Best train ride ever

Next month I have a wedding to attend in Alaska. As part of that trip, I will be taking a train to Denali National Park, where the wedding is to be held. While looking online at train schedules and trying to decide which ticket to purchase, my mind was taken back to the best train ride in video games, which is found in Uncharted 2. For those who have never played Uncharted 2, the train sequence has the lead character Nathan Drake leaping onto a moving train and then slowly working his way from the back of the train to the front in an effort to rescue one of the other characters. While Drake slowly makes his way forward, fighting baddies along the way, the train rambles through the valleys of Nepal, passes through a long tunnel, and then emerges up in the high mountains of the Himalayas. It’s the sort of thing you would expect out of summer Hollywood blockbuster and quite satisfying to play through. Hopefully my train ride in Alaska is nothing like it.

Testing the Waters of Mobile Gaming

A bit over two weeks ago, while sitting in the Hartford, Connecticut, airport, I made my first foray into the world of mobile gaming. Even though I’ve had a smartphone for a while now, I had never actually played a game on my phone up until that point. It’s not that I’m one of those PC or console elitists who view mobile gaming as trash, but whenever I’m in a situation where it would make sense to get the phone out and play, I usually prefer to read a book, get caught up on the current week’s edition of The Economist, or browse online articles. This time, however, I decided it was finally time to give mobile gaming a try. The specific game I would play would be Mass Effect Infiltrator, referred to hereafter as just Infiltrator. I had gotten a code for a free download of Infiltrator earlier in the year and had been meaning to play it for some time, and with my flight delayed due to a fuel leak on the tarmac (the first time that’s ever happened to me) I wasn’t going to be getting on my plane any time soon. And so, with the opportunity right in front of me, I got the phone out, launched the game and played for the next hour and a half.  Over the following days I put in a few more short sessions and at this point I feel ready to supply a few thoughts on it.

As a game, Infiltrator is ok but not great. It is a cover-based, third person shooter in which you blast your way from area to area, earning credits along the way which you can use to unlock and upgrade weapons and abilities. The touchscreen controls work just well enough but are nowhere nearly as accurate or precise as an actual controller or a mouse and keyboard. Consequently, there were a number of times where the game misinterpreted what I was trying to do and I ended up dying when I felt I shouldn’t have. On the plus side, the sound and visuals of Infiltrator are quite good. Granted, this is my first mobile game, so I don’t have a personal point of comparison, but it’s certainly better looking than other mobile games I’ve seen people playing. Sadly, Infiltrator’s storyline is razor thin, which is disappointing because the mainline Mass Effect games have such a heavy emphasis on story and character development. You learn next to nothing about the character you play as and nothing that happens feels particularly meaningful. When I stopped playing Infiltrator I had overall enjoyed my time with it, but I wasn’t eager to play it again.

At this point I suppose the question is whether or not I’ll being doing any more mobile gaming in the future. The answer is yes, but in very small portions. Having games on my phone would certainly be a fun diversion, but I do enough console gaming that I don’t really need additional video game entertainment in my life. Times like the one I had at the airport are also among the ones that I am able to get serious reading done and in the grand scheme of things I think I’m better off sticking with that rather than playing games on my phone. I can see the appeal of mobile gaming and I have nothing against it, but committing to it just doesn’t make sense for me at this time.

 

The Bolder Boulder

Today, May 25, is Memorial Day. It’s also the day of the annual Bolder Boulder, a 10k running race that I’ve participated in the last few years. I’m not a runner, or really anything that could be construed as an athlete, but each year I hit the pavement and run the race.

The first year I participated in the Bolder Boulder was my senior year of college. One of the projects for one of my classes was to do something that I would normally never do, and seeing as how I hate running, the Bolder Boulder seemed like a good fit. I also had a few friends who had run the race over the previous years and from talking to them I knew the Bolder Boulder could be done casually, so there was no need feel bad about being a slow runner. Over a period of about two months prior to the race I trained my unwilling body as much as it would allow me to, and on the day of the race I finished with a time of 75 minutes, which is nothing to brag about, but for me I was just pleased that I finished the race without stopping to walk.

With the class project completed and my distaste for running still intact, it would be reasonable to expect that my first Bolder Boulder would also be my last, but it wasn’t. Having run it once, I knew there was something undeniably special about the race. As the nation’s largest Memorial Day event, you’re running along with tens of thousands of other people as what feels like the entire city is cheering you on. Bands are scattered along the racecourse, people set up slip-n-slides on their yards and the usual Boulder wackiness is on display. One year I got a cupcake from a guy who was handing out cupcakes to passing runners. As it turns out, it is very hard to eat a cupcake while running. Silly stuff like that and all the positive energy surrounding the race are much of what keeps me participating year after year. I also need the exercise.

The Bolder Boulder is now an annual tradition for me. I’m still not a runner, and my body has made it clear that I never will be, but you’ll see me coursing through the city this year and each coming year that I’m able to.

The Countdown Clock

Within the next few days, I will be announcing my resignation from the company that I currently work for. The decision to leave the company was made many months ago, but it’s always felt so far away, until now, that is. Over those months I have felt like there was big countdown clock on the wall, slowly ticking down to both this announcement and my last day of work. Now the clock has finally reached the point where each passing day feels like a big step closer to my departure. Each day I walk around the office, knowing what’s coming but having to keep it a secret.  I’ve been sitting on this bombshell for a while, but now the nervous anticipation is really building. It’s close, so very close.

Wait, what am I talking about? Here I am, writing about a routine job departure as if it is some cataclysmic event. There’s really nothing special here. This isn’t my first time leaving a job and it won’t be the last either. There is no clock on the wall and my company will be just fine without me. Any yet, it feels momentous, it feels like something big is about to happen. The world will not notice or care, but to me it is as if everything is building to this moment. And so I take another look at the wall, and there it is again, the countdown clock, steadily counting down to the end. It’s close, so very close.
 

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.

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.

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.

Remembering my gaming roots

Although I’m predominantly a console gamer, I got my start as a kid with PC gaming. This was back in the early 90s and on my father’s computer there was a small assortment of games. My dad only played from time to time, thus the limited selection. Also, my dad’s computer was a Mac and back then there weren’t too many games that came out for Mac. Like most little boys, I was quickly enthralled by these games and played them whenever I could. Many of them were in fact just demos of the full product, but as a kid I didn’t care – I was just happy to have them. Some of the games I only remember bits and pieces of, and others I remember how they played but I can’t remember their name. But even though I don’t remember all of them now, I do remember how much I loved gaming as a kid. There were worlds to be explored, stories to be told, puzzles to solve, and battles to fight.

Truth be told, some of them weren’t that good. As a kid with limited gaming access I didn’t have much of a perspective on what made for great game as opposed to a mediocre one. But there were some really good ones that I had the privilege of playing. Games like Oregon Trail, Space Invaders, Dark Forces, Pokemon (there was a Gameboy emulator on the computer), and SimCity gave me countless hours of entertainment and fun. And then there was Civilization 2, probably the defining game of my childhood and teenage years. I don’t know exactly how many hours total I put into that game, but I’m confident it still holds the title of the most hours I’ve put into an individual game. Most games hold my interest for a few weeks to a few months. Civilization 2 kept me enthralled for about ten years, a testament to its quality.

Together, Civilization 2 and these other great games became the foundation of my gaming experience and profoundly shaped my gaming preferences. It wouldn’t be until college that my gaming life would undergo a major transition, and that transition will be the topic of my next gaming related post.

Not the reason I played the game

Earlier today I completed my playthrough of the HD remastered version of Kingdom Hearts 2. This edition of Kingdom Hearts 2 is the Final Mix version of the game, which was previously only available in Japan. Though largely the same as the original, it contains additional items, boss battles and various other tweaks from the original game. Having not played Kingdom Hearts 2 since sometime around 2009, I felt like I was overdue to replay one of my favorite games from the PS2 era, and the HD remastered version seemed like the perfect way to do it.

Like my time with the HD remastered version of Final Fantasy 10, I played through the game knowing what to expect but also taking note of the new features. Towards the end of my time, I decided to look more into some of the extra boss fights. I completed a few of them, but then one boss fight stopped me dead. I took a second try at it, and failed again. Then a third attempt, still no success. At this point I was scratching my head trying to figure out how to best counter the boss’s attacks and getting a bit aggravated at what, from my irritated perspective, were some game mechanics that needed adjustment. But then I remembered something important, moved on and went back to finishing up the main storyline of the game. What I remembered was the original reason I had rented the game. I wasn’t playing to defeat every boss and collect every hidden item. Maybe one day in the future I’ll do that. All that extra stuff that’s part of the HD remastered version is cool, but it’s not the reason I played the game. I played the game to relive that story and remember why I love the Kingdom Hearts series so much, and I wasn’t going to let some optional boss fight take away my enjoyment of the experience.

Who says I have to go back with him?

This year I will make my second trip to Europe. It will happen in one of two ways. The first way is that a friend of mine is about to finish up his PhD and we have been talking about taking a trip together afterwards. If this happens we will probably be going around the start of June. The other way, if things fall through and my friend can’t go, will be for me to just go on my own, probably around mid-September. I would really like to go with my friend, but the thing is that he is also going to be getting married this year and probably cannot take more than about two weeks for this trip. For me, two weeks is a bit too short and I had been puzzling over how to make this trip work. As I was staring at the map a few nights ago, I was thinking over what cities we could land in and how we could best work our way around and get the most out of our time, when I had a sudden realization. “Wait, who says I have to leave with him?” popped into my head. I wish there had been a camera filming me at the moment, just to see the grin on my face. It’s such an obvious thing, but I had somehow overlooked this solution. Now the possibilities have grown exponentially and I’m diving all the more intensely into research for this trip. Let the planning begin.