After a long delay due to my internet conking out on me, and having ten straight days of partying, I have returned. And I doubt anyone cares, but the hell with it I'm going to continue on my odyssey. Here's the eight gaming related moment that shaped me.

Blockbuster's Unlimited Game Rentals


I find it strange that as a kid I rented games every weekened, and now I haven't rented one in two or three years.

In the summer between Sophomore and Junior year of High School, I had two things on my mind, get ready for Varsity Football, and play as many Video Games as possible. Prep for football was easy, for the first five weeks of summer we had camp during the morning, and the last week and a half had single then double practices. The Gaming part was a little more difficult. While I had a PS2, and a decent amount of games, I had played through them all. While I could break out the Super Nintendo or N64, I kind of wanted to play something new. But, I didn't have a job, I still got an allowance thankfully which gave me a small amount of disposable income. Also, while I love gaming, at times it's hard to keep yourself motivated to play. Luckily I had two allies, first was my buddy Tyler, same grade, same kind of personality, and he had his license and a car. I was stuck on my learners permit because I took drivers ed outside of school and still had to finish a few driving lessons.


I'm in the front right, and Ty is the front middle, New Years Eve, and I don't do the whole photo thing so this was the best one I could find.

The second was Blockbuster Video, and their deal, unlimited game rentals for 25 dollars a month. I could only take two out at a time, but I could turn one in at any time to get a new game. It became a partnership, I covered the monthly fee and would throw in for gas every now and then, he'd drive, and we'd play together. I am not joking when I say that we may have rented every single PS2 game that they had. Whatever we saw, we'd rent, sometimes going back to the store two or three times a day because we picked a crappy game and wanted to try something else. Many afternoons were completely killed by us avoiding the outside, hell we were there in the morning what had changed? Nothing stopped us, not our other friends wanting to hang out. Not even pure shit like Fantavision, Driven, or the Army Men games.


Who in the hell enjoyed these games, I don't think a single person did.

We hung out so often that I became like a second son to his mom, he became the third brother of my family. It's still like that to this day. In all honesty, I can really only remember one game that we kept for longer than a week, and that I eventually bought. That was Grandia 2. We played through nearly the entire game before Football season began, and brought an end to our quest. We still planned on beating it at some point, but it never happened, he got a girlfriend, we became part of a larger group of friends, and there was never really time. About a year and a half after we graduated High School we disconnected, he had found a new girlfriend who was just bad news. She was once a friend of our group, but became absolutely batshit insane. She became persona non grata with our friends, and he left with her. I ended up beating Grandia 2 away at college, having not even realized we were nearly at the final battle. Thankfully he came to his senses, left her, and we've resumed being best friends. Our bond was cemented in a single summer, prior to that we were good friends, after it we became like brothers.


One of the best RPG's I've ever played