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

So I was going to do a prompt about Golden Sun, one of the new games I’m playing this month. But I’ve been caught by the bug of inspiration. However, we’re going to have to wind the clock back a bit.

Back in the 1980s, two of the biggest (or, perhaps, most infamous) poster makers in America were the Costacos Brothers, who made authorized pin-ups for American athletes. Brian “Boz” Bosworth, Jose Canseco, Lester Hayes, Chuck Person, Michael Jordan, and a ton more. And while they did have some that presented these men in their branded athletic uniforms doing the athletics for which they were known, the most prominent ones did… not to that. Their most iconic posters instead had them in almost action movie poster parodies, with a incredibly bad pun title and ludicrously oversized props. Eric Davis’ has him feeding baseballs into a gigantic novelty revolver larger than his own body. This was partially a way to work with the athletes but not pay a cut to the actual sports team, but it led to something garish, stupid, and hilarious. I think that when people wax rhapsodic about the Eighties, this is what they’re thinking of.

This brings us to today’s prompt—though before you answer it, I humbly request that you take a few moments to look up “costacos brothers posters” into Google. Even if you only look up the ones for Canseco and Lawrence Taylor; they’re great.

…You’re back? Had a good time? Of course you did! But now you’re ready to answer my prompt: imagine your favorite video game mascot as portrayed by a Costacos Brothers poster. So imagine, say, Mario, or Link, or Leon Kennedy, or Ellie, or a car from Forza, but they’re in this kind of poster. I’ll help you with an example. We’ll use Fox McCloud, since he just got a new game. We can’t call it Star Fox or use Arwings, because we’re working with Fox himself and not Nintendo. Instead, it’s going to be Fox on a ridiculously oversized throne. He’s got a gigantic-ass crown, a cape that’s probably just an actual carpet, a scepter that has “SF” badly superimposed on it and is shooting off Photoshopped electrical sparks, and he’s pointing at some bad guy who’s mostly careening offscreen so you can’t see his face.

And the title of this poster? Tsar Wars. And yes, obviously I worked backwards form the pun.

While you come up with your own idea—and this has to be the stupidest prompt this site has ever come up with, right?—what did you play this weekend?