Board 8 > KCF's Top Gaming Memories and Moments (Part II)

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I graduate on May 12th. I have 16 planned entries left. My goal is to be done by the time I graduate.

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Going out to lunch with some friends soon and may hang out with them for a little while after eating, but I will get some done today

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The Good - The Old School

Back in the 2000-2001 school year, my mom's workplace was undergoing major renovations, so they leased an old school so they could continue to operate like they used to. My mom works for our county's Board of Developmental Disabilities and Mental Retardation, so they needed a place that was wheelchair-friendly, had classrooms, and could store a bunch of equipment and toys. The school was the perfect place.

On multiple occasions, my mom had to go into work during non-workdays/hours, so me and my sister would accompany her during those trips. The first time I went there, I had just bought the Pokemon Trading Card Game for the GBC. I also had my eye on an electric wheelchair, so I decided to combine the two. I would play a game that requires a great deal of attention while operating a mobile machine that requires an even greater deal of attention. Terrible combination that should lead to disaster right? Well, it nearly did.

I pretty much just used ramps or went around in the flat gymnasium, mitigating my risk, but after awhile, I felt confident enough to venture out. This also happened to be the time that I was taking my grass-based deck into the fire gym. With my deck being at a disadvantage, I put far more attention on the game than my surroundings.

I was fighting the gym leader and was on the ropes. I was getting so worked up about it that I accidentally sped up my wheelchair. If you can imagine a 10-year-old kid looking as intense as could be while mashing buttons on a Game Boy while speeding on a wheelchair, I implore you to do so as it only gets better once I realized I was on a crash course for a some-what lengthy flight of stairs that would almost assuredly destroy my Game Boy, the wheelchair, and some of my bones.

I was trying to slow down that thing so hard that I thought that it was going to short circuit on me. By the time it came to a halt, I was no more than a foot away from the top of the stairs. I was relieved, but I quickly forgot about the situation that I put myself into and continued with that boss while cruising, after backing up and turning around of course, in my wheelchair

Why am I listing this as a good memory even though my life was in serious danger? It was simply too damn fun.

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I've been pretty negligent of this lately, but seeing as I really want to get this finished before graduation and the fact I have plans in the middle of the week, I will probably set aside time for the next few days to get a massive amount of entries (5 or so) in one sitting

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The Bad - The Snitch


In the 4th grade, most of the boys had a Game Boy Color and a copy of Pokemon Red, Blue, or Yellow. Because of the aforementioned school rules in the Game & Watch story, we had to play in secrecy while in school. That happened to be quite difficult, so it was common that we would only have a handful of opportunities in a given week.

Sometime in the middle of the school year, we had a new student. I forget his name, but let’s just call him Josh. Josh was a boaster. All kids made fibs to make them or their parents look cool, but Josh boasted all the time and often at the expense of others. He was already in our Pokemon circle, so we couldn’t just kick him out, but we tried our best to ignore him.

One day, Josh decided to play his Game Boy Color on his own and was caught. Instead of taking the high road, he took down everyone with him. One by one, our principal was going to kids and having their backpacks checked. I was hoping that I would be passed over, but she eventually came to me and asked for me to remove my belongings in my backpack. She took my Game Boy Color, game included, and said that she was going to hold onto it for a week and that my parents had to come retrieve it after that.

If you can imagine what it would be like to have your access to Pokemon taken away as a 10 year-old kid, I’m sure you would have pity on me. It didn’t matter that I had a SNES, Atari, N64, and an original Game Boy at that time. That Game Boy Color had my goddamn Pokemon cartridge and because I didn’t have it, I wanted it desperately.

After that event, our Pokemon circle was no more, and I never brought my Game Boy Color to school again.

Coincidentally, this wasn’t even the worst guilty-by-association punishment that I received that school year.
However, it isn’t video game related, so you will likely never hear about it.

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The Bad - Gone Without a Trace

My oldest SNES games were always having their memory wiped. Nobody in my family was intentionally or unintentionally erasing files or anything. It was just something to do with the cartridges themselves. It was a bummer when it happened but when those games happened to be Super Mario All-Stars, Super Mario World, and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, it wasn’t too hard, both in difficulty and time required, to get back to where I was. I did not have the same attitude in a later occurrence.

In 2000, I received Paper Mario for Christmas. I let my sister have a file on it and we both would play it a lot and compete for its use. After roughly 20 hours into the game, I reached the final point in the game. Instead of beating it right then and there, I decided to take a break and attempt to beat it later on.

My sister happened to play it after I got off. When I returned to finish it in the evening, I was horrified by what appeared on the screen. My file that occupied the first slot was gone. My sister’s file was intact but not mine. I went ballistic.

I was never a physically violent person, but I went on a verbal tirade directed at my sister that my mom or sister had never seen from me. I accused her of erasing my file, which she denied doing, and I remember throwing in a ***** and ******* in there. After five minutes or so, I calmed down and went to my room so that I could restart my file.

I don’t know what the truth behind the matter was. I do know that my sister would never intentionally erase it, but she was the type who would lie if she did something wrong that she didn’t mean to do. If she did accidentally erase it or if my file was the victim of some cartridge problem is something I’ll never know.

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The Good - GTAing in Secrecy

Back in the 6th grade, me and Jon, from the Symphonia story, were still a ways off before we would get a Gamecube and Xbox, respectively, for Christmas. We still went to each other’s house every so often to play video games, but we still yearned for the opportunity to play some of the new systems. One of Jon’s friends in his neighborhood, Brian, dropped by unannounced with a surprise, a PS2.

We were elated at first, but then he showed us his only game, Grand Theft Auto III. It wasn’t the game that was the problem (who wouldn’t want to play GTA III?) but where we were at. Jon’s mom was very much against violent games. Though religion and upbringing played a role, it was mainly because Jon’s younger brother at the time was 5-6 years old and she didn’t want him to be negatively affected by being exposed to such things.
To make matters worse, we played video games in the basement while she was often directly above us either using the coffee table as a desk or watching TV.

We went ahead and played it anyway, but we devised a plan to be in the clear. Jon and his brothers had all of their video game systems in a jumbled mess in the basement. What we did was boot up the Dreamcast and put a match of Power Stone up and pause it. Then, we would change the channel and boot up the PS2 with GTA III. His TV had two input channels that allowed for that to happen.

When we got to playing GTA III, we would each take turns wrecking as much havoc as we could and try and stave off the police and whatever they threw at us until we were gunned down or busted. We didn’t keep it on mute, neither was it incredibly loud, but we were hollering and such each time we witnessed or did something awesome. Each time Jon’s mom came down to check what was going, we would hear her open the basement door, so that gave us the heads-up to change the channel and pick up the Dreamcast controllers and play Power Stone for a bit until she went back upstairs.

Because Jon and I didn’t live close together, we couldn’t do this all the time, but it was something we always did every few weekends until Brian moved away later that school year.

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The Good - The Sexy Kyle Clan

Back in the early going of Halo 2, there was a clan feature. There wasn’t any use for being in a clan though, so I didn’t do anything with it. Eventually, Bungie set up matchmaking modes centered on clan matches, finally piquing my interest.

Most of my friends from school were in a clan about pink ninjas or something. I felt that was beneath me, so I began the Sexy Kyle Clan. As silly as a name that may have been, it was one of the most formidable clans in Halo 2.

The first battle was getting my friends to join my clan. With a name like “Sexy Kyle Clan,” it didn’t exactly inspire all my friends to join up, but they eventually chose their friend over some random clan that they didn’t even know the person heading it.

Back then, we didn’t have very busy after-school schedules, so we would often play some matches every day. We had all played Halo since the year Combat Evolved came out, so were better than the majority of people playing Halo 2.

Our rank kept getting higher every day as our members were highly skilled players with no glaring weak link among us. I remember one weekend where we won 25+ matches in a row. The Sexy Kyle Clan, at its peak, was one of the most successful clans, in terms of winning percentage, in the Halo 2 community while having only 15-20 members!

For whatever reason, Bungie halted the clan matchmaking mode and never brought it back up again. My friends and I joked that they didn’t want a clan with “sexy” in its name being on the leaderboards. Though we all continued to play a lot afterward, we missed having our little clan. I, more than anyone else, was sad to hang up the Sexy Kyle Clan.

I’m still waiting for the right game to bust that out again. Unfortunately, many games now block the word “sexy”, even M-rated games. Who knows if and when I will have another chance to do so?

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The Bad, then Good - My B8 Playthrough Topics

Over the first few years here on B8, I noticed playthrough topics from time to time. I never entered them and saw how they were structured, but I knew what they were about at the basic level. Being in college gave me a lot of free time, so I decided to put some of that toward a playthrough topic of my own. I didn’t know which game would be the most suitable, so I chose one at random, Final Fantasy III. I guess that it really didn’t matter which game I chose because my approach to it was catastrophic at so many levels.

It wasn’t called “The Most Epic String of Posts By A Single User” by users like foolmo for no reason. Each post was a gigantic wall of text full of the driest material imaginable. I would talk about every little thing I did. I gave full disclosure of each building I went into, each item I bought/collected, and each little thing that got a reaction out of me. Though my anonymity as a user certainly didn’t bring many people into my topic, my writing style and approach to the game made it nearly impossible for anyone to make any sort of comment. At one point, I had 60+ posts in a row full of text until ctes kindly broke that combo. There was even a topic scolding ctes for breaking it where that gem of a moniker (the “Epic String” one) came from. Foolmo, rightfully, brings that up sometimes to joke around.

My second attempt was Chrono Trigger. I know that people really liked the game on the board and I didn’t recall anyone else doing a playthough topic on it, so I decided this was going to be a successful one. That ended up not being the case, but it was a step in the right direction. I no longer talked about everything I did, and I added more personal thoughts and feelings, but I still didn’t draw in many people.

The third, and most recent, game that I did it on was Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors. This ended up being far different from the other two. Not only did I get plenty of people in who gave their comments and said they eagerly awaited my progress, but I had a lot of fun doing it. I was anxious to reveal what I experienced, what I felt I uncovered, and all the theories that were piling up in my head. Seeing people praise my ability to analyze the events and characters of the game led me to believe that I finally made progress in writing in a more interesting fashion.

Though I have yet to get the 999 one on the wiki, my first two are up there, so you can see them in all their “glory” if you feel like killing time.

As a result of my game moment topic, I am now slated to begin a playthrough topic for Resident Evil 4, Bully: Scholarship Edition, and Mass Effect 2 by the end of the month. I hope that it is remotely as successful as the 999 one.

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The Good - Late Night Gaming

One of my best friends growing up, Adam, mostly lived near me in his mom’s house after his parents were divorced. His mom would allow him to stay up late as long as he wanted on the conditions that he was quiet and it wouldn’t affect his performance as a student. We exploited his mom’s generosity once he got Madden 2004.

We never actually played games of Madden. Instead, Adam and I would be co-GMs and run a franchise for the full 30 seasons in one sitting (his memory card didn’t have enough space to save a franchise).

At the time, we didn’t really understand the financials too much outside of what a cap space was and how much of that space each player took up. We would always give the best players 7-year deals, regardless if we needed them or not, and for the minimum amount that they would still sign for. Every offseason, we would usually be way over the cap and be forced to trade away a bunch of players for draft picks and then go on and splurge in free agency once again. There was hardly any middle ground as a result. We either had dominant or pitiful teams, and our coaching staffs kept retiring because they were sick or winning or losing all the time.

Madden 2004 was the first game we did these late night marathons on, but it wasn’t the only one. Gran Turismo 4 came after that. Because of the nature of GT4, we had to have a career saved, so Adam had to delete some sports franchises in other games to make room for it. Though he was initially saddened by having to do that, I’m sure he didn’t regret it after the fun we had.

For those who don’t know, GT4 gives you the option to either be in the driver’s seat in A-Spec mode or behind the scenes instructing your driver on what to do in B-Spec mode. Adam and I solely used B-Spec mode. We would micromanage everything. Not only would we do that on the race track but off of it as well. We tuned every car personally and made buying decisions based on very specific reasons based off of in-depth research of potential cars, if in the market for vehicles, or existing cars, if in the market for parts. Of course, being such micromanagers made us clash frequently, but that just added to the experience.

In the case of what we did in Madden 2004 and GT4, we turned single-player functions/modes that we treated as co-op that took up long nights that could have been used for sleeping instead. As expected, our decisions were worse and worse as the night went on due to sleepiness, but we weren’t too hung up on whether or not we were successful or not despite how much effort we put into it.

In a sense, it’s a shame that in later years we swapped out gaming late at night with poker and movies, but I will always have those fond memories of our attempts at being general managers of NFL teams and pit leaders for a racecar driver.

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Tomorrow is my last full day before graduation, so I have my work cut out for me if I want to get things finished

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I have some done, but not quite all the rest I have remaining. Though I won't have it all finished by the time I graduate, it looks promising I will be finished by the time I move out on Sunday

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unfortunately, I didn't make any progress since yesterday, but I may not be moving until tomorrow due to weather

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The Good - An Unexpected Gift

I was skeptical of the DS when I first heard about it. Hell, I guess you can say that I had very little interest in it, even after it was released. I didn’t even tell my parents about it or anything. That’s why it came as such a surprise that I received it for my 15th birthday, just a few months after it was released.

I didn’t really learn from my mistakes with bringing my Game Boys in elementary school as I brought my DS to high school that following Monday. Nobody else had one, so people would always want to try their hand at the mini-games in Super Mario 64 DS during lunch or a class where the teacher would allow us to use banned devices in class when it wasn’t lecture time.

My most vivid memory of that was when I had to do voice-activated mini-games for WarioWare Touched. I didn’t know how to properly get the system to register the mic function, so I tried a myriad of ways to get it to work. I eventually settled on a bizarre noise that involved me making a high-pitched noise while flapping my tongue up and down. Most people thought it was hilarious, though that wasn’t my intention, but a substitute teacher, not knowing where the source was coming from, yelled during a class, “Quit making those turkey noises!”

A few people started getting DSes and we had a little thing going with the multiplayer function of Super Mario 64 DS. Unfortunately, that began a little late, so we only did that for no more than a month because school was out for summer by then.

It didn’t carry over to sophomore year, but I had a lot of fun playing with others and letting others play my DS for the few months that it lasted.

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I have another two complete and one in progress, but I just wanted to put one up instead my usual, boring bump

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The Good - A Familiar Face in College

When I decided what college to attend, I didn’t base it on my friends like many people. I also decided to go somewhere outside of the city but stay in-state, lowering my chance of going to the same college as a friend. To top it all off, I chose a private school, something not many of my 300 fellow graduates would attend since we all mostly came from middle class families. Despite all of that, one of my friends happened to pick the same college as me in the end.

His name was Frank and because he was in the Honors Program, we didn’t live in the same dorm building or attend the same classes. Even though we each made a slew of friends and hung out with them, we always made time to see each other, often in the company of others. There were occasions where it was just the two of us though. We usually played video games while talking about people and other things from back home. Most of the following should be slightly familiar if you read my moment topic.

The first game we played together was Portal. I don’t even remember how he even got into that. He must have just dropped by my room while I was in the middle of playing it and was hooked into it. Something about that damned cake made us very intrigued about its existence. Though I think it only took me 2-3 hours to beat the game, Frank and I talked the entire time.

The second game placed him with the controller as he went through Fallout 3. Unlike Portal though, I wasn’t there to see him from beginning to end, so I didn’t really know what was going on at any given time. That helped set up the moment where this ant lady and robot man went at it out of nowhere in the middle of some town. My experience with him playing that was littered with several moments like that.

The third game had us both playing Halo 3 simultaneously and it was more of a roller coaster ride in terms of emotions. I had that ridiculous streak of matches that involved me being betrayed, but big team matches on Valhalla and Sandtrap generally did a great job at cheering me up. We probably put up 100+ hours that year alone on Halo 3 matchmaking.

Unfortunately, those three were the only video games that we did together in college because Frank transferred back to a college in our city in the middle of July during the summer between our freshman and sophomore years. I didn’t even learn about that the day I arrived for our sophomore year. I was bummed, but I eventually got over it. I can only imagine what it would have been like if he was there with me going through BioShock, Far Cry 2, Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay and Dark Athena, and Assassin’s Creed II, just to name a few.

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The Good - An Imaginative Movement

Back in the SNES and N64 days, I guess you could call me an imaginative gamer. Not only did I create little modes and handicaps for myself to go through, but I also sometimes came up with frame stories in my mind to add to the experience. This mostly happened with racing games where I would create fake alliances/teams and add all of the members’ points at the end to see who would emerge on top, as well competitive-based games, such as Mario Party and Super Smash Bros., where I came up with imaginary feuds.

Once the GCN/PS2/Xbox era came though, that creative spark just never clicked with me in all the games I played, even sequels to games that I already done it before with. It wasn’t until two games and a link between them that paved the way for my most ambitious and time-consuming side project in video gaming ever.

I love sports games, but after buying most of EA Sports’ 2004-2005 lineup, I decided to put off buying their sports games for awhile. I was only convinced to buy NCAA Football ’06 by some friends who wanted to do some tournaments. We only ended up doing two, so to get enough bang for my buck, I decided to go ahead and start a dynasty.

Like with the previous NCAA Football games, I didn’t like seeing my favorite players be listed as their jersey number and not by name. I had a friend that bought a memory card that had roster names loaded on it, so went on ebay and found one for $20. Now I didn’t have to input the names manually, so I could dive straight into rushing 200+ yards a game with Laurence Maroney.

At around the same time, I was asked by some friends at school to buy Madden ’06 so that we could play online and also start an online franchise. The former was a blast, but the latter was a buggy mess that would often crash. Like NCAA Football ’06, I wanted to get more value out of my purchase, so I went straight to franchise mode where I could do managerial stuff to my heart’s content.

Instead of doing solely that though, I decided to start a franchise with my two favorite teams, Dolphins and Jaguars, and play their games on top of all the management activities. Before I knew it, I had played a full season, with plenty of unexpected twists and turns. I was about to head into the offseason when I saw an option to upload a draft class. I ignored that feature for the previous Madden due to the jersey number crap, and seeing that I was close to finishing my first NCAA season, I decided to hold off so I could bring in the draft class with all the names.

After completing the NCAA season, I was ready to go into the Madden offseason, but I decided to take a notebook and write some interesting things down from the in-game NFL season, such as spectacular games/performances/plays, as well as intriguing stories. After getting all that down, I looked at the retiring coaches and players and wrote some fake farewell press conferences.

Next on the agenda was resigning our own unrestricted and restricted free agents. For unrestricted, you would also see players who are holding out or demanding a trade. I remember laughing when a then 37-year-old Junior Seau held out on me, so I cut his ass immediately. I wrote up a hilarious press conference for him and me, as the GM, about that which may or may not be in poor taste now given his recent suicide.

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This story creation went on and on for the rest of the off-season, from the draft through coming up with a position chart. I even continued it into the following season with a bunch of fake stories based off of controversies and feel-good events. I even gave each player and coach, as well as myself, on my teams a personality. I kept expanding and expanding what I did after each season, taking up several notebooks.

I didn’t even realize that I had come up with a frame story for the first time in a long time. It’s still a work in progress too since I haven’t abandoned it. I’m on season #7 and I have no plans to stop anytime soon, even though my activity has died down quite a bit since I entered college. Now that I have graduated, maybe I’ll find more time to continue with something I have invested hundreds of hours into.

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I am going to get some entries done later today

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Whoops, I wrote one up, but I forgot to post it. I am also in the middle of another, but I can post one now

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The Bad - The Unrealized Dream

My friend Brittany and I loved playing Mario Party, though I somehow don’t remember playing it with her. We came up with a plan to have our very own Mario Party themed event. It wasn’t going to involve going around on some board but rather replicate a ton of the mini-games. It was a very detailed and very expensive idea we had going, so we had to start working and saving.

We were 10 at the time, so it wasn’t like we could work at a grocery store or restaurant. We worked for our parents, neighbors, and anyone else in the neighborhood that needed some sort of assistance. We saved any allowance that we received to go towards this event. We also started selling some of our own possessions, lemonade, and baked goods.

After several months, we earned hundreds of dollars. I was the money manager as well as the budget analyzer. It was dumb of me to not do it earlier, but I started to come up with how much the games alone would cost. It was surprisingly staggering. We had planned to do around 40-50 games from the first two Mario Party titles, but we only had enough for maybe 15, if we chose the least expensive ones.
It was very disheartening, but we pressed on. Unfortunately, we had else left to sell that we wanted to get rid of and the weather was starting to get cold outside, making it useless to sell food and drinks. Our parents had run out of things for us to do for money, so we spent weekends raking leaves, shoveling snow, and removing ice for October, November, and early December.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get many opportunities to do those things, so we barely made any money. Because Christmas was just around the corner, Brittany and I had to discuss if we wanted to ask for things to help with the event for Christmas or not. I think we were just exhausted and overwhelmed at this point that 9+ months of work had seen very little progress in the end because we decided to put an end to our Mario Party aspirations. We divided the money up evenly and went on our way. I think we considered starting it back up again in the spring, but it never went past that stage.

Maybe it would have been a complete disaster if we followed through with the Mario Party event in the end, but that’s only speculation at this point. What is certain is that we spent a lot of time and effort to make it happen, but we thought enough was enough at one point.

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Hung out with a friend and that's what cut my time on this short

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Some time this evening, I am going to sit down and hopefully knock most of the five remaining out

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Something came up last night with a family friend and I have been cutting wood since I got up, but I did manage to nearly finish three of five last night. I should be able to finish everything today then

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I was with a friend for most of the day, so I never really had the opportunity. Unless that happens today too, I should be good to go.

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In about an hour, I will be with a friend. If I am with him for most of the day again, then I will just finish up the three that I already have a lot of progress with. Hopefully, I can do the final two tomorrow

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I was with my friend much longer than I thought I would yesterday, but I am staying on my laptop until I finish at least two are finished

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The Good - Late, Late-Night Gaming

If my time playing GT4 and Madden 2004 were considered late-night gaming, the semi-regularly Halo 2 nights that me and some friends had were late, late-night gaming, though that may not even be a suitable name.

Though me and a close group of friends played a lot of Halo: CE together, only a select few of us had the game. That forced us to only be able to do a system link with maybe two systems when we all got together. It wasn’t until Halo 2, since we all bought it, that we started to have these massive get-togethers where we had four Xboxes system linked so that 16 of us could play at the same time under a single roof.

We would often take a Friday evening to get everyone together. Each event would gather a minimum of 16 people. Though Halo 2 was the headliner, there were other things we also did, mostly huge, long games of basketball and football. We would then be starving after that, so we would eat a lot of pizza before spending the next 12+ hours playing match after match of Halo 2. We generally stuck to either team deathmatch or CTF on Coagulation, but we sometimes mixed it up by using Waterworks, Lockout, or Zanzibar.

We generally got together late afternoon or early evening, so that meant we would be playing all night long. Most people did end up sleeping, but there would always be a couple of people who were up the entire time. When it whittled down to maybe 2-4 people, we would stop playing Halo 2 and either go play Madden or pool/foosball until everyone got up again. Depending on whose house we were at, we either had to leave as soon as we could or we would go outside and shoot some hoops for a while before going our separate ways.
This went on for every month or two for a couple a years until something happened.

There were some falling outs as ******* got in the way. Some girlfriends went from one of my friends to another, and that caused some fractured relationships. Though that greatly reduced our sessions while we were in high school, it was post-graduation plans that brought it to a halt. Some of us went to college out of the city and others went into the military.

I doubt that we could do these again at our age given our schedules.

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Yeah, late night gaming is something that seems to just disappear eventually because there just isn't as much time as there used to be :(

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Probably the main reason why I would want to go back to the high school and earlier years is to have more free time than I do these days

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I say that though as I spent 20+ hours with a friend the previous two days

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The Good – Always Having a Co-op Buddy

Throughout all of these memories so far, I have mentioned many different friends in the process, whether I named them or not. Most of those also occurred during my middle school or early high school years, and there’s a good reason for that.

A lot of my friends moved during or just before those years. Many got into drugs and other things and seemingly fell off the face of the map. With others, we just grew apart from each other or we just simply aren’t as close anymore. There has been one friend who I am as close as I always was with, B.J., whom I mentioned in the entries with The Sims and Gauntlet Legends.

He has always been one of my best friends throughout life, but he wasn’t much into video games when we were younger. It wasn’t until middle school that we started playing them a lot together. He wasn’t someone who wanted to play against me because it would result in him losing most of the time, and I wasn’t the person who really knew how to go easy on someone without being obvious about it. We pretty much exclusively played co-op from that point forward.

It began with Mario Kart: DD where we would play as Wario and Waluigi to have a monopoly on the Bob-omb market. This marked the beginning of me being the official driver and him being the official gunner for applicable games. We didn’t really play a lot of other Gamecube games other than that together. Not many with co-op were to his or my liking and some like 007: Everything or Nothing had co-op that we simply failed at every single time.

We shifted to Xbox once I got that during my freshman year of high school. Even though I had fewer options for us to play than for the Gamecube, what we had available was far better for what we were looking for. Halo: CE’s campaign, Halo 2’s campaign and online, Madden and other football games, and Star Wars Battlefront I + II were games that we spent dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of hours into working as a team.

The time we spent doing this ramped up once more of my friends were moving or growing apart from me. I enjoy being around people and not be a recluse, so this really meant a lot to me to have a friend that was always there to spend time with me when it seemed that a lot of people were starting to leave my life.

When we graduated high school, I got a 360 as my graduation gift from my parents, as well as Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. He decided to attend college locally while I went to one a couple of hours away, so we spent a lot of time together over the summer just to play them, as well as Mario Kart Wii online. Halo 3 offered co-op campaign and online while Modern Warfare offered nothing of the sort. Though he wasn’t a fan of facing me in a video game, we decided to make things interesting by having prone knife fights on Shipment or grenade launcher-only matches on any map.

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When I left for college, I didn’t bother spending much money on co-op games, so when I came back for breaks every now and then; we would mostly just play Halo 3. Over time, I bought or received games like Kameo, Marvel Ultimate Alliance, PGR4, and both Rainbow Six Vegas games, but we still kept coming back to Halo 3 since we could play together online. We did this during our first three years of college, but by the time summer came around, the online community for Halo 3 was nearly dead for the matchmaking types we were interested in.

Not knowing what I should get, I asked the board for help and I ended up getting the GotY edition of Borderlands. That’s essentially all that we had been playing since then until a few days ago when we ended up starting and beating Perfect Dark HD and Halo: Reach.

Just yesterday, we accomplished what we wanted to in Borderlands, leaving us with no idea what to go to next. I bought the first two Gears of War a couple of months back with the intention of playing co-op together, but he says that he doesn’t like the games. We can always go back to old games, but I am trying to find something new that can hold us over for a long time.

Whether or not I find a suitable solution to that though, I am grateful to have him as a friend. We always have a good time together and when it involves playing video games, we have our high and low points where we laugh or blame each other for things going awry in-game, but at the end of the day, we look forward to hanging out again.

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I have been addicted to Mass Effect 2 these past few days. If I beat it today, I may do stuff tonight or tomorrow

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So did you beat it?

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I do because I can.....and because I'm bored.
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