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Editor’s note: Today’s lead story in The Disgruntled Vegetable chronicles how circumstances push the galaxy’s greatest bounty hunter to embrace…an insurance company. Actually, I could see how a number of gaming heroes — and villains — would benefit from insurance. I betcha Bowser wishes he was in a certain company’s “good hands” after Mario and Luigi break every block in his castle and loot all of his gold coins. -Jason
ABOARD THE G.F.S. OLYMPUS — After spending tireless years backtracking for lost or stolen abilities, renowned bounty hunter Samus Aran announced earlier today that she had finally become fed up with this needless waste of time. In order to prevent this from happening in the future, she has purchased premium insurance from the Space Farm Insurance Company, saying that the quote she received from SFIC was “the best deal for the best coverage around.”
“Whether it was from flying through a huge lightning storm or simply tripping on a jagged rock, I was constantly losing access to my special powers, like being able to curl up into a ball or run really fast,” Aran told reporters. “This was really interfering with the time it took to complete crucial missions.”
Lighting storms: One of the ways that Samus inevitably loses her abilities.
The final straw, she said, was during her last mission to planet CR355-LARD in which the Galactic Federation Council assigned her to wipe out all indigenous life for “the good of the public.” After climbing out of her ship, she slipped and fell on a small ice formation, which caused a system error in her power suit, losing the data required to perform all but the simplest tasks.
“Basically, I was only able to walk, jump, and shoot for a little while, which really slowed down my progress in single-handed mass-genocide of the planet’s inhabitants,” she said. “I learned to survive on my own early in life, but once you get used to the luxury of having a super-missile launcher built into your arm or the ability to lay an infinite number of landmines at your whim, it gets pretty hard to go back.
“If any of those soft, fuzzy creatures that lived there actually tried to fight back, I might have been in serious trouble.”
Luckily for Samus, her adopted Chozo family conveniently placed devices throughout the world that contained patches to restore the lost data in her powersuit in case of this very event. They also hid some mods that added a few new abilities developed after the release of the power suit.
“It would’ve been nice if they included those useful features, like the screw-attack, in the initial build. I wouldn’t have minded to wait an extra month for the bonus content. It would’ve saved me a lot of time in the long run,” she said. “At the very least, they could’ve added an automatic-update feature to download the newest abilities as soon as they’re released instead of forcing me to search for them on random planets that I happen to stumble upon.”
As for why she keeps losing her powers in the first place, Samus blames her suit’s faulty programming, which runs on a Windows-27 SP2 operating system that’s known for its frequent crashes and virus attacks.
“I keep telling her to switch to a more reliable framework, like the Mac OS XI, which was just released last year,” said Galactic Federation technician Lieutenant Shmup. “The space pirates could easily create a virus that hacks into her suit and cause it do terrible things, like making her punch herself in the face while shouting ‘Stop hitting yourself.’ But she’s too afraid of switching to a different interface, no matter how many times I explain to her that it’s even more user-friendly than the one she has now.”
Behold: Apple’s latest advertising campaign.
With her new insurance contract, Samus simply has to file a claim with SFIC any time she loses her powers, and they will ship a new set of abilities to her within three business days. This, of course, assumes that she does not lose the ability to communicate with the outside world.
“When the insurance agent told me that I could get replacement abilities sent to me in a few days instead of scouring a desolate planet for months, I knew this was a great deal,” Aran said. “Plus, I just couldn’t say no to that computer-animated Metroid with the Australian accent that they use in their commercials.”