It wasn’t too long until his sister was walking through the door. He was still sitting down sipping on his energy drink inside of his glass. Today wasn’t the day to chug energy drinks and get super hyper. His sister had a small black back with the words : GameWorld sprawled across it. His sister walked over to the table and dumped the contents of the bag onto the table. It was one retro looking game-box. The cover art had the main character doing a peace symbol in front of a dark metropolis looking city. He found the depiction of the city to be ominous and foreboding. It’s not like he hasn’t played dark retro games.

He looked over at Jasmine who was standing next to him. “So this is the game, huh?” He picked up the game case with one of his hands.

Jasmine nodded happily. “Yeah, it is.” She paused for a moment. “It was weird, it was like the game was pulling me towards it. Like it wanted me to buy it.” She put a finger to her lip and it looked like she was in deep thought or some sort of a trance.

Honestly, he didn’t like the sound of that. The only thing that ‘pulls you to it’ is some sort of evil spirit or entity. Those are usually in haunted houses and creepy places. Could the game be haunted? He wasn’t getting any weird vibes from the game. It was still in it’s case though. Maybe if he got it out, he would feel different and how was he going to run this thing on the emulators anyways? Only one way to find out. He opened the case and it opened up like any other DVD. There was a mini-cd in the case with the same art from the front of the game printed on it. He picked up the CD from the sides. He blinked for a moment as he held the game.

He smirked. “A CD, really? This really is retro. I was kinda hoping for a DVD or something. Surprised they haven’t started making video games on Blu-Ray discs.” He laughed.

Jasmine glanced at the mini-cd that her brother was holding. “Interesting, retro. I wonder if we can put that in a cd player and access the soundtrack.”

Bobby laughed. “Who has a CD player anymore?”

Bobby had hooked up a USB-CDROM to his computer. He pushed the button on the CD-ROM and the tray extended and he put the mini-cd in the Cd-Rom tray and oddly it was a perfect fit. It was like it was made for the cd-rom that he was using. That was odd, but nothing to worry about. He was one of those people that loved retro-shit and had a lot of retro stuff. Hell, up in his room he had a few desktops from the early 2000’s that he had torn apart and was trying to make into emulated arcade machines. The project wasn’t going to well.

There was always that excitement of playing a new video game, because you didn’t know what was going to happen or who you were going to encounter. The CD-ROM tray retracted back into the CD-ROM and you could hear the cd spinning and the computer was doing it’s job and it was booting up the CD. A window opened with the contents of the CD there was a single game file on the CD and some other files, one was a .png file of the cover art and the other files were just simply setting files. There were two retro-style-usb controllers hooked up to the other usb ports on the laptop. Nowhere on the box had it mentioned if the game was one or two players. They were hoping for a multi-player game. If it wasn’t they would just take turns.

Jasmine was excited and looked at her brother. “What do you think the game will be like?”

Bobby shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably some plat former. If it’s supposed to be retro, that is the kind of game it will be.”

There was an electric feeling in the room, like there was a vortex of energy. Of course, he lived in a rather old apartment and those apartments tended to have, well, umm, ‘personality’ which meant there were probably a few spirits and spooks around. That didn’t bother him. He was smart enough to leave the paranormal alone. He loaded up his emulator, it was a simple gui. It had three tabs : Files, Settings and Tools. Settings is where you calibrated your gamepads. Tools was something you didn’t mess with. It was basically for loading up hacks and hires textures, he wasn’t getting into that right now.

He clicked on FILE, then located the rom file on the CD-ROM and opened it. The game loaded and the title screen came up rather promptly, they were both amazed. Then something odd happened, that electric feeling it got stronger. A portal opened up in front of them, it looked like it was one the computer screen and it sucked them both in. Where were they going? It felt like they were falling and it was because they were. It felt like they had been falling for hours. There was a thud sound, they had finally hit the ground. Bobby was the first one to stand up, dust himself off and look around.

They were in what looked like a forest and he noticed a wooden sign that was stuck in the ground. It had writing on it. The sign read : Darkcrest, 4 miles and it had an arrow pointing to the right. Could they be on a hilltop or something. Jasmine had pushed herself up off of the ground and dusted herself off and then she blinked and looked down at her hands, they weren’t hands anymore.