A day or two ago, Pajiba ran a comment thread asking users to name their favorite video games. It filled up in an instant with proclamations of the most holy of gaming lore, and I joined in. Below the cries of “MEGA MAN RULEZ U GUYZ SUK,” there was a dim murmur of desire. The people wanted Pajiba video game reviews, but the site would not have it, for none of the writers seems to play them.

So I was looking for an excuse to start a blog. I can write, and I can be negative, and I own a couple of URLs with which I’ve done nothing. The Pajibians’ cries for gaming fulfillment reached my ears, and I decided it was my job to bring them what they need.

Too bad this is how it turned out, huh?

Welcome to Shieldship, or The Shieldship, or maybe The Ship if I’m cool enough to call it that. I’m Lucas, your unmotivated entertainer, lecturer, and dancing monkey. I’ll be writing about video games, and probably comics here and there, and then I’ll probably run out of things to write about and move into different topics such as cooking, social skills for the socially unskilled, music, new socks, cotton swabs, and dirty dishes.

But you want to know what a shieldship is (yes, you do). First, you’re a liar for not capitalizing it. It’s Shieldship. Get it right. Second, a (the) Shieldship is a space ship that’s built so that the front of it is shaped like a big, round, Captain America-esque shield, and armored like hell so you can’t blow it up unless you shoot it from behind, and good luck with that, you dishonorable fiend. Why is a blog about video games named after a made up space ship? Look at the part in the first (nope, the second) paragraph where I mention having a few unused URLs. Seemed like a cool name at the time, and I was probably drunk (no I wasn’t).

I’m five paragraphs in (well, the third paragraph is just a sentence) and I haven’t said anything about video games other than that they exist, have I? Well. I’ve been playing games since I was a kid. When I was five or six years old, I was in a Circle K with my mom and I saw Street Fighter II: Street Fightin’ Edition against the wall. It was a monolith of happiness, and all it cost was 25 cents and my soul. My mom gave me a quarter, I provided the soul, and the machine welcomed me.

The mind of a six (yeah, it was six, not five) year old is a remarkable thing. I read Beowulf in its entirety and understood it, but not for the life of me could I figure out how to choose a character. I strained to reach the controls, and once I found them, I had no idea what they did. The stick obviously had something to do with movement, and one could reasonably assume that the buttons would cause awesome things to happen, but I couldn’t fathom what those awesome things might be.

Inevitably (thanks to the timer), a character was chosen (might have been my choice, might have been an angel): Chun Li. I was smitten. Never yet had a Chinese girl captured my heart; all the ones at violin lessons were better at the instrument and made me feel inadequate. Chun Li flew her toned ass (I didn’t know that word then) to Japan and decided it was time to put E. Honda in his place, and together, she and I gave him a good, clean whooping. Seeing that I was the winner, I decided that the game was over. I returned to my mom, smiling like the street fighter that I was.

A decade later, I realized that I was E. Honda.