Listicles are simultaneously great and terrible. They're great for the nostalgia and occasional insight that comes with justifying their ranking. They're terrible because search is saturated with them and because they're very subjective.

In the spirit of video game nostalgia, I decided to put together a database of quotes, memes, references, and tropes from my many years in gaming. I tried to skip the super overexposed ones like an arrow to the knee or a weapon to surpass Metal Gear.

Yo, my buddy Keith had his car drop in a lake off a bridge just like this one here... Yeah, see, he was driving over it late at night and there in the middle of the bridge was what looked like, In Keith's estimation, like a dead bear, so Keith gets out his car to find a stick to poke at it right? Well, it turns out it's just some lady's fur coat that musta fallen out her car, so, hey, free coat, right? Now, owls won't normally attack a man, but in this case, they were hungry, and that made them reckless, man. Keith reckons that they musta been there for hours watchin' what they thought was a bear carcass, 'cause as soon as he picked it up, them owls had claws in him inch deep. Well, Keith figures his best bet is to jump in a lake, 'cause owls can't swim. Well, them owls could. He fought them for like 20 minutes treading water, and during that time, a boat came, bridge went up and down went Keith's car. Man, sometimes nature's just tryin' to teach us, if we'd only listen.

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I was going to use a single eight-bit sprite for this widget but there were too many great options. Alas, having both the graphic and text rotate seems to imply they are related. Oh well, going to keep it for now.

For the moment, I'll put one of these at the end of each post with a video game.

On the subject of games

The Borderlands 4 reveal dropped a couple of weeks back. It seems to show Elpis, presumably at the conclusion of BL3 from the other side of the phase shift. Elpis wrecks some green ice energy stuff, sending debris down to a new(?) planet. Someone on the planet with a robotic hand picks up a psycho mask from a chunk of the Pandoran moon.

Source. Does this hand match?

I read some initial speculation that the hand belongs to an Eridian, possibly The Watcher who appeared at the end of TPS. Does this mean the omegawar mentioned in the TPS epilogue is upon us? In the eternal words of Mr. Torgue, "MAYBE!"

I ever tell you about the time my buddy Keith drove a car off a cliff, broke both his legs? It's not a funny ha-ha story so much as a make-you-think story. For instance: Windshields look pretty durable, right? Not the case, according to Keith. Son of a bitch flew right through that sucker--

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