Today is a dark day. A day of pain. A day of suffering.

Valentine’s Day.

I was going to spend tonight with my friend Marianne, so we could hold an anti-Valentine’s Day pity party…but she was too busy. So not only am I all alone without a girlfriend, I’m all alone without a single friend.

And what better way to revel in my misery than by writing about than my darkest, most mysterious guides…the ones not good enough to be listed on GameFAQs?

Rampage: World Domination Log

Rampage is a fun but overly-long game where you take the role of monsters intent on taking over the world. There aren’t many guides for it, because every level is exactly the same. I mean, seriously, a proper guide for the game would look like this:

Level 1: Destroy all the buildings.
Level 2: Destroy all the buildings.
Level 3: Destroy all the buildings.
Level 4: Destroy all the buildings.
Level 5: Destroy all the buildings.
Level 6: Destroy all the buildings.
Level 7: Destroy all the buildings.
Level 8: Destroy all the buildings.
Level 9: Do the Hokey Pokey and turn yourself about…no, wait, destroy all the buildings.

But instead of writing that, I wrote a guide that’s basically a list of every city you destroy. Click on that link to see what I mean. It’s a really crappy excuse for a guide, and eventually, I “killed” it by asking GameFAQs to remove it.

What’s really weird, though, is that someone named Richard Bean emailed two months after I killed the guide, pointing out that I misspelled “Peoria.” So, even though the guide was killed, I had to update it to fix my spelling error. It was probably my most useless update ever.

Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons

Zelda is a total cutie.

This is my only guide that was actually rejected by GameFAQs. It’s a Quote FAQ for Oracle of Seasons. For those of you who don’t know, a Quote FAQ is basically a compilation of all the dialogue in a game, sorted by who says it and when they say.

I read a Quote FAQ by David Bulter, and I went to his Zelda-themed Web site. He had a list of all the dialogue in the Oracle games, but it was unsorted. I asked David if I could make a Quote FAQ by sorting the dialogue for him, and he said yes. So I sorted all the dialogue and submitted the guide to his Web site and GameFAQs.

David Butler’s Web site accepted the guide. GameFAQs did not.

Angst. Angst. Angst.

Fun fact that few people realize: When you put the names of the two witches in this game together, you get Maple Syrup.

Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages

I also did a Quote FAQ for Oracle of Seasons’ twin, Oracle of Ages. Exact same process: I took David Butler’s list of dialogue and sorted it according to memory.

This looks better on a GBC, trust me.

To help relieve my boredom while making this guide, I created a mini-section called “The Meanest Quotation in the Game.” Basically, there’s a totally out-of-place Goron who insults Link for no reason at all. Here’s what he says:

GORON: You humans are looking stranger every day. What happened?

Where did that come from? Mean old Goron. I thought it was kind of interesting, so I pointed it out in the guide, just like I did here.

If a woman who looked like this wanted to be my valentine, I would probably run away screaming.

And that’s it for this month! Now I feel less depressed about Valentine’s Day, because if I can’t find love in the real world, I can still find love in the virtual world…with you GameCola Readers! That’s right! I love you, GameCola Readers! I LOVE YOU!!!

…But I still want a pre-nup before we take our relationship to the next level.