I'm not interested in entering a contest I'll never win, but I have been trying to get Syndicate into my cart all day. I keep clicking and clicking, but every time I click, nothing seems to happen.
It. Just. Will. Not. Work... at all. >_<
While I wait for this grievous issue to sort itself out (Something I predict will happen no later than the 19th of January. Just call it intuition, it's an even ten days after my birthday, so it just feels lucky is all...), I may as well make an entry with the least amount of effort possible, since I'm not going to win anyway, and even if I did, I'd probably have already bought it by the time I found out I won.
Team:
Team We Never Win
Team Members:
Shotgun Harry: In a battle against an opponent, who happened to be a right-handed wizard in a universe supposedly devoid of spellcasting, with a proficiency in "magic intended for healing minor wounds and illuminating dark corridors" (in all likelyhood hydrogen peroxide, gauze, and a flashlight) as well as the use of small one-handed wooden rods and a heavy penalty with ranged weaponry of any sort (it's said that he once utterly failed to pelt a bear, even once, with a fairly large satchel filled to the brim with walnut-sized stones... while it was asleep), this wizard was, for reasons I can't begin to fathom, wielding a shotgun in his left hand.
Aside from the difficulties of anybody who isn't the son of the legendary dark knight Sparda proficiently wielding a shotgun in one hand, much less their off-hand, we was also famously abysmal at any sort of combat, especially ranged. Shotgun Harry made a conscious effort to dodge, yes, but he just wasn't very lucky that day... or ever, really. Despite 1d400 odds, having to roll 400 just to avoid a critical miss (again, the wizard was very bad with the equipment he was wielding), he not only managed to shoot in the direction of his target, but his target failed the ten consecutive saving throws required to avoid a load of poorly-aimed shrapnel to the face.
If you haven't already guessed by now, Shotgun Harry is named Shotgun Harry, and part of "Team We Never Win", because he has a crater where his face should be, and the very sort of luck you'd expect from a member of this team. He's unofficially the leader, for the fact that he always enters a door before the rest of his squad (you never know when there will be on old lady with a shotgun or a field full of claymore mines just waiting on the other side...), inspires his team members with his impressive pedigree of misfortune, and never gives them orders they're unwilling to follow... or at all, since he is physically incapable of intelligible speech (...but nobody on a team like "Team We Never Win" would want to take orders from a member of Team We Never Win anyway. If they did that, they'd never win!).
Gamblin' Leonard: Back in his prime, Gamblin' Leonard was quite the gambler. He gambled his house, he gambled his kids, he gambled his neighbor's car, he even tried to gamble the casino itself, as he'd never managed to win quite enough of an education to understand the concept of "personal property", or anything else, for that matter. According to Gamblin' Leonard, the only way to gamble is "all or nothing"; in Leonard's case, however, it's simply "nothing". It's a miracle he's managed to acquire so many thing in his life to gamble in the first place, but he always manages to part with things just as quickly as he possesses them.
Down on his luck, even more than usual, Gamblin' Leonard, despite parting with his dignity a very, very long time ago, still possessed whatever freedoms you and I pretend to enjoy. He, of course, lost this too, and he's been an unwilling, but most certainly welcome, part of Team We Never Win ever since. He's usually in charge of the treasury and the armaments. For any other team, this would be a dire mistake.
"Moonman Stan" Stanley: When asked why people call him "Moonman Stan", Stanley fondly remembers his life before joining the team. A high-ranking member of a highly secretive space program (he was number four of ten members!), Stanley was in charge of watching the monitors. A cushy job with none of the worries of impacting on the surface of meteors like numbers eleven and twelve (numbers eleven and twelve frequently seemed to die; reducing the membership by two somehow resolved this issue), all he had to do was watch the monitors.
He did a great job watching the monitors, but a very poor job of interpreting what was displayed. He was, in fact, watching a set of monitors streaming images from cameras aimed at himself, which served him suitably as a makeshift mirror for keeping his hair kempt. It was just his luck that the cameras, of course, were on-board a shuttle, which explained the g-forces he often complained about prior to his realization that he was, in fact, in space. Crash landing on the moon, Stanley subsisted on a diet of gorillas that were frequently shipped to his little white satellite.
The gorillas were, unbeknownst to Stanley, plagued with radiation and all manner of experimental chemical compounds. These compounds were usually made from completely random assortments of chemicals, with the hope that one set of treatments would render one gorilla fully conscious of the mission he was meticulously trained for, and would signal, through a series of gestures involving pointing and sign language visible via telescope, the exact coordinates for the placement of "New Moon 1" and "New Moon 2", exact replicas of our moon placed in just the right way to allow the Earth to be triangulated by three moons, which would later serve to be "possibly useful" for future plans of some kind.
It was proposed as "more of a proof of concept, really, with the possibility for practical application in the future". The organization Stanley worked for considered themselves "visionaries", founded on the ideal that "looking at the big picture gets in the way of not only thinking outside the box, but progress".
One day, a shuttle landed, fully intact, which aroused Stanley's suspicion, as every other shuttle, including his, always landed in a state of complete disrepair. His suspicions were sound, as onboard the shuttle was a crew of his fellow colleagues. Horrified at the sight of a very, very pale Stanley amidst a sea of gorilla skeletons, the crew dragged Stanley back onto the shuttle, after which he would be be tried by a tribunal of his superiors.
Midway through transit, however, a particularly unstable Stanley somehow phased through the floor of the shuttle and fell careening towards Earth. Withstanding the dangers of entering the atmosphere and impacting with terra firma, you would think Stanley was actually a very lucky fellow, and in fact, he is easily the luckiest of the team. However, his exposure to various toxins has had a profound effect on his body and mind, which has caused nearly every hour to seem like one thousand years of excruciatingly painful torment. Also, he's the errand boy of the group, which is arguably worse.
Char-broiled Charlie: They said jumping in water could put out any fire. Charlie proved them wrong.
Together, this team proves that while some guys have all the luck, some of them have none of it... at all. I recommended GOG to Shotgun Harry. He complained that none of the games he bought were DRM-free. I told him that every game is DRM-free, but somehow he's managed to be unlucky enough to end up with some form of DRM every time.
Gamblin' Leonard, of course, bought the entire catalog, and gambled it. If he won, he'd have gotten every future GOG for free. He lost, of course, and now all of his games have three time activation limits.
Moonman Stan and Char-Broiled Charlie are in far too much agony to care about gaming, much less DRM-free gaming. I tried to explain the benefits of DRM-free, and gifted Moonman Stan copies of Planescape: Torment, Sanitarium, and Painkiller Black Edition. After playing, he expressed that "some guys have all the luck" (referring to the Nameless One, Max Laughton, and Daniel Garner). Then he stayed motionless for an hour, suddenly broke into laughter, paused, screamed a gut-wrenching cry, and then his mind appeared to wander into another plane of existence as he mumbled incoherently for the next few hours until I finally left, admitting defeat. Char-Broiled Charlie's computer recently fried, despite my lecture on proper cooling and the importance of thermal paste.
There's just no getting through to some people, I'm afraid. I certainly tried, but luck just wasn't on my side, it seems.
