Area gamer Steve Ellerton was horrified yesterday when, after spending three hours straight playing the PlayStation remake of Lunar 2: Eternal Blue without saving, his mother's prized Persian cat padded into the room, tottered uncertainly, and then proceeded to throw up all over his PlayStation unit. The vomit turned out to be highly liquid and seeped into the unit, shorting it out and causing Ellerton's game to freeze.

After throwing the controller in the direction of the cat, which had already wandered out of the room, Ellerton, 16, of Des Moines, Iowa, swore bitterly. "Man... I hate this stupid cat!" the adolescent fumed while gingerly cleaning his PlayStation console. "My mom got it three years ago after she went to a cat show, and the freaking thing is so inbred it's always having health problems."

Ellerton, however, does not associate the cat's inability to hold its breakfast down with these difficulties; rather, he is ascribing the vomiting incident to the cat's tendency towards "revenge vomiting," in his words. "Yeah, that stupid cat is always puking on something if you don't treat it just so," Ellerton grumbled, rolling his eyes. "The other week, I had just started playing Final Fantasy X when it came into the room with that look in its eye. Fortunately, I was able to throw a shoe at it that time, but I obviously wasn't so lucky here."

When approached for comment, Ellerton's mother was skeptical about her son's complaints: "Oh, Steven is always complaining about the cat," she sniffed, clutching the animal and forcibly petting it, despite its frenzied attempts to escape her grasp. "If he'd just show a little more care for Percy, maybe the animosity wouldn't be there -- I mean, is it that difficult to feed him once in awhile when I'm not home?"

Ellerton's friends also expressed contempt for the gamer's saving practices. "I swear, man... Steve never saves anywhere," said Rico Person, Ellerton's next-door neighbour and long time friend. "Once, he was playing Suikoden II and he went for like an hour without saving, even though I told him like six times. Then he got killed by this chick with a whip and acted all shocked. Still, that cat is a pain in the ass."

In spite of his shortcomings, there is some sympathy for Ellerton, whose future playing Lunar II is now in doubt. Even if his PlayStation console can be coaxed into functioning properly again, the game's closing sequence can verge on excruciating, with a drawn-out conclusion to the plot, a tedious final dungeon, and extraneous, maddening epilogues to complete following the game's end. For more information on this title, check RPGamer's coverage.