‘Shop Contest: Video Game Independence Day

Independence Day is this week for Americans, and that means barbecues, American flags plastered on everything, and lots of people (who are also plastered) lighting fireworks and shooting them into the sky, into the ground, and at each other. Let’s put that in video games.

Your task this week is this: how would your favorite video game characters spend their July 4th holiday?

In my mind, Big Boss is into a lighter version of the holiday that’s just him, his hat, a sparkler, D-Horse, and the craggy rocks of the wilds of Afghanistan. After all, he’s constantly having to negotiate his relationship with the nuclear power that in the United States, but I think he still has a glimmer of patriotism in him. After all, he keeps doing clandestine missions for the CIA.

How would Mario feel about the great big fireworks? Does the Mushroom Kingdom have its own equivalent event? Do they celebrate in the far-future of Horizon Zero Dawn? I bet the event is appropriately horrifying in Far Cry 5‘s Hope County. I’m sure you have some great ideas.

I look forward to your July 4th video game celebrations.

As always, good luck, and the rest of the instructions are below.

How To Upload Images — Instructions

1. Create your ‘Shop and save it to your desktop. Images must be at least 636 pixels wide.

2. Go to the bottom of this post

3. This brings up a comment window. Click “Choose file” if you’re uploading your ‘shop from your desktop

4. Alternatively, you can upload the ‘Shop to a free image hosting service. I suggest imgur. Then paste the image’s URL into the field that says “Image URL.” Note: this must be the URL of the image itself, not the page where it is displayed. That means the URL ends in .jpg, .gif, .png, whatever.

5. Add editorial commentary and hit submit and your image will load. If it doesn’t, upload the image to imgur and paste the image URL as a comment. I will look at it.

6. Large-size images may not upload properly, though we have seen some animated .gifs upwards of 5 MB. If you’re still having trouble uploading the image, try to keep its longest dimension (horizontal or vertical) under 1000 pixels, or the whole thing under 2 MB.