Video games and Eric

I went to Microplay in P.A. today to buy a PS2 game. Working there was my old friend Eric, who I hadn't seen in at least two years. Probably more. We B.S.'d for a while, and then I said "Eric, I need you to sell me a game. But I don't know which game I want".

He said, "You want this one. You like RPGs, right? Of course you do. This game takes 120 hours, plus. I'm at, like, 100 hours, and it's like, when is this fucking game gonna end?"

I bought Dragon Quest 8.

I didn't realize it at the point of sale, but I'd actually played the first Dragon Quest game for the Nintendo in the late 1980s. And you know how some things just don't change? Like in Final Fantasy, even though we've gone from this




to this












there are some things set in stone, like the fundamentals of the combat system, or the names of most of the spells, or the names and properties of pretty much all the potions.

The first thing I did in Dragon Quest 8 was kill some Hershey's Kiss-shaped slimes. That brought back some memories.

So far I like DQ 8. It's very pick-up-and-playable, at least for a big RPG nrrd like me. I don't know whether or not I'll put in the 100+ hours needed to finish it, since I don't think I'll find it challenging, so I'll probably get bored. It's not real complicated, but I find it very intuitive, which is important to me, because if I'm playing a new game, and I push a button, and it doesn't do what I want it to do, I stop playing. If it takes me more than 5 minutes to figure out what I'm doing, then forget it. I'll go play Rogue.

I gotta go. "Robot Chicken" is on.

T.

ps watch "Robot Chicken". and "Bromwell High".

IT'S OVER!

Summer is finally over. And I'm glad. I've never felt this way at the end of a summer before, but I'm actually happy that September is here. We got through the long weekend, we did our final cleaning-up, we ate the last of the chicken fingers, we sold off the last of the beer (I took home a gross amount, 12 dozen) and we called it a season. It was a long haul, and I'm glad that it's finished, but I had a pretty good year, and I'm sure that I'll start to miss it after a little while. It was actually a pretty good job, in the sense that I got paid to watch T.V., play pool, drink beer, and take naps, but it was a pretty bad job in the sense that I had to do that stuff 70+ hours a week for pretty much all of July. When you HAVE to do it, it's not quite as much fun, and work started to seriously get in the way of my having a good time, which is NEVER acceptable, especially not at the lake.

As of yesterday, I'm unemployed, and I couldn't be happier. I don't have a job lined up or a place to live, so I guess I'm pretty much a bum right now. I'm not even going to start looking for a job for at least a week. That should give me some time to recharge the old batteries.

I'm sorry it's been so long since I posted, but let's be honest with each other, ok? I'm probably not going to blog again until
1. Something worth blogging about happens to me, and
2. I live in a place with an internet connection that doesn't totally suck balls.

So this might be all you get for a while. I'm gonna go to bed, have a steak for breakfast, and then drink a beer on my boat-ride down to Sunnyside to play golf. I have the best life.

T.