Joust!

I did the main story mission in Final Fantasy XIV to get to the point where I could start earning grand company points. I set to work doing their crafting daily quests which earn a pretty hefty experience boost and give points. I spent my first 2000 such points unlocking my own personal chocobo mount. Woo! The first thing I got to do is name it, which of course is going to take me a lot of time to come up with the perfect name. Boco would be the default name, but it both seems boring and is probably a pretty popular name. I then thought of Silver, from "Hi-Ho Silver, Away!" which led me to trying a Google search for famous mount names. Which linked me to an article on Wikipedia about the Nazgul in Lord of the Rings. Which talked about how their flying mounts were absolutely _not_ pterodactyls, but how Tolkein could see why people might think they were.

Pterodactyls? Reminds me of Joust! Maybe I should name my chocobo after Terry the pterodactyl from that game. Was that even his name, or am I just making things up? But a chocobo isn't really a pterodactyl... It's more like the ostriches in that game. Ok, did they have names?

A lot of searching turns up nothing on the name front. Old school arcade games didn't have plots or stories and rarely had names. Apparently there was a movie planned in 2007 but it never got made; I bet it would have had ostrich names! On the plus side I did turn up a site that let me play Joust! I used to play this game a lot as a kid, but not the arcade version. I think we had it for the Atari 600XL home computer. It had better sound than this emulated one for sure, because I distinctly remember the sound of little ostrich feet running on the ground and screeching to a stop when you tried to chang directions.

So I don't have a name for my chocobo, but I do have a web version of a 1982 arcade classic to play. Woo!