A Month of Blogs - If I Could Snap My Fingers And Be Anywhere, Where Would It Be?

If I Could Snap My Fingers And Be Anywhere, Where Would It Be?

Suggested by Chris P.


As a writer who seems to have hit a low point in creativity and / or just getting off my ass and writing, I signed myself up to write 31 blog posts during October - one a day - on any subjects that are suggested to me. The only rules for suggestions are that they can't be anything that involve me having to take on a particular viewpoint (so no "Why I Hate Twilight" or "Why Rock Music is the Best Music") - this isn't debating class, and right now I'm not interested in trying to argue something that I may or may not agree with. Anything else goes - it can be a specific subject or a broad one, one that I've written about in the past or something new that will need research. If you're interested in playing along, you can leave a comment here, or email me at thenordicalien@gmail.com. (I'll try and remember to check there, honest!)

Where would I be? The Star Light Zone in the Mega Drive / Genesis version of Sonic the Hedgehog.

I fell in love with the Star Light Zone when I first played Sonic, back in 1991. For those of you who've never played the game - have you been living under a rock? - the Star Light Zone is a large pale green and gray construction site under a black sky filled with thousands of bright stars. As the second-to-last zone in the game (aside from the Final Zone), it is one of the harder zones, filled with unkillable beasties, bottomless pits and spiked balls that you have to use as counterweights on catapults. Yet it is the strangest mix of difficult and peaceful, and I decided the first time I saw it that I wanted to live there.

Nobody had pointed out to this seven-year-old that this would not be possible.

Over the last twenty-some years I've tried to work out why I have such deep affection for a game level, and I've never come up with a satisfactory answer. The closest I can get is that it feels like home. It might be the strange, space-age streetlights that remind me so much of the ones we had in Spain when I was a kid. It might be the astonishing amount of stars that you can see in the sky; stars that, like the streetlights, remind me of a childhood spent where the air was dry and unpolluted and the night sky filled with wonder. It might be the fact that I spent many an hour playing on construction sites as a kid, and find the atmosphere comfortable.

Maybe it's just that it's a city. I've always felt most at home in space-age cities. It's why I originally started studying Japanese, and why I hope to take up Cantonese - Tokyo and Hong Kong are two places that I want to live.

In my early years of playing Sonic, I found it hard to get up as far as Star Light, often turning off the Mega Drive before I got there, and considered it to be a prize that was dangled in front of my face only to be cruelly snatched away. There was a cheat code you could use to access a screen that would allow you to choose your level - on the title screen, you sort of smush your thumb on the D-Pad in all directions at once, while pressing Start, and if you're super-lucky you'll get a brown screen that brings up the level selection - but it was an incredibly hard cheat to manage and usually left me throwing my controller to the ground in frustration even more than the early levels of Sonic did. As an adult, I prefer to think of Star Light as a reward for getting through the sheer awfulness that is Labyrinth Zone. (I HATE the underwater levels on Sonic games. Every. Single. One.)

There are multiple places across the globe - and indeed, in books and movies (Rivendell, anyone?) - that I'd like to visit or live in, as well as places that I'd like to be able to teleport myself to any time I'm in need of a dose of happy. Sports stadiums at night are one of the places where I feel the happiest, and I don't think it's a coincidence that the floodlights remind me of the Star Light Zone.

Thanks to the miracle of YouTube, I can watch other people zipping the little blue critter through my homeland without having to do it myself - handy, since I no longer own a Mega Drive (it disappeared when Ryan did, after being stored in his wardrobe for several months, and I can only assume he accidentally took the bag with him and then was too embarrassed to bring it back when he realised what it was) and I don't often have my GameCube hooked up to the TV. I probably should see if there's a Sonic Collection or a Mega Drive Collection available for GBA or Nintendo DS - I know there's one for PSP that I played when I was staying with Siji. Regardless, YouTube has made it possible to view the Star Light Zone whenever I want.

But there will always be that little part of me that grieves for the fact that I will never be able to live there.


Go see Star Light played (WARNING: He curses a lot, and says "cunt" a lot. I know some people are sensitive about that word.) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWreQW1-MX4

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