Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Gaming Roots, Part 2


A few weeks ago, I did a post (found here) on my gaming roots, covering the period of my childhood through the end of high school. Today I am following up that post with one on my early college years, focusing on my transition from being a predominantly PC gamer to a predominantly console gamer. During this period my experience as a PC gamer reached its climax in the form of two particular games, but also saw PC gaming fade away as the PlayStation 2 came into my life.

The first game was Battlefield 1942, referred to hereafter as Battlefield. I had played a few first-person shooters prior to Battlefield, but Battlefield was the one that finally turned me into an enthusiast for the genre. Battlefield was a World War 2 era shooter that came out back when World War 2 games were still very popular and completely changed the way I thought about shooters. It gave you big maps, lots of vehicles and the freedom to go nuts and see what kind of craziness you could pull off. You could play the game very tactically and coordinate with your team to dominate the map, or you could forget all that, load a jeep full of explosives and drive around looking for a hapless opponent to blow up. The game rewarded experimentation and even had a few hilarious glitches in it. I can still remember the thrill of discovering that if you drove a tank or another large vehicle on top of an antiaircraft gun, it would suddenly be launch high into the sky. Even though I’m not that good at multiplayer shooters, Battlefield kept me coming back for more and I even put in some time on the fantastic Desert Combat mod. Battlefield was the main PC game I played during the first half of my freshman year of college, and it would be followed by an even bigger game that brought me to the apex of my PC gaming career.

That game was Total War Rome, referred to hereafter as just Rome. Strategy games have long been a favorite of mine, and that combined with my love of history came together in a perfect storm of obsession over this game. Rome did something that I absolutely loved in that it was split into what were effectively two games. You had the big campaign map, in which you would manage your cities, conduct diplomacy and move your armies around, but when you engaged in battle you would transition to a battle map. On the battle map you would directly control your army’s individual units and fight a real-time battle against the opposing forces. You could position and maneuver your forces as you pleased and the game would teach you about actual battle tactics from the era. This, combined with other subtle history lessons meant that after awhile you found yourself strangely knowledgeable about this period of history. I played Rome consistently for over a year, until my laptop started to have trouble maintaining both the game and everything else on it. Even at the peak of my time playing Rome, however, the winds of change were already blowing in my gaming life. A new power had risen, and its name was the PlayStation 2.

Up until college I had never had a game console. What little experience I had with console gaming came from visits to friends houses where I got to experience a few games on the Super Nintendo and the Nintendo 64. Console games had my interest, but with limited access to them I was never able to develop a history with them up until my college years. When freshman year of college came and I moved into the dorms, one of my roommates brought with him a Nintendo 64 and a PlayStation 2. While we played the classic N64 games like Mario Kart and GoldenEye, it was the PlayStation 2 games that really grabbed me. Games like Medal of Honor Frontline, Tekken 5, Red Faction 2, Shadow of the Colossus and X-Men Legends gave me a taste of what console gaming could be, and by the end of my freshman year I knew I would be getting a PS2 of my own. As college progressed and I began my sophomore year, I was still playing Rome on a regular basis but I found myself more and more going to the PlayStation 2 first. It wasn’t that I had acquired a distaste for PC gaming, I just found console gaming worked better for me. The PlayStation 2 was easy to use, the controller felt more natural in my hands than a keyboard, and it had its own sizable collection of games to choose from. Console gaming also had the advantage of being more time and cost-effective than PC gaming, as it didn’t require regular hardware and software upgrades to play the latest and greatest games. That last advantage was particularly big for me, as I was a college student who wanted to play a lot of games but also needed to minimize the cost of my pastime. Little by little, the PlayStation 2 became my gaming machine of choice, and with that, my era of PC gaming came to a close.

Though it is now long gone, my time in college as a predominantly PC gamer was a glorious era, one that I still remember fondly. I still have the game boxes and CDs for Battlefield and Rome sitting at my desk, and from time to time I’ll pick them up and reminisce over the college days and how much I enjoyed playing those games. To give you an idea of their lasting influence, the Battlefield series of games are still my favorite first person shooter games and Rome remains my favorite strategy videogame of all time. I might one day get a nice desktop PC and go back to PC gaming, but even if I do, I’m not sure my experience could ever surpass those heady college days when I felt like I was playing the best games ever.

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

The Speech


Sometimes life throws you a curveball. Last weekend I got back from a friend’s wedding where I took a swing at one such curveball, which came in the form of a wedding speech. A few days before the wedding, the bride contacted me and asked if I would be willing to do a speech after the ceremony, as she and my friend, the groom, had someone on the bride’s side doing a speech and they wanted someone on the groom’s side to do one also. I was not expecting this and was completely unprepared, but accepted anyways. Panic started to set in, but I had a chance to be a blessing to my friend and was determined to take a shot at this simultaneously honoring and frightening opportunity.

I began my speech planning where most quests begin these days, on the Internet. There I found many websites with tips on making a good wedding speech. These tips were very helpful and I got some ideas on the general format of a speech, but as I read more I came to the realization that I couldn’t just mimic some speech off of the Internet. It needed to be my speech, not someone else’s. With that conviction, I opened a Word document and started to outline the speech. The opening and closing sections were fairly straightforward; I would open by introducing myself and thanking everyone who helped make the wedding happen, and I would close with a Scriptural blessing followed by a toast. The body, however, went through multiple revisions over the three days that I pondered the speech. Ideas came and went. Paragraphs were written, rewritten and sometimes thrown out altogether. I originally had a few jokes in my speech, but they just weren’t meshing with the more serious tone I was developing, so they eventually were all dropped. The night before my departure I was looking at the final draft of the speech. I wanted to do some more work on it, but I was out of time, so I printed the speech and put it in my backpack. With the busy schedule I had leading up to the wedding I knew that at this point only slight revisions could now be made.

Sure enough, over the next two days I had almost no time to work on the speech or even memorize it. I flew out to Chicago and got busy helping with the wedding preparations. Working on the wedding arrangements occupied my days and social events claimed my evenings and nights. On the day of the wedding I took one last look at my sheet of paper. One sentence had been reworded but that was the only revision I had been able to make. With time having run out, I stuffed the sheet of paper into my suit pocket and departed for the wedding venue.

The wedding ceremony itself was a mixed bag of emotions. On one hand I was overjoyed and proud of my friend but there was also this feeling of nervousness and dread hanging over me. The ceremony, glorious and beautiful, came to a close and I got to see my friend officially become a husband. Everyone then went downstairs to where the dinner was and we all took our seats after a few minutes of standing around and socializing. Sitting in my seat I pulled out my sheet of paper and read through my speech over and over again, hoping to get a least part of it memorized before my time came. A little while later the wedding DJ announced that the bride and groom would be making speeches along with two of their friends, and that was my cue to head up to the front. The bride and groom both made short speeches and then the bride’s cousin delivered her speech. With the cousin’s speech done, the microphone was handed off and all eyes were on me. I didn’t have my speech memorized, I could feel my tongue already starting to stutter and a distinct sense of panic was coursing through my entire body, but there was no turning back. My mouth opened, one word followed another, and I gave my speech. I introduced myself, thanked those involved in the wedding, talked about all the years I had known my friend and how he had grown as a man, told the story of my last visit to see him and seeing the relationship he had built with the woman who would become his bride, congratulated the couple, blessed them, and then proposed a toast. Everyone raised their glasses and drank, and then the applause started. The bride and groom both hugged me and thanked me for the speech and then I returned to my chair, nerves frayed beyond reason.

For much of the rest of the night I was fielding praise from other wedding guests. There wasn’t anything particularly great about my speech and my lack of oratory skills were clearly on display while I delivered it, but it seemed everyone was in love with my performance. I couldn’t square my perception of the speech with everyone else’s. In my mind I gave a mediocre speech that had been hastily prepared and spoken with little skill. It seemed everyone else had heard a moving speech spoken from the heart. The truth is probably somewhere in-between. Maybe it was a good speech, or maybe everyone was just being nice to me, but if it blessed my friend and his bride and brought joy to those in attendance, then I guess that’s all that matters.

Saturday, April 11, 2015

Filling in the dates


Three years ago today I was in Bruges, Belgium, taking in the city and enjoying some Flemish Fries. As I’ve been thinking about my upcoming trip to Europe, my mind keeps coming back to the previous trip I took in 2012. Yesterday, I brought out the notebook that I took with me on the trip and marked the days on my calendar with the names of the cities I was in 3 years ago. Below is what the month of May looks like:
Sorry about the image quality. You'll have to zoom in to read the writing.
As I was doing this I was also skimming through my notebook and recounting a few of the experiences I had written about. The scattered sentences triggered little memory flashes of various things that happened on the trip. Long train rides, encounters with other tourists, majestic scenery, petty complaints, interesting observations and mundane details all came and went. After I had finished filling in the dates I sat back and looked over the calendar. I knew I had spent more time in certain places than others, but visualizing my time distribution made it really clear what areas got the most attention. Certain cities like Paris, Barcelona and Rome got extended stays while other places like Milan, Ljubljana and Copenhagen had shorter visits. If I could do it all over again I would keep much of the schedule the same, but I would certainly make a number of changes. Certain cities like San Sebastian, Venice and Budapest would have gotten an extra day or two while a few others would have time taken off of them. I might even take one or two cities off the schedule and replaced them with others, but overall I’m pleased with how things turned out.

Today as I look back at what was, I also look forward to what could be. I have a rough schedule of my upcoming trip in my head, but there are still many gaps to be filled and a big decision about the last week or so. One day I’ll repeat yesterday’s exercise and fill in the calendar dates with the places I visited on this trip. Then I’ll sit back and just stare at that calendar, reminiscing over the places I went and the things I saw. This will no doubt spark the planning of the next adventure.