| I have brought about the apocalypse..... |
[Mar. 31st, 2010|02:48 am]
Rob T. W. Hanlon
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Tonight, after weeks of debate, I bought an X-Box 360 from GameStop.com.
No, I haven't gone crazy.
I'm still not the biggest fan of the X-Box or the 360. I'm still bitter about both KOTOR games, plus some of Microsoft's press releases about reports of games crashing. I still laugh really hard about reports of the Red Ring of Death. And I think it's crazy silly that the console still uses normal DVDs for games, when there are a few better options out there.
What has changed? I have two words for you: Perfect Dark
"Are you fucking kidding me?! You just spent $300 so you could play a game worth 800 Microsoft Points?!"
Yes.
( Let me tell you a story about GoldenEye 007Collapse )
I don't remember exactly when that happened. What I do know is that I subscribed to Nintendo's magazine, Nintendo Power, and in my freshman year of high school the sequel to GoldenEye was coming out. It was going to be called Perfect Dark. It wasn't a James Bond game, but that wasn't what mattered. It had the same soul. I talked to classmates about my dilemma, and they told me that Funcoland won't check ID for Mature rated games. So on May 22, 2000, I caught a bus to the Burlington Mall after school. It was the first time I'd taken the bus alone anywhere but home from school, and I was weirdly nervous. I tend not to like doing things for the first time because I have no idea what to expect. I mean trying games or watching stuff is one thing, but to take action and go somewhere where I don't know what's going to happen is something I've never been comfortable with. I got off the bus next to Macy's, and walked through the mall because it was hot as hell out. I came out of Sears, and managed to not even get close to dying crossing the street getting to Funcoland. I grabbed the game, paid for it, and was out the door as fast as I could. I did it. I had it in my hand. I got back to the bus stop as fast as I could. Once I was finally on the bus, I took a sharpie out of my bag and got rid of the ESRB Rating on everything I could find. When I got home, I showed my brothers our victory, and made them swear to never play it in front of our mother in case she realized what it was. That summer I worked for my dad and made almost a grand I think. The first thing I did was buy a 27" TV that lasted me a good 7 years before I got an LCD HDTV. More importantly, this moved the videogames into my room because I had the best TV in the house, so we could play Perfect Dark as much as we wanted.
Time passed, and dumb shit nearly scattered us permanently to the wind. Super Smash Bros. came out and became the game of choice in my family, and I didn't see my friends enough to make much of a difference in what we were playing. That was 2003.
College was an interesting time. My failures at school brought me and Durkin back together, since he was the only one still around. For the time being, our hang outs consisted of Jack & Coke and Super Mario Bros. 3, and eventually we upgraded to Guitar Hero. I was no good at it, since I never wanted to play it alone and therefore didn't skill up, but it was a good drinking game. As more time passed our lives continued to get more complicated. Durkin cheated on his girlfriend of 3 years (dumbass) and they broke up. Paul graduated college. I met Bunny. I think those three things actually happened in the opposite order. Anyway, on rare occasion we'd pull out an N64 and play GoldenEye or PD, but for the most part we played the newer games and rarely hung out all together. Why? Because in a world with HDTV, old videogames tend to look like shit if they're not 8-bit to begin with.
This year I put a stop to that, and gathered Paul, David, Durkin and myself as much as possible to play games. We were playing Super Mario Bros. Wii a lot, but we also played 1-3 and Mario World sometimes. It was good fun, but it wasn't as much fun as we used to have. And the Paul said we had to hang out, that RARE had just released Perfect Dark in HD. I managed to get Durkin and Mark Earnest over to play it. Coincidentally, this is the first time I've spent any time with Mark in five years. But then we turned on the game, and all the years that passed dissolved, and we were back in my bedroom in high school, getting our asses kicked by the computer players all over again as we tried to relearn the controls. When it was time to go, we made plans to meet up again ASAP. Those mostly fell through, but Paul and I played together for hours, and Durkin stopped by for about an hour.
Yesterday I went over to Durkin's to play it, since after Paul brought his X-Box to my house the first time, both Durkin and Mark had bought the game. We tried to get Paul or Mark to come by to, but no dice. Little did I know that when I arrived, Paul was at home waiting for us over X-Box Live, and even though he wasn't watching my screen as usual, he was still killing me with explosives even though we were on the same team. We had a blast for an hour and a half, and then Bunny and I went home, and Tony and Durkin played together.
We can't stop playing this 10-year-old game because we have way too much fun playing it. The first time I learned that just because we spent so many years apart doesn't make us any less able to enjoy the hell out of this game together. Yesterday I learned that playing each other over X-Box LIVE isn't nearly as inferior to playing split-screen in the same room as I suspected it was. Not only that, but when Paul said he couldn't make it to Durkin's to play with us, he still had the time to play us from home, and even barely being able to hear him without a headset, it was almost as fun as having him there. Playing this game with them made me for the first time see a reason to buy an X-Box, and yesterday made me see that buying one myself would greatly increase our opportunities to play together, and not just make things more convenient as I originally thought. Sure, it seems silly to get a console for what is essentially a DLC, but Bunny has wanted and X-Box for a while, especially for Fable II, so I knew she would get enough out of the purchase to make it worth it.
( Details and Bunny's reactionCollapse ) |
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