LBA2 has been the carrot at the end of a stick, hanging out in front of my life's metaphorical eyes, since the time I first played and fell in love with Little Big Adventure (LBA) as a kid. I bet most people who play either game in this series has a story that is similar to mine; my mom took my brother and me to a weird, out-of-the-way computer shop in the nineties. This was when computer stores still felt like hobbyist places that bought and sold trading cards, where the carpet was old and dark, and everything smelled like hot plastic and the dust of too many people having used the delapidated store that had probably been leased to dozens of failed businesses. I don't know what my mom needed -- a new mouse? A cord to replace one my dog had chewed up? While we were there, I was browsing the handful of games on the wall. There was a used CD in its jewel case that caught my eye. The CD didn't have a box, and the disk itself was labeled 'Relentless' and had a digitally-generated orange, wavy texture. I knew, the second I saw it, that this was important. Some daemon was whispering in my ear, telling me that this game would shape who I would be become. I had absolutely no idea what the game was, what genre, what the gameplay was, how it looked, etc. Something called to me, regardless. Memories of my mom saying 'no' to most games I wanted are readily recalled, but I have no idea how I got my mom to buy this game for me, or if I used my allowance on account for the next six months. That was it for me. To spare you the details of the minuatiae of LBA1's (also called Relentless: Twinsen's Adventure) influence on my life, I will simply say that I spent a lot of time in the game dying, getting frustrated, getting stuck, losing sleep over how to proceed, giving up, coming back to it over and over again during a period of 5-10 years, and finally beating it. The world of the game mattered to me. The time I spent trying to puzzle the game's next steps with my brother mattered to me. Seeing my game wife's survival and eventual escape from Funfrock's clutches mattered to me. I still have strong feelings every time I see the game, every time I hear the word 'relentless,' no matter the context. If someone told me they were relentless in finding a caterer for their last minute event, I would think of Twinsen fighting his way through the Hamalayi Mountains. If they said their unborn son relentlessly kicked them through the night, I would only hear the word 'relentless' and be brought back to the first time I found the magic saber. I didn't know there was a second game in the series until I was in my twenties. My mind was blown. I didn't know how to access it, but the second I learned it existed, I knew I would play it. A handful of years later, I learned about Steam and GOG and that they both had a copy of the game. I bought it on both stores, just to make sure that LBA2 knew I cared about it. I fired the game up several times, but never made it past the first twenty minutes. Fast forward another handful of years. I'm reflecting now, and I wonder why didn't I play the game until now? What was it that kept me from playing this game that called to me so strongly? Why was my daemon abandoning me until last week? I realize now it's because he always knew that LBA2 was my reason for living. Until last week, my life looked like this: I wake up, sleep, work, survive, and hold in my mind the idea that I will some day play LBA2 and the experience will be incredible. My mind wanders through the world of Twinsun regularly, and it wonders what could possibly happen in LBA2, and it gleefully hops like Twinsen around the potentialities of new friends to meet, new prophecies to live out, and new worlds to experience. I hope I have laid out enough context for you to understand that this game always had stakes for me, and it always had way too much to live up to. There is no way that a game that I had imaginatively inhabited and dreamed of for half my life and then waited eagerly to play for another half of my life could possibly be as good as I held it out to be. It could not live up to the memories of an adult who loved a game so devotedly as a child that he wove it into the fabric of his being. It could not be as good as the figurative taste of that carrot dangling in front of my eyes. I had decades to imagine the flavor of that carrot, imagining up unrealistic flavors in my mind: flavors that I dreamed would one day meanderingly cross over my tongue in a hypnotic excursion of ecstasy, like a proto-pack traveling over gentle waters. Well, I am here to tell you that this game, Little Big Adventure 2: Twinsen's Odyssey, is in fact better than my expectations. The game has an entire race of people who are hot dogs. Literal hot dog people. I have now played the game, and it is good. I have eaten the carrot, and I have nothing else to live for.
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