Sonic Advance (GBA)

When I was a twelve-year-old boy in 2001, an event would occur in America that would irrevocably change my life forever. You know what I’m talking about, thousands dead, families torn apart, lives destroyed, the Pentagram in shambles (they didn't know WHAT to do). That day, in an instant, the course of the nation would be changed by the actions of but a few foreign individuals. December 20^th, 2001. The day Sonic Advance (GBA) would release on the Gameboy Advance.

As the reader probably has keen experience with themselves, that event would be the catalyst that would eventually lead to my three arrests, my crippling meth and incest porn addictions, my murder trial (on continuance, if you are law enforcement then GET THE FUCK OFF MY PAGE), and my failed stand-up comedy career that came to a sudden end after a heated exchange with a group of hecklers (who were in the wrong), but I could have held my tongue better and maybe pre-show laid off the three bottles of Pink Whitney. I only really said all that stuff because it was the worst thing I could think of at the time, and it doesn’t reflect my beliefs towards any specific group of people. I have many friends of that variety, and honestly, I probably have more of those types of friends than normal friends, so it’s almost like I am one in a sense.

Regardless, as an eleven-year-old boy, Sonic Advance (GBA) was the worst thing to happen to me. It didn’t help that my parents had died a few months earlier in 9/11 leaving me a fat and rotund young orphan stranded outside of our house because I wasn’t old enough to have a key yet, which is really not at all fair because I was honestly a super responsible kid and always have been. Anyways, my filthy whore junkie aunt Helena who started taking care of me after that point decided to get me a copy of Sonic Advance (GBA) for Christmas that year. She could only afford me one present, which was hilarious to me because my parents were very well off. They were also dead though, so jokes on fuckin’ little old me, I guess. Instead of getting mad about the lack of care like an average child might, I instead just pitied the frail and elderly 35-year-old rotting husk. This is but a mere prelude to the true world of nightmares that was to unfold.

I will tell you; I was and am the greatest Sonic fan of All Time. One time as a strapping young lad, I ate so much of the blue Sonic curry that I ended up vomiting on this girl in 2^nd Grade. She had to be rushed to the hospital. That was unrelated, she actually got hit by a drunk driver at a crosswalk after school that day. She survived with a traumatic brain injury that made her forget her own parents and how to speak. It was seriously tragic, even if my puking neon blue sludge onto her was the reason I got my first teaching license revoked. Me being the greatest Sonic fan of all time may have been why this game hit me so hard. A Sonic game exclusive to a Nintendumb console? There was no greater blasphemy unto His name. Not to mention you could play as that annoying bitch Amy Rose. Sonic was mine, and she wanted to get in the way of that. Honestly, it made me partially happy to receive the game, just knowing I could play as her and walk off ledges over and over.

The intrepid viewer may have noticed a discrepancy, nearly a lot of people on our Earth know that Sonic Advance (GBA) released in America in 2002, not nearly in time for Christmas like I had received it. You see, my aunt had actually taken out a second mortgage on her house to import the new game directly from Japan. If you needed any further proof that the woman was a witch, look at the lengths she would go just to make me suffer with this shitty game. Of course, I was merely a thirteen-year-old boy who didn’t know what was yet to come, so after scoring a nine-darter on my dartboard of Mario’s face, I loaded up the game.

The strangeness of the game was evident as soon as it launched, I was met with a black screen that seemed to last for an eternity. I was utterly terrified. After a brief sip of blue Sonic milk (my aunt would dye my medicine blue and call it “Sonic milk” to get me to drink it, but I ended up liking that so much that I would drink it all the time and inadvertently robotrip constantly.)  I realized that my Gameboy Advance was not turned on. If you’ve never played Sonic Advance (GBA) before, the game starts with a rather horrifying visage. Essentially, Mario wanted to scar any child who played his games for life, so they included this (rather disturbing) boot screen where mysterious letters fly in from Sonic-knows-where and just sort of… taunt you. All the while, this perverted pink Nintendo logo sits at the bottom of the screen. Everyone knows pink is the gayest color, but Mario still chose to include it anyways. I can often recall long nights where that pink logo would leave me confused, turning in my bed for hours, thinking of unspeakable things.

The game then showed a fucking utterly radical cutscene, which was awesome might I add. This was merely a wolf-in-sheepskin though, because as soon as it ended, I was met with these strange, encrypted glyphs that I would now know to be “China” the language of people from the country of East Asia. If you are dumb and confused, East Asia is its own country, kind of like North and South America. North Asia is actually where continents like Russia and the North Pole are, but most people don’t know this and will look at you funny. It’s for reasons like this why I wish I still had my fifth teaching license; Sonic-only-knows why they suspended that one. They weren’t even underage. Wait, that was my fourth one. No, thinking back on it, I completely agree with them suspending my fifth license. Jesus the fucking Hedgehog.

Continuing as normal, I decided to select Sonic as my character. As a kid, I always admired how fast He could run; Thinking, maybe if I could run as fast as Him, I could even outrun Jeremy and his asshole friends who liked to pour root beer on my head and call me Rooty Fruity. And then when I retaliate and kick their asses, I’m the one who gets punished! Because they’re “mentally handicapped” and “five years younger” than me. Fuck that. In the game, Sonic was covered in what I assumed were tattoos, and He had black shoes and white gloves, and His eyes were yellow, and He had radical purple tips on His fur. This was kind of strange, but I didn’t notice because I hadn’t actually played a Sonic game before. What I did­—however—immediately realize was strange, were the graphics.

You see, the Gameboy Advance has a color depth of 15-bits, meaning that it uses 5 bits for each channel (Red, Green, Blue) representing one color. You probably know that we typically represent colors using 24-bit color depth, with 8-bits for each channel. 5-bits can only represent 32 unique values, which is eight times less than the 256 unique values with 8-bit numbers. We obviously can’t represent as many colors, but we still want the greatest range possible. This is made simple with a basic mathematical trick. With a domain of [0, 31], just use the function f(x) = 255x/31 and round your output. That converts any 5-bit channel to its counterpart on the 8-bit scale. For example, 5-bit numbers 28-31 correspond to 8-bit 222, 230, 239, 247, and 255. This was weird, because the yellow pixel for Sonic’s eye looked like a color with a 254 R value, which should be mathematically impossible to represent with 5-bits. I ended up downloading the game again from CoolROMS, and after scrubbing my PC of trojans, I took a screenshot of the game. I swear I checked this like a hundred times; His eye is an impossible color.

To this day, I’m not sure if what happened next was a haunting, a hack-rom, some kind of practical joke, the true story of Sonic that SEGA was hiding from us, or my blue Sonic milk DXM-induced psychosis hallucinations. Everybody knows about all the lame shit in Sonic Advance (GBA), but nobody talks about this. After about two hours of running in a straight line past beheaded bird corpses and rabbits strung up on pikes, Sonic came to an abrupt stop. What is Sonic if not to run? Sonic’s face suddenly took up the entire screen, making direct eye-contact with me. To be fair, I’m already looking at the small-ass Gameboy Advance screen, so that’s not all that difficult to do. He spoke:

“Hello little Jimberly, I think we’re going to have lots of fun together. Do you wanna play a game with me?”

That’s not even my name. Who the fuck names their kid Jimberly? I stared at the screen with my usual drooling near-sapient face.

“Helllooooooo…. Is this thing on? Hee hee hee hee… I can seeeee you. I can hear you breathing...” He said in a shrill, mocking, Kefkaesque voice.

This was the happiest day of my life, Sonic was real, and all our experiences together meant something. The two hours we spent together holding down the right d-pad button. The sore thumb I gave myself on this very day. If Sonic world was real, I could do anything there,  I could even bring my parents back to life. I could even run really fast and do cool tricks, like run around in those fuckin’ loopdeloops.

“Sonic, how do I come see you. Let me in, how do I get to Sonic world? Sonic how do I get inside the game. Sonic I want to be your friend, Sonic. No, we already are friends, I want to be something even closer with you Sonic. Sonic please, I’m tired of living in this world. I’m ready for my next life. How do I come visit you and your friends Sonic. Sonic, is Sonic world in the Sega Genesis or the Gameboy Advance because I don’t wanna live in a Nintendumb Sonic world, but I might make an exception for you. Sonic let me in.” Keep in mind, I am only fourteen years old at this point.

“Fucking lord kid, do you ever shut the hell up? I mean—Sonic world is real! And you can come visit me, I just need a little fee~ but you won’t even miss it. I promise, I’m your best friend.” Sonic continued, as His face began to twist into a wicked (but cute!) grin, revealing His filthy (but cute!) orange hobo-teeth. If you didn’t need to brush your teeth in Sonic world, that was even more of a plus!

“Sonic, before I go with you, let me show you my awesome drawing of you!”

“Yeah, sure, whatever kid.” Sonic said apathetically, looking off to the side as He flicked gunk from underneath His overgrown nails.

I pulled a folded piece of paper I had stashed between the bed frame and the bottom of my mattress. “Sonic, look at this!” I said as I unfolded the paper in front of my Gameboy Advance screen. Did you know, it takes the brain roughly half a second to fully interpret information it receives. For some reason, about a full second after seeing my sketch, Sonic’s face morphed into what I can only describe as a mixture of anguish, terror, hatred, pity, and survival instinct. I guess it took twice as long because He had to interpret the interpretation as well. Suddenly, the game turned itself off. I attempted to turn it back on.

“No. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO.” Sonic’s voice was a duet of misery and fear. I kept trying to turn the game back on, why was my best friend avoiding me like this, did I do something wrong? After about an hour of this back and forth, Sonic, now a sobbing mess, begged me to let Him go. I had pretty much given up on trying to talk to Him by now, so I just shut the game off. My little heart felt like it had been shattered into a million pieces. I had met my hero and had my heart broken by Him in just one day. Then I started to put the pieces together. What if that hadn’t been Sonic? What if that was some kind of evil creature posing as Him? Could that be why He was acting so cruel? But what kind of being could do something like that, everyone knows not to oppose Sonic in His Kingdom. Then it hit me, the Sonic Revelations. What console was Sonic Advance (GBA) on? The Gameboy Advance. Mario’s Dominion. Mario made Sonic his bitch. He’s done worse; you’re telling me Sonic just happened to cut someone like me off? No! He orchestrated it, Mario! He stole my favorite game series. And I bought his console. And I shouldn’t have. I took the Gameboy Advance into my own home! What was I thinking? He'll never change. Ever since the Super Nintendo, couldn’t keep his hands out of the console market. But not Mario! Couldn’t be precious Mario! Stealing Sega blind. And HE gets to have a console? What a sick joke.

Defeated, I went downstairs to get my midnight snack and chocolate milk, when suddenly I heard a knock at the door. I wasn’t supposed to look through the peephole, because last time I ended up opening the door and letting in a police officer without a warrant, who almost ended up finding Aunt Helena’s heroin stash while she was passed out in the bathtub, but he ended up just settling on taking all of the money in her purse to “impound” and then left in a hurry. Thinking back on it, there’s no way she took out a second mortgage on the house. She was probably being fronted drugs by her Mexican ex- boyfriend. That guy went to college and ended up getting a PhD in Quantum Physics but he’s the only one I know who had a high chance of being a cartel member, so it was definitely him. If she really did make all that money from slinging, maybe I’ve been too harsh on her.

Oh yeah, the door. Anyways, when I’m all sad and stuff, I usually get either disobedient or really hungry for spaghetti sauce. Last time I ate all the spaghetti sauce, Derek (her boyfriend at that time) made me sleep outside in the rain for two days. I decided that being disobedient was probably the safer option, so I went and looked to see who it was. I dick you not, outside was a fat Italian guy with a mustache. Mario knew I was on to his plans, and he was coming to hunt me down. I ran to my aunt’s room and shook her awake violently. “Get Derek’s gun, Mario is here and he wants to kill me!” I knew not to shake awake Derek. Helena was very definitely a teensy bit mentally ill, so she kind of just accepted what I had said, or she only heard the words “gun” and “kill.” Anyways, me and Aunt Helena took turns throwing shit across the room at Derek until he woke up. We followed him to the front door as he held his Ruger in his right hand and opened the door with his left, obscuring the firearm.

“Hey, I’m your neighbor Martin. I just wanted to let you know that I just got back from the vet after your psychotic child threw rocks at my dog from across the fence. My dog is dead, and me and my wife are going to be pressing charges unless you pay up.”

“Shoot him, SHOOT HIM!” I started screaming, Martin booked it down the block in an instant, that guy was fast as hell for his size. In my defense, I thought he said his name was Mario for a second and I got really scared. Wouldn’t that be a cosmic coincidence? Would I even be in the wrong if I killed him in that case, like legally speaking? Also in my defense, the dog thing happened when I was banished outside. There’s only so much you can do outside. If I was born in the age of smartphones, I would have just watched Sonic Underground AMVs on YouTube, but back then all we had for entertainment was throwing rocks at dogs across fences. Helena led me back to my room while Derek kind of stumbled behind us, somehow holding a bottle of alcohol he did not have before. Helena tried to give me her best stern talking to, but she was super out of it for a lot of reasons. As I got to my room, I realized, oh fuck. I left my drawing on the floor, unfolded.

Somehow, seeing that drawing was enough for Helena to place me in a psychiatric institution until I left at eighteen. That was the worst period in my life, and the reason I hate Sonic Advance (GBA) so much. The physical, emotional, and sexual abuse I went through there was soul-shattering. It’s incredible that I’m even alive. I haven’t talked to Helena in ages but last I heard she’s gotten clean and has a stable retail job. There is love in my heart for her, but I don’t think I have any interest in reconnecting with her. Not after what she put me through. I can recognize that some part of her heart had my best interests in mind, but I’d rather not awaken old memories. As for Derek, he immediately vomited upon seeing my drawing. He ran out the front door and kept on running. Nobody has heard from him or seen him since. I really don’t think the drawing was THAT bad. Kind of rude if you ask me.

playboi_throggy

sonic

mario