HEAVVVVVVVVVVVVVY BARREL!

Many good hours were spent today in conversation while driving to an arcade in New Hampshire. Driving 90 miles to go to a video arcade? One step inside the Funspot and you will understand completely. They have a huge collection of old video games from the 80's: Elevator Action, Spy Hunter, Tron, Jungle Hunt, Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, Space Invaders deluxe, Defender, Robotron 2084, Missile Command, Asteroids... and the list goes on. We dropped about $10 a piece in the arcade over the course of three hours. I remember the games being a lot harder back then, but I didn't have nearly the coordination I have now when I first played them. Spy Hunter was the exception: that games still sucks, especially as the sound was all garbled when I played today. Star Wars and Gauntlet were still lots of fun though.

The most unexpected part of the day was playing games like Heavy Barrel and Ring Kings. It brought back memories of friends from college I haven't heard from in ages, and will likely never hear from again. They were good friends in some respects, in that they were smart and damn good gamers and sympathetic ears sometimes. And they were bad friends in that they were insufferably arrogant, and believed in that school of friendship where you pick the hell out of each other. I'm somewhat used to that now, but I hated it then. It was like some sort of masochistic dependency. If I ran into those same guys today, I'd be afraid of slipping back into old roles, which is something I'd hate to do.

But, I've grown since then. Surely so have they. And "recognizing a trap is the first step in avoiding it."