Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day.
We all get older, but rarely do videogame characters. Birthday candles mark our slow advance toward death, but Mario never gets a single gray hair in his 'stache. The few exceptions to the eternal youth of game protagonists provide us little hope for our own decrepitude. On those infrequent occasions where time makes its mark on a beloved character, it seldom does so kindly.
Sam Fisher doesn't visibly grow a lot older through the course of the Splinter Cell games, but man, does he ever get a little cranky. And by "get a little cranky" I mean "turn into a complete and total asshole." I can understand taking issue with some of the stuff he's told to do, but by the end, he really seems to be getting off on his passive-agressive rants against his boss, and agressive-agressive "interrogations" of the newbs he gets the drop on. By the last game, all his dialogue sounds like it came out of "shit my dad says."
Max is no stranger to personal tragedy, but it's hard to imagine what could have been terrible enough to cause his hair to retract back into his head so fast that it flew out of the bottom of his face. While Max's new look is sure to be a hit with the "I am Jeff Bridges" demographic, it doesn't seem likely to go over well with people who are not Jeff Bridges. Who, I am told, comprise the entire population of the earth, minus one.
As kind of the poster child for the process of aging, Snake does so at a rate accelerated by genetic tampering and chain smoking. In fact, the ravaging effects time has on his body are only eclipsed by what it does to his fashion sense. The message is clear: Age slows you down and makes you cough, but even worse, it causes misguided experimentation with facial hair and mullets.
I realize Act: Zero was supposed to be some kind of weird reboot or spinoff, but I prefer to imagine that the little doughboy character of the old games finally grew up into awkward teenagerhood. And, naturally, he compensated for a childhood of complete and total wussdom with the robotic equivalent of bleached hair and a black trench coat. Nobody understands Bomberman.
Apparently the O.G. Donkey Kong grew up to become Donkey Kong Country's rocking chair-bound complainer Cranky Kong. I never kept up with Donkey Kong canon, but Parish assured me that this is the truth. You know, while we sat around in rocking chairs and bitched about how videogames ain't like they were back in the day.
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