When Mrs. Biederman brought home the copy of Tony Hawk: RIDE, carefully tucking it away behind the towels in the family linen closet, she must have missed the thick gloom that followed her car back from the Best Buy like the grimmest of wedding cans.

Excreting from the video game’s box, a tangible sadness embedded itself deep within the Biederman household, hidden behind walls and in unused cabinet space. It was at first no more noticeable than a fresh mosquito bite. The kids would just suddenly lack any drive to help clean the table or Mrs. Biderman might cry a little longer than usual during those seasonal commercials where the son comes home from Iraq — with a tin of instant brew coffee nonetheless. No one knew where these feelings came from or why they had arrived. They just were. And then they weren’t.

Ignored and enraged, the portents persisted. One late afternoon, the Biedermans’ dog, Bo, barked at the front door for a good two hours with nothing out there but the slightest of drizzles. And on another, while doing her Algebra homework, their daughter and middle child, questioned if maybe, like was it possible if, Mr. and Mrs. Biederman had adopted her. After all, neither of them had her nose.

The uneasiness brewing in that linen closet was almost pinned down when, on a night less than two weeks from Christmas, Mr. Biederman tucked in his youngest. While plucking crusties from his son’s eyes, he noticed the child’s skin had turned rigid and cold. “Like a crocodile,” he told Mrs. Biederman during their nightly alone time together in front of the television. “You,” she snorted, “have never once touched a crocodile.” “I’ve touched crocodile boots,” he countered but by then Dancing With the Stars had returned from the commercial break and the peculiar occurrence was all but forgotten.

No matter how clear the omen, how obvious the warning that something was wrong, really, really wrong, it seemed the Biedermans managed to fold it up neatly with their logic and pack it away to be forgotten like all those old linens in the closet. And the copy of Tony Hawk RIDE ensconced between them.

On Christmas Eve, the gods, or whichever forces in the universe whom decide what is right, took action against the looming threat of a Christmas morning with Tony Hawk RIDE. Like a Roman candle, the Christmas tree erupted spontaneously into flames after one of its infinite tiny colorful light bulbs burst with a charge, lighting the dry green needles and sending them whizzing across the living room. Ornaments cracked and ruptured from the heat and the sharp smell of burnt popcorn filled the house since the healthy snack had been freshly strung and hung on the tree that morning.

When the firemen finally let the Biederman clan return to the house, they found a heavy glob of brown and green goop pocked with sparkly glass and ceramics where the tree and the presents once were.

But Tony Hawk RIDE had not been there under the tree. Mrs. Biederman originally thought it would be such a surprise, on Christmas morning after the kids finished with the other presents, to send them up to the linen closet for one last gift. Now, RIDE would be the only present as the rest had been destroyed and any remaining money in the family’s savings account would be used to repair the house and finance their eldest daughter’s reconstructive surgeries — her burns were quite hideous.

24-hours passed slowly, as they tend to do while filling out home insurance claims and tending to your burn-victim daughter, but soon enough Christmas morning arrived. The children and their father huddled in the living room around the Christmas glob, which hadn’t been removed though they all knew it probably should have been as it was clearly a health hazard. Mrs. Biederman, upstairs, reached through the towels in the linen closet until her hands blindly clasped the hard videogame box. She pulled it out and made her way downstairs, delusionally triumphant, thinking this the savior of an otherwise dreadful holiday.

She set the parcel before the family and perched herself on the glob. The youngest son, whose skin had grown so cold and hard that it flaked where it met his cuticles, gingerly peeled back the wrapping paper. “Tony…” he read aloud, pulling the paper back more.

And darkness swallowed the house.

Recurring nightmares have plagued this man for as long as he can remember. While others are curling up for a good night’s sleep, Jared Smollen (AKA Kirby) dreads putting his head on a pillow for fear that he will spend yet another night as a pink cotton candy-colored blob in the hellish demon pastures of his “Dream Land.”

“It’s gotten pretty scary at times. At the start, I’m just flying around in the clouds or waddling around, then suddenly an enormous Penguin monster is trying to kill me with a hammer.”

Smollen, a graduate of Vanderbilt University, already had several vague hypotheses for why these dreams recur:

“As I understand Freud, dreams are just small concerns of the day made into images that point to deeper desires and fears… But, I work in a bank. I can’t imagine what goes through my mind at work that would make me dream of a tree with a boner nose making me swallow apples and spit them back at his face. My subconscious either wants me to experience the most cartoony version of Lord of the Rings… or the most homoerotic version.”

Smollen continued by stating that these fears were either more “existentially terrifying” than the first reading of a Camus book, or his mind was trying to tell his body something it has known for quite some time.

“Sometimes I dream that I die over and over and over the same way. Those are the worst nights. I can’t figure out how to maneuver around these large creatures that want to kill me, and I have to just keep getting hit with a hammer or the stuff coming out of the tree’s mouth until I wake up. I like to think of that tree or hammer as my fear of death… That, or my insuppressible longing for phallic objects…”

We visited Jared at Citi Bank where he was even more candid with us:

“I don’t understand how the economy can be doing so poorly, but people still get fatter. Every rosy-cheeked chubby lady I talk to probably has a better job than I do. Sometimes I wish I could go all Buffalo Bill on these people and wear their fat faces as a suit, and do their jobs. You know, just do what they do for awhile. I don’t care which: chef, knight, ninja. Whatever they do, I just want to live as my mortal enemies for awhile.”

“I’ve also had asthma my entire life, and sometimes wake up in the middle of the night because I think I’m not able to breathe. That must be the reason I dream of endlessly sucking in air all night.  Or it could just be another gay thing.”

When we asked about other dreams, he responded:

“Recently, I’ve had this weird dream where I am in this Thunderdome-ish fight with a few other people who are trying to knock me out of the ring, and the audience is complaining how ‘cheap’ and ‘unfair’ I am as I float safely back into the ring no matter how far I get knocked off.”

Additional reporting from Hardcasual’s own Daniel Wilbur.

At first, I think he’s just muttering those hyphenated curses that he reserves for the times I beat him in Wario Ware.  But he’s not.

Instead of throwing a temper-tantrum, flicking me off, or telling me my Mom is a “whore-bitch-AIDS-cunt,” Timmy McFedderin remains quiet, save for a few grunts and strange whispers, after every Wii Sports Resort game we play. I thought he had calmed down a whole bunch because of the new medication he’s on, but after one of those rare flukes when I lost a tennis match to him, he let out a sigh of relief, bowed his head, and clearly said: “Thank you, Jesus Christ, for letting me win.”

I mean, I get it. Some uber-religious athletes will thank God for helping them compete to the best of their abilities, but I don’t even think the McFedderins belongs to a Church. I’ve slept over enough times to know his Mom is never around on Saturday night, but staggers into the house Sunday morning and takes a really long nap for most of the afternoon. That’s when I own Timmy in Swordplay until he cries (“Who’s your Daddy? I am!”).

Come to think of it, I have only met Mr. McFedderin once. He was on his way to pick up some cigarettes.

He doesn’t go to church! So it’s like his prayers are part of some made-up Manson Family cult. If that cult’s only membership requirement is to be embarrassingly bad at Power Sliding.

But this is missing the point. Let’s be clear. Timmy McFedderin is a cheater. It’s totally illegal to pray that your friends lose to you in a video game, especially when your friend is discernibly better than you at every game you own from Tetris to Mario Party.

Of all the weird shit he’s said to me, mostly about how he was gonna strangle me with a belt if I “don’t-wipe-that-stupid-smirk-off-my-faggot-lips,” these prayers take the cake. He once told me after beating Scribblenauts in two days that the reason he won was because God was on his side, and no one else’s.

I told him that my mom was expecting me for dinner and ran away, even though it was only three in the afternoon.

Once, I thought he was doing pilates or some other Wii Fit game he’s terrible at, but it turned out he was saying a quick Hail Mary before I walked in the room. He tried to play it off like he was cleaning a disc with his shirt, but I could hear him say something about how he deserved to win way more than I did because “Patrick is a terrible person who uses drugs and tries to finger innocent girls while they’re sleeping.” The only drug I must have taken was the one that makes me so much better than him at table tennis that he needs to turn to the supernatural for support!

Here’s the truth: I don’t even like the Wii. I don’t own one. But my family is Catholic and I think God is a little too busy making sure good families stick together and stopping Chinese people from aborting girl-babies to worry about some spaz who’s not even good at the one activity that he spends most of his time doing! Any time he beats me in Bowling, he crosses himself! And now I feel like I have to win as much as possible, so I can stop him from believing that God would actually listen to him!

Timmy is naturally inclined to suck at video games. It’s probably because God hates him for wasting so much of His time!

Timmy’s controller finally broke when he dowsed it in Holy Water that he stole from St. Angela’s parish. ‘My buttons are sticking, that’s why you won!’ he said, after I beat him for the 70-bagillioneth time.

The only time Timmy gave up his awkward praying was when his brother told us we could use his laptop to look at some porn.

Additional reporting from Hardcasual’s own Daniel Wilbur.

Less than two weeks after 9.9.09 and its accompanying media blitz, Richard Walsh of Grand Rapids, Michigan has remembered something he had briefly forgotten – he’s fucking sick of the Beatles.

“Elevator music, plain and simple,” said Walsh, reclining on a couch in his small bachelor apartment. “Tell me that you can listen to ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ more than once and not want to die a little. If you can tell me that with a straight face… You can just take the game. Seriously. Just take it.”

Walsh, like millions of Americans, had pre-ordered “The Beatles: Rock Band” weeks before its numerically significant release date, assured that the title would be the most elegant, refined rhythm game ever released. As a longstanding fan of music games, he pored over song lists, achievement scores, and reviews up until the day he ran home, pulled the plastic wrap off the green DVD case, and played the game.

“I finished it in one sitting. And they gave me an achievement for that. They rewarded me for the fact that I managed to play through their 3 hour game in 3 hours. So I thought – man, they must have something up their sleeve. They must have planned for that, right? But no – it turns out, all that you get to do is play ‘She’s So Heavy’ over and over again, whether it’s in a “challenge” or in quickplay or in the actual game. Has anyone ever listened to ‘She’s So Heavy’ over and over again? Even when people were actually excited about the Beatles?”

Attempts to drag more excitement out of the game led Walsh to throw a number of Beatles-themed Rock Band parties. Soon, though, he realized that even this was useless. “It turns out all people want to talk about is why their favorite song isn’t in the game. Jennifer, my girlfriend, was all like ‘Where’s “Hey Jude”? Where’s “A Day in the Life”? What the fuck is “Boys”?’ I couldn’t answer any of those. So we just played ‘Drive My Car’ again, and I died a little bit inside.”

“You know how every time you have people over to play Rock Band, all they want to do is play ‘Say It Ain’t So’? This is like if they made a whole game where the only song is ‘Say It Ain’t So’,” he added.

“I want to thank Harmonix, really,” he reflected, “for making me realize how tedious and inescapable the Beatles really were. I don’t think I ever owned a Beatles album, but I know every one of these fucking songs. Even ‘Dig A Pony’. Why the fuck do I know ‘Dig A Pony’? If it weren’t for this game, I might have gone out and bought those remastered CDs. But they saved me $250 by making me realize – good God, those Beatles are a boring band, when it comes down to it.”

When asked if he would buy any of the forthcoming DLC for the game, he shuddered and said, “They’re going to charge me $2 for ‘The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill’? I will eat my own face before that day comes.”

Link pulls out with a stack of papers with doodles all over them. There are maps, notes, and an especially vivid nude drawing of half-woman, half-fish Ruto. “In many ways, this is my life’s work,” he declares.

He sets them down on a table and arranges them into three neat piles. “It’s the story of my incredible adventure with the Ocarina of Time. I’ve written out every moment in great detail, from when I break the Deku Tree’s curse to when Princess Zelda transports me back in the time to live my childhood.”

“Everything is in here…” he continues. “…except the Water Temple.”

The ageless Hylian man smiles sadly. His pointy green hat wilts in the sweltering Dodongon heat. He’s sitting at his favorite spot to write: inside an active volcano. It’s very private. Off in the distance, a lava chute spews.

“It’s not that I don’t remember it,” Links says. “I do. I remember strapping on the iron boots, sinking to the bottom of Lake Hyrule, and solving a bunch of complicated puzzles that had to do with raising the water levels so that I could get to this and that… I just don’t remember exactly how I figured it out.”

“I remember it was a lot harder than the other Temples. And it was very wet. That doesn’t make for good reading, though.”

The book’s editor, a talking owl named Kaepora Gaebora, patiently awaits in the Sacred Realm for Link to hand in the rough draft of the manuscript.

“Frankly, I don’t care so much that he can’t remember one tiny puzzle,” the reincarnated sage tells Hardcasual. “We’re probably going to cut out most of the ‘He shoots this target with an arrow’ and ‘He pushes a stone to this dark spot in the floor’ stuff anyway. No one cares so about those details. They want to hear more about the stuff he stabbed while on horseback.”

But Link wants to tell his tale as thorough as elfishly possible.

“I’m sorry, but I have to know. All my other accomplishments are accounted for. I even wrote in the location of all the Skultellas. What am I supposed to do? Say, ‘And then I went down to the Water Temple and beat some puzzle and killed a boss and left’? That wouldn’t fly. Hylians deserve to know how I solved an ancient riddle with my superior intellect.”

The possessor of one third of the Triforce takes a jar out of his knapsack and cracks it open. A faerie flies out and swirls around his head several times before dying. He stares at his hands for a long while and sighs.

“I keep thinking that maybe one of these is gonna jump start my memory.”

Navi, the faerie who accompanied Link throughout his quest to stop Ganondorf from achieving power, tells Hardcasual that she offered to tell Link how he solved the notoriously tricky temple, but he refused.

“Link said he had to come from inside him. Which is a pretty typical Link thing to say,” Navi says. “HEY! He thinks he saved the world all by himself. LISTEN! It was me putting myself in the line of fire again and again just so he knew what the hell he was supposed to be looking at. LOOK! I didn’t have a sword or a shield. Nothing.”

Though the stars are visible through the mouth of the volcano, time seems to slow to a crawl down here by the lava pit. Link sits on his rock and goes over his papers once more, as if waiting for inspiration to come to him. After a long while he writes down a single word on the back of a paper: “hokshoot?”

With additional reporting by Hardcasual’s own Filipe Salgado.

Omar Redmond lines up his putter with the ball. It’s a misty morning on the green and the sun is just now peeking out over the tall hill. He takes a moment to breathe in the air, to smell of the fresh cut grass. A warm breeze that bats at the sleeves of his Polo shirt and cools the sweat on his freshly-trimmed sideburns.

This is the leisurely life of a free man. The life of someone who is not currently serving a twenty-six year prison sentence for first-degree murder. The life of someone who is not Omar Redmond.

Omar sighs and quits Wii golf. As the menu screen loads he glances through the bars of his cell. A guard named Mac is reading yesterday’s paper. Someone down the hall is taking a really long piss.

A reminder pops up on the screen: Why not take a break? There’s a picture of an open window leading out to an impossibly perfect world. It could be anywhere; a beautiful park, a serene forest, a city street. It’s tempting. Omar wonders what kind of person would choose to push a bunch of buttons in a dimly lit bedroom when they could be outside, enjoying the fruits of modern nature?

That’s someone he’d like to stab in the neck.

There aren’t any windows on Cell Block E, but Omar knows what lies beyond these walls. An endless desert wasteland. Burning heat pounding a scorched earth. Gila monsters and scorpions dying as they try to cross a busy interstate highway. A sign reads “Do not stop for hitchhikers.”

Omar spends a few minutes tinkering with the menu screen. What’s it going to be: tennis, bowling, or boxing? He’s played them all a thousand times. He wonders it’d be like to play with a friend, but Omar isn’t allowed to have a cellmate after he stabbed his last one in the ear for mumbling secrets in his sleep. No one could argue that the guy didn’t have it coming, but at times like this, Omar wishes that brain-dead Cliff was around to hammer on the nunchuck.

Boxing it is.

As Omar’s Mii beats the living shit out of a guy who looks a lot like Cell Block Guard Mac, he can’t help but think about what’s he’s going to do with his time after he’s done doing time.

The thoughts give him a giddy feeling in his stomach, one that he hasn’t felt since he poured a bucket of boiling grease over that bitch asshole cocksucker cashier at Arbys who wouldn’t give him a free chocolate shake even though he came in all the time and was totally good for it.

Omar punches and punches. When the time comes, he’s going to crawl out that open window and live in the blue beyond, parasailing and duck hunting and fucking women. He’s going to meet up with his son – who will be a man only a few years older than he was when he was sentenced – and the two of them will go fishing on a sundrenched lake and talk about the important things in life.

It’s a beautiful future, one that Omar hopes he’ll live to see. Until then there’s always snorting tits and jacking off to that Mii girl he created whose skin is perfect like a doll.

In a shocking turn that many in the racing community have called a true “Time Trial” for the more inclusive, family-friendly image of the Mario Kart circuit, popular female racer Birdo has been pulled from competition in next weekend’s 150cc Star Cup amidst allegations that she has internal male sex organs. The condition, better known as hermaphroditism, would make Birdo neither a female nor a male by any textbook definitions.

Rumors had long swirled among the racing community about Birdo’s abnormally sized hands and Adam’s apple, and the way she seemed to tower over the other female competitors. One fellow female racer, speaking under condition of anonymity, told us, “I would stand up on the dias, and she would be a full level below me – but she’d still tower over me. How was I supposed to gleefully go through my one repetitive hand-clapping motion indefinitely with that going on next to me?”

Birdo, who has been unavailable for comment, was widely known for her bizarre behavior. Her deep voice, long a source of embarrassment for her, led to her rarely speaking, often just resorting to blowing kisses – indescriminately, at men, women, animals, and infants. Her pronounced musculature gave her a distinct advantage on the track, and many found her style of dress bizarre.

“It’s like, I get it,” said one fellow racer, “You want us all to know you’re a girl. You wear the biggest bow I’ve ever seen – and I race with some chicks with some completely absurd bows – and you’re bright pink. But sometimes, you take all this girly-girl stuff a little too far – like you’re hiding something. Like undescended male genitalia. In your body.”

Reports of her ability to launch eggs from her mouth had long seemed to confirm her femininity, but the recent allegations have raised speculation that she was actually launching one of her species’ several thousand testicles that, in her unfortunate case, had never descended.

Mario, both the league’s chairman and one of its most famous racers, released a brief statement, reading: “We here at the Mario Kart circuit don’t want to prejudge anyone. But we do come from a simpler culture, where men are men, women wear bows and bake cookies, adults can race right alongside their infant selves, and monkeys and reptiles can race go-karts together if they can set aside their petty differences for a few minutes.”

“That being said, Birdo has always weirded me out, and I’d be happy to see that freak get thrown out of this league.”

Pit shuffles under the covers, clutching at his boxers gracelessly caught around his ankles. They fumble loose and he tosses them beside the bed. He examines the room in a desperate effort to look casual. She didn’t see him, did she?

Whew, good, Mrs. Henderson is still in the bathroom. What is it girls do in the bathroom that takes so long? Maybe she’s trying on negligee or adding a fresh coat of make-up or putting up her hair. Or maybe she’s just taking a piss.

Yuck, Pit can’t think about that. It’ll steamroll his boner. He continues to scan the room for something to refresh his mind after the gross image of Mrs. Henderon squatting over her toilet letting out a mondo-shit.

Stop it, Pit. Calm yourself, bro.

It’s hard for him to see anything with only the flickering light of a Glade scented candle, but Pit, eyes squinted, makes out the geometric silhouettes of unframed Impressionist posters, likely the very ones he sold Mr. Henderson that day she visited him at Hobby Lobby. Beside them, a fishbowl full of condoms and packets of lube that look like body condiments. Mrs. H can sure set a scene.

How did Pit get here? Has so much changed since that first class of Theatre 1, Mrs. Henderon treating the young man like all the other meatheads taking drama as a Mickey. (A few no-brainer courses these and even a soup for brains goober would have the arbitrary number of extra curricular credits required for graduation. Plus Mrs. H wasn’t half bad to look at with her mature waist and fat tits.)

Pit wasted hours, days, gazing longingly from the back of the classroom, occasionally stealing time alone with her after class. His method was a simple but direct strike of flattery. He would wait for the class to make their exit, and then cajole her to stay behind a few minutes to discuss the deeper, recurring themes in David Ives’ oeuvre. Still she looked at him like a plebian. (“The monkeys are writing Hamlet, you fool!”)

The War turned life on its ear, particularly for Pit. Medusa and Palutena, the Godesses of his land, had a feud, which had erupted senior year, boiling into an all out battle for control of Sky Kingdom and tangentially Sky High. Taking away many of the town’s strongest men, it devolved into a youth’s war. And Pit asserted himself as the strongest new recruit, not just physically, but mentally.

He returned months later with Medusa’s head to a parade in his honor. And attention. Loads of it.

Mrs. Henderson wasn’t the first to make a move, sexually. Ms. Viola had filled his locker with naked Polaroids, close-up pictures of her nether-regions trimmed in the shape a Mirror Shield. Mrs. Shipman casually opened her desk drawer each time Pit handed in a test or collected his homework. Inside, her dildo, generally wet, along with furry handcuffs, a candy penis and a picture of Pit the Hero clipped from a local newspaper. Even Mr. Dyer had begun watching him during those long walks from gym shower to gym locker.

Pit never took any of the suitors up on their unspoken offers. He never wanted to. Here, though, here is where he’s waited to be. In the bed of Mrs. H. The young, voluptuous, seductive theatre teacher who taught him the greater parts of Neil Simon; the women whom visited him at Hobby Lobby, his place of employment, often asking where they kept the Krazy Glue for her Shakespearean dioramas; the maiden whose mere utterance of “diphthongs” made his lip quiver, is now changing in the bathroom. Or pissing. Or shitting. Ugh, there goes his hard-on.

She’s taking her time, but he can wait. If there’s one thing Pit learned from his arduous adventure, it was patience.