So I felt sick at work and got home early to rest up, have some medical marijuana, and order Taco Bell with the money I would have spent on dinner (I need to go to the grocery store at the first opportunity but my plan was otherwise the $5.99 boneless wing special at Charley’s) and the $25 my mom Zelled me because I was sick and she’s become really cool like that since she had grandkids.

I haven’t had Taco Bell since my dad lived in the area, so like 2018 at least, and probably for some time before that because it’s never been a favorite of either of us. But sometimes you need a late-night Taco Bell run. Sorry, no Baja Blast.

Regular hard taco, double beef and cheese, no lettuce: You can’t have Taco Bell without the classic, make-at-home style taco. Inflation has hit Taco Bell hard in general, but it wasn’t long ago that the basic Taco Bell taco was 99 cents. Am I dreaming? This is what it is – comfort food, because with the extra stuffing and lettuce left optional, it’s like the tacos I had as a kid but don’t feel like going through the trouble to make.

Chips with nacho cheese sauce: You know why I don’t like nachos? Because in my head, nachos were stuff like this and 7-11 and stadium nachos and the fancy “nacho supreme” stuff was a cruel lie. They used to call these nachos, btw. Now they’re tortilla chips with nacho cheese sauce. One good thing is that they still give you enough sauce for the whole bag of chips.

Regular nacho fries: These are really good fries, the kind that don’t have to be too hot, too fresh, or too dry to be enjoyable. Seasoned fries, like Popeyes’ Cajun fries, but fluffy where Popeyes’ are firm. The cheese sauce is a nice added touch. Major props for this one.

Fiesta potatoes: old, cold, not worth the $2.39 or whatever it was.

Quesadilla with extra cheese sauce: Eh, the biggest disappointment. I’m not wild on jalapeño outside of kettle potato chips, and the biggest thing is that there’s no meat. It just feels like it’s missing something substantial – melted cheese and jalapeño sauce on flatbread doesn’t cut it as an entrée. Which is why I got this and left it for last –

Five-layer burrito, extra beef, extra cheese sauce, with potatoes, no beans: Read that back and try to find one fucking thing wrong with it. The potatoes replicate the texture of the beans, but they taste much better and mix well with the taco-seasoned beef and that delicious nasty-ass creamy cheese sauce. This actually cost less than the quesadilla and it was the crown on the meal that tonight deserved.

** The Final Fantasy Legend : I took a break from the other game I’m playing for the Olympics and I started this when I got back. After the other game I’m playing, I plan on A Link to the Past, which I’ve actually never played for one second (I didn’t get an SNES until I already had a PlayStation). The other game is Avernum 2: Crystal Souls, btw.

But FF Legend is the American release of the 1989 Game Boy RPG SaGa that went on to have its own series – we’ve discussedSaGa Frontier. I won’t bore you with details about that series thar you’ve probably never played, but in short it’s a middling 8-bit JRPG that was localized exceptionally poorly, typical of the time, and extremely broken – if you hang around and grind at two specific places in the first few hours, you’ll be unstoppably OP’d the rest of the game.

But the miracle of The Final Fantasy Legend isn’t that it’s a great 8-bit 1989 JRPG on a tiny cartridge in monochrome, it’s that it exists at all, and it’s playable enough to get lost in for a while. With games like this, Link’s Awakening, and Super Mario Land, early Game Boy developers took the console seriously in its own right rather than as a toy for a car ride or to play Tetris while waiting for the doctor or before class. If you had asked me at the time I wouldn’t have believed it. Pokémon, one of the greatest pop-culture originals of the ’90s, started on Game Boy, and not even Game Boy Color, though it was backwards-compatible.

You’ve made it all the way to the end of the post! And prooved the justice of our culture. Here are some goodies for your perseverance.

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