Happy Monday, folks, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread!

As someone who’s been doing these headers since 2020, I’d like to think I’m well known for my music prompts, where I put down a gigantic buffet of songs from various games and ask you to contribute. I do love doing those, and I want to do one before the year is out, but today’s prompt doesn’t exactly fit a big list. What I do I mean by that?

I’ve made no secret of some of my frustrations in the world of gaming. As a player, as a critic. My unmet aspirations seem to loom larger, my work feels weaker than it should, and it’s hard for me to exist fully outside the space of unpaid games journalism. It’s not that I can’t play a game for its own sake; it’s just hard. Add to that a general terror in the world that’s eating away at me every hour of every day, and it’s hard to not feel unsatisfied. Fortunately, things are better, as is my ability to manage this. Psychotherapy and medication are good! But back in, say, June or July, it was pretty bad. And it was in this emotional space that I began to do a casual, chill session of Mario Kart World in an ultimately failed attempt to ignore my feelings. I was feeling awful, and I was playing a game I like, that’s designed to induce feelings of joy. And then a song started playing.

Now, for those of you who haven’t played World, you need to know that it has an absolutely ridiculous score. In Nintendo’s drive to make a massive, open world Mario Kart, their sound team composed a 226 piece soundtrack (which is apparently accessible through the game’s main menu, something I assumed was not there until writing this header, so that’s actually pretty sweet). This includes the themes for each course and the credits, but also dozens and dozens of remixes of tracks across the Mario Kart and Super Mario series. And it’s good stuff, to boot. The quality and quantity is absolutely shocking. Some of them are exclusive to specific routes between courses, but most of them are in the open world Free Roam mode according to a somewhat hard to read Mario Wiki graph. And right then, while I was driving around a mountainside or tricking or trying to do a P-Switch Mission, one specific song played. It’s a medley of various map screens from Super Mario Bros. 3. For you dunkey fans, it’s the song he used to represent SMB3 in his video on the game. And it was actually the part he used—the part that covers the Water Land theme—that hit me.

Now, I had heard this piece before. A lot, actually. I was listening to the Mario Kart World soundtrack a lot at the time—while playing the game, of course, and on my own. I had heard this song; it’s one of my favorites on the soundtrack. But at this moment, it, and that section, just hit me like nothing else. I was playing and listening and looking, and I just started crying a little at… I don’t know, the compositional beauty of the song. Maybe it was the game, too, and the graphics. I wasn’t sad, to be clear, just somewhere between content and euphoric. At exactly this moment in time, this theme whose official name I still don’t actually know was almost transcendently beautiful. It made me feel better, and stronger, and while I’m not sure what happened next, I distinctly remember feeling on the upswing and staying that way since. This is a delightful piece of music, but it instilled within me a feeling that markedly improved my state of mind.

So, for the prompt: have you ever experienced this while playing a game? This sense of majesty, the feeling of deep emotional empowerment. I realize it’s a rather personal question, and a specific one at that. If you’d prefer to not discuss it, please don’t.

And, as always, what did you play this weekend?