SCREAM FOR IT

Is it weird for someone to collect demo versions of games? Maybe not if you play a lot of demos for recent games of course but for demos for games that came out years ago? Yeah that's probably weird. Isn't much of a reason doing so, it's not like a full video game killed my parents and I swore an oath to only play demos for the rest of my life. Just found myself doing it. Think I've got about 20 demo disks on the shelf, the story I'm about to tell you is what happened when I received my 21st disk. Believe me or not, I don't give a shit. Just wanted to get this off of my chest. Once I post this hopefully I'll be able to get a seller for it. Or not, could just lend it to a friend.

So for this particular demo disk, a Japanese demo of Mario Party 8. Saw it one night while I was browsing eBay and decided I had nothing else to spend my recent pay check on. From what I could guess it was a disk used during E3, giving players a taste of what's to come with some minigames. Probably spent more than necessary but I didn't care at the time. Just thought it'd be cool to own. So the disk was ordered and it came around a few weeks later. Thing came in a clear plastic case with a hand written note inside. Wasn't all that important so I won't transcribe it, it was just a thank you note that had some bad grammar. Made sense considering where it came from though. So anyways I got the disk loaded in the Wii and got myself ready to the play the game.

Got the reminder to strap the Wiimote to my wrist and then the game began with a barebones intro screen with all of the Mario characters standing in front of a white screen. All of the characters except for the unlockable characters and the host for the minigames, MC Ballyhoo. Quite the rush job I guess. Anyways, I hovered over the prompt to get to playing the game and got to the character select screen. Picked my go-to character Luigi and was brought to the minigame selection screen. There were only six available so I decided to go through clockwise starting from the top left with Shake It Up. Ignoring the embarrassment from the motions of this particular game, nothing was out of the ordinary here. Same with the next couple of games for that matter. Things did start to get weird once I had finished Crank to Rank and was about to start Snipe for the Picking. I had just barely remembered seeing something odd about the Shake It Up game. Gave it a playthrough and saw the thing that was odd. Within the windows where there'd usually be Miis were Toadsworth and MC Ballyhoo. A neat little reference to Mario Party 7 that seemed to have been removed I guess. Still strange for Ballyhoo to appear considering that he may have not even been made yet. After that I figured that I'd keep an eye out on the background to see if the two appeared in other minigames. And surprisingly, that was the case.

Water Ski Spree, the two were standing on a boat clapping and applauding the winner of whoever got the most coins. Crank to the Rank, both of them were sitting in the hot air balloon high above the sky waving down. Then I finally got the chance to play Snipe for the Picking which is when the cameos started to take a weird turn. They only showed up at the end of the minigame but they weren't applauding for the winner. Toadsworth was being dragged off by the monkeys alongside the losers while Ballyhoo kept watch in the background. Just stood completely still, not even an idle animation being used for him. For Blazing Lassos, Ballyhoo stood inside the saloon, hiding behind the doors so that only his hat Big Top could be seen. As for Toadsworth, he was now being directly involved as being one of the few things the player can grab. Being cheeky I decided to grab a hold of him when the game completely froze up. Had to turn the Wii off and on to get it working again. Once I clicked on the start button, something popped in Japanese. Translated into English it was:

Toadsworth is now playable.

At this point I was seriously considering that instead of a demo disk, this eBay seller just wanted to show off some weird game project he did. I mean how else can that be explained, Toadsworth was never a playable character for Mario Party. He's not in the rest of the new Mario party games so why was he in this copy of Mario Party 8? It was strange enough for me to see if this was legitimate so I went over the character select screen and saw that he now took up one of the spots. Decided to pick him and then test him out with Shake It Up. And to my surprise he was functional. Not a single issue with animations or his model. Yet it seemed like because Toadsworth is there, the rest of the characters were just going to not work properly anymore. None of enemy AI made an effort to try and play the game. Their models had been changed as well as their textures were just solid black. Along with that, in the background for the level in the place where Toadsworth was a blacked out Luigi. MC Ballyhoo was nowhere to be found. Checked the rest of the minigames I hadn't played as well, it was the exact same thing. So finally I decided to play the one minigame I hadn't tried out yet, Ion the Prize.

The setting for the minigame had been heavily changed. Instead of the room looking mostly like stainless steel, it had just been replaced with black. When the doors opened up to what should've been the rest of the spaceship, it was just the main colour that was in the tunnel, pink and green ones from left to right with the rest of the tunnels being blue. Toadsworth travelled in through the the tunnel in the back on his ship and was stopped in place by seemingly nothing. The pink and green jars shot out from the sides and the screen split in two to show off who my opponent was: Ballyhoo. Seems like he was the other unlockable player character. Game soon began and I just gave up midway through as it was like his AI was set to an impossible difficult. Hell the orbs that were coming out for him to sort when by twice as fast as mine. It was a deliberately unwinnable battle so I let the timer hit zero. When the screen panned over to Ballyhoo, the game could only play an audio loop of him laughing with Japanese text barely appearing on screen before the console hard restarted itself.

My interest had fully piqued at this point, meaning that I was in a rush to see what would happen if I started the demo again. After turning it back on, I returned to the main menu screen to see that all of the character models had turned black. The poses for the models changed as well, being set to a default A pose. The odd one out of the bunch was a newly placed Toadsworth. He was curled up on the ground. Along with that, the 8 that was present in the title had been changed to a 7. I pressed on the start button and was brought to a nearly pure white minigame select screen. There was only one game that was selectable, with the preview screen for it showing nothing but Ballyhoo. Had some text underneath it that translated to:

MESSAGE FOR PLAYER

Without thinking I pressed on it and was taken back to the main menu screen. Toadsworth had become fully black at this point. And standing beside him was Ballyhoo. He started to speak to me, what I'm writing next will be the pieces of text I was able to transcribe before the lines changed.

No instructions necessary. No motions needed. There's no winning at being replaced. KINOJI was past his prime and was No one wants something old. People demand the NEW. People need the CHAOS found in the And we will give you it. We know you will enjoy the full game. As much as we enjoyed making it. So throw away those old memories. Because the NEW is here. WE are HERE. If you want us to stay, you must The world needs to know. Your family has to know. So tell the world. Scream it if you have to. If you need us to STAY, then you have You have to SCREAM for it. So GO TELL THE WORLD WE ARE HERE TO STAY SCREAM FOR IT SCREAM FOR IT SCREAM FOR ITTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT

The game started to make a loud and shrill noise as the text covered the screen. Covering my ears didn't help block out the noise so I had to rush over to the TV and turn the thing off as soon as I can. Wasted a couple of seconds to that but I eventually got it turned off. Felt like I had tinnitus for a few minutes straight after that, even as I was taking the disc out of the console, into the case and throwing it in the cupboard. Even when it died down, I could still hear it like it was stuck in the back of my head. Still somewhat hear it too. Had some neighbours of mine in the other apartments where I live complain the same thing. Even had a couple with a 7 year old child threaten to sue me because of what it did to him. Apparently the noise sent him off into a deep sleep that lasted a couple of days. When he woke back up he just cried non-stop. Kept banging his head against the wall until it bled. The only thing the parents could get out of for him why he was crying was so much was that he simply didn't know why. He knew that he wanted to talk about something but nothing could get him to think on it. So to try and fix that he tried bashing his brains in so that he could know. The lawsuit came by but it was treated as frivolous by the court so they got nothing out of what happened.

Going to be moving soon out of this apartment since the complaints have just gotten worse. Burglary has started to happen too, had a couple of break-ins within the past few days alone. Happened to no one else in this block too for some reason. But anyways once I move out, I'm going to look into selling this weird thing. Probably get a close friend to buy it or something, I know someone whose a big fan of Mario stuff. Maybe get him to do a test play, see if it goes back to the beginning on a different console. Hell if you're reading this, contact me and I'll send it over to you for a price. In whatever way you guys see fit, I just want it away from my collection and into yours. Looking forward to the requests.