jason pushed me aside, took a big bite of the mushroom himself, and began smacking the living shit out of it with a whiffle ball bat just like DeNiro in The Untouchables. Wasn't Sean Connery awesome in that movie?

Even after eating the mushroom and stealing the Lay-Z-Boys from those two corporate schmucks, Jason and I were still mad about the fate of one of our all time favorite game makers. We thought back to when we were still in gradeschool and I stole Jason's copy of Final Fantasy for the original NES. I played that game so much that soon I was walking around the playground with a blue robe and a large, orange, pointy hat while chanting Fire3 spells on kids I didn't like and SpreadYourLegs2 spells on all of the girls. Needless to say I was living in my own delusional world of insanity and genius and all it took was one GreenOgre (in the form of Trent Rubinski) to put the smack down on me and snap me out of my fantasy mind set... He took off a total of 152 HP with just one swing of his club too!

After that, I got way too into Final Fantasy II when that eventually came out for the Super Nintendo years later. I played that puppy on many a lifeless Friday night in high school and unfortunately never regretted a moment. I then moved on to Final Fantasy III and all of the Game Boy FF games that had come out by then. When I found out that the States had never gotten official translations of the real Final Fantasy 2, 3 and 5 I went apeshit. I NEEDED all of the Final Fantasy I could possibly collect in my pathetic and miserable lifespan!! But soon enough I was rewarded with the internet and all the horribly fansubbed ROMs of all the Japanese games I could ever want. But back to Squaresoft. I love them more than just the sum of their FF titles. They also brought us the Secret of Mana, the Magus, Xenogears and that chick in that black leg-slit dress in their Parasite Eve game. Aya's pretty damn hot for a bunch of polygons.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make here is that the Lords of Square used to be a great thing. They used to make nothing but gold. But then they let that power go to their head and they began putting pieces of shit in a few of their titles to see if the consumers would notice that despite the company's name being on the box, the title was lacking something. Their first experiment was with their flagship title. They almost turned Final Fantasy VII into a complete and total pile of steaming Kuni dung. What was impressive with this test was that nobody noticed this (including me) until they were done playing it. The music was far from being dancible, the storyline blew and the bad guy was gayer than Sigfreid and Roy's sexually embarrased tiger. But, due to a gluttonous amount of ad time on TV, FFVII sold more copies than the Forrest Hump and Lesbian Teeny Boppers 2 combined! Then the bar was lowered even more for FFVIII and IX. After that Square saw fit to fuck with the classic Chrono Trigger storyline!! Was nothing sacred?!... Apparently not as lots of really dick-in-the-pencil-sharpener-painful Chocobo themed games came popping out of Squaresoft's collective asses.

Do I believe that there is hope for the future of Square? Well, the Final Fantasy movie was pretty cool if beyond trippy... And their FFX for the Playstation 2 appears to have potential despite over using voice actors and not keeping many "fantasy" themes in its performance. But FFXI is going to blow Martin Sheen's over inflated dick. Trust me. And this new Di$ney game that they just debuted at their booth is going to cause the apocalypse to kick it into overdrive. Then the prophecy will come true: "The one to guideth the children into the future shall also be-eth the one to destroy the minds and wallets of future generations of mentally handicapped gamers.... This I command!!"
God save us.

After beating ourselves up over the defection of Squaresoft to the camp of "crappy game makers", Jason and I headed over to Kentia Hall. Where as there are only a few shanty-towns in the small Jungle of Shame in the main exhibit halls, Kentia Hall is nothing BUT retarded programing and user interface companies. It was truly depressing. We tried our best to make fun of the sad sacks that had to pimp their own lame products to the tens of hecklers that came to them for a good laugh, but the guys and gals in the booths there were way too upbeat for their own good. No matter how many times we'd tell them that they were fuck ups, or that their gaming add-ons and controllers and what-not deserved to be shovelled into Kathy Lee's diseased slot and blown to hell, they would only smile at us and say, "So, can we put you guys down for a shipment of 2,000?" This is what's wrong with America today. Even the dregs of society still believe that they can make something of themselves if they try. This would be fun if everybody was allowed to watch them when reality came a knockin' and they decided that free falling from a tall building was the only way out, but what really stinks is these fuckers never gain enlightenment. Even on their deathbeds in the ghetto, covered in dirt and oily rags they smile and think to themselves, "You know.... maybe if we added more flower petals to the girl's head in the flower pot... Maybe that would have made it sold more than 2 copies to my mom...."