MAR1O Day

For anybody who may not be aware, today is MAR1O Day.

Now I'm not the biggest Mario fan, however being a gamer I feel it necessary to at least acknowledge the day for myself and for my wife (who LOVES Mario games), I'll definitely have to mention it. With so many other games in our house to play, I don't imagine we'll take the time to do anything special for it, but then again... we are starting to celebrate new and fun things for various occasions... who who knows?

Maybe we'll play this tonight:

Or this:

Or maybe this:

(Yes these are all games that we own... hard to take pictures of a digital copy game though)

Or maybe I'll get real nostalgic and play one of these:

Yeah, that's right... I still have a good old N64 which still runs to this day. Might need to get it checked out and cleaned sometime though. Also may want to get some new controller bits to get everything working up to par once again. But this was seriously my childhood. When my brother and sister were out with their friends, mom and dad were at work or doing things around the house, and I was left to my devices: you could find me in the basement playing games on the N64.

So maybe that's what I'll do tonight. Perhaps I'll pull out the Super Mario 64 and spend some time being all nostalgic.


What are you doing to celebrate MAR1O Day?

~ Kyle Welykholowa

=== Games With The Wife To Be ===

     Recently I've been playing games with the wife to be. We've always enjoyed playing board games together and sometimes things like Mario and State of Decay because who doesn't love Mario and zombies? The unfortunate part is that we've always found it quite difficult to find two-player games that we both enjoy. In comes Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance on the Play Station 2. I've known for a while now that Carley has been interested in Dungeons & Dragons, but we just haven't had the time to run an adventure together. So one night I decided to suggest playing a new game and the next thing I know... she's asking to play "just until the next save point."

     Something I learned from this experience is that it's good to ask to try new things with your partner. You may be surprised to find that they enjoy doing some of these new things, or they may in fact be quite interested in something you like which even they never new about! I've also learned to be much more patient with my partner and that I also need to give new things a try... not just her. I've always been set in my ways where I like to do the same sort of thing every time; I even tend to order the same thing at each restaurant I go to. Now I'm trying to do things that are a little bit out of my comfort zone. We started spending time outside together recently building a snow fort! But that's a story for another time.

     So now we're looking for a new two-player game to play because we've beaten Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance and I don't have the second game currently. Amazingly there don't seem to be a lot of great games like this on consoles these days. I'm sure if we keep looking we'll find something somewhere... or maybe I'll just finally get her to join me in playing some games on the PC. ;)

     I've always been a PC person because I enjoy the wide breadth of games available and I much prefer the accuracy of a mouse and keyboard vs a controller. I pretty much can't find a comfortable control scheme when using a controller in pretty much any case ever. The worst part about this... is that pretty much everybody I've ever known has been way more into consoles than PC. As unfortunate as that is, I will remain primarily a PC user searching throughout the land for some people of the same mind as myself to join me.

~ Kyle Welykholowa

A Blast From The Past

     So last night I started playing a game on PS2 I haven't played in forever called "X Squad". I remember I rented it once upon a time from Blockbuster and at the time I thought it was pretty awesome. My mistake was wanting to play on the hardest difficulty as soon as I started it up. This game... is from the year 2000. On the hardest difficulty, you get shot four times and you're done, then you start over again from the very beginning of the mission.. ugh. So I eventually gave up and started over again on the easiest difficulty instead.

     Now I consider myself to be a pretty good gamer... on PC. I'm not so great with controllers and things; they feel weird to me. Plus, this game is so old that there isn't really any sort of way to be awesome at it. So I don't feel ashamed in any way that I'm playing through this game on easy. Who knows... maybe I'll play through it again on harder difficulties later if I figure something out about how to play better... or maybe I'll just play through it the one time because I have it and I'd like to say I've completed it.

     In any case, playing a game I haven't played for so many years really brings me back to my childhood. Apparently I've played much better games than this... but hey, it's a working game and I might as well start finishing some games. I have lots of them and I would really like to find the time to do just a little bit of something for me every once in a while, yet still spend enough time doing all the other activities I need to do. I don't quite know what I entirely need to do yet, but I'm settling in here and figuring things out. I think we're looking pretty good.

~ Kyle Welykholowa