TR Contest Special: Corrupting the Games, Sponsored by ReBoot on DVD!

?Ladies and gentlemen, this weekend’s TR contest is being sponsored by Shout Factory, who have offered not one, not two, but three copies of ReBoot: Season 1 and 2 on DVD for you to win. Here’s the problem, though: ReBoot is a really specific topic for a contest, and a lot of people haven’t seen it. More importantly, I haven’t seen any ReBoot, making me even more worthless as a judge than usual.

Luckily, I have an idea. See, based on my basic understanding of ReBoot, the first season was mostly about Bob the Guardian playing various games to protect the Mainframe — specifically, games would suddenly appear in various spots, and Bob would play the game to protect the sector, because if he lost that section of the Mainframe was destroyed. Meanwhile, the evil Megabyte would sabotage these games, because he was an evil dick.

So here’s this week’s contest theme, which I figure anyone can enter. Say Bob’s living on a computer with every emulator ever on it — meaning that the games he plays include anything from the Atari to the PS3. Your job is to corrupt these games, like Megabyte might do. Basically, you want to cleverly sabotage them so that the player is fucked. For example:

? Painting the red shells green and green shells red in Mario Kart
? Adding 100,000 lines of dialog to Final Fantasy VII, all of which are “…”
? Replacing the flying ostrich eggs in Joust with Tyrannosaurus eggs

I’m less concerned about the plans being hideously violent and more looking for the plans to be devious. For instance, replacing the ostriches in Joust with T.Rexs would have the same effect as replacing the eggs, but switching the eggs is much more clever. So that’s it. If you’re a ReBoot fan, pretend you’re Megabyte and trying to kill Bob in an appropriately cartoon-ish way. If you’re not a ReBoot fan, just pretend you’re a game programmer who desperately wants to screw over the player.

Three entries per person. Keep them short, as the more complicated the plan, the less likely it is to work (in the sense that I’m less likely to read it). The contest ends at 12:01 pm EST on Monday, March 7th, 2011. Thanks so much to Shout Factory for sponsoring the contest and offering these DVDs! Please don’t forget if you want the complete ReBoot on DVD, the only place to get the Definitive MainFrame Edition is right here. And remember, “Memento te esse nerd. Quidam scribam nerds Amy Pond fabulis stupra tibus.” (Thanks to Arachnophobe and Google Translate for those words of wisdom.)