So a few things:
I sent this to J's PM, but I'll say again here - that looks fantastic (as does the other one). Reminds me that I started a pearler bead project 2-3 years back that I abandoned, so this may inspire me to literally dust it off & see if I can finish it. If so, I'll post the final results here.
An early gaming story I'll share, to stay on theme, will be my first RPG. It was The Bard's Tale on the Commodore 64 - a good friend I met in middle school introduced me to it. We would map out the dungeons on graph paper, trade notes & stories of our adventures at school, and even do some pass-the-controller gaming with it. It was a blast, and definitely hooked me on the genre. One quirk about the game is that you can only save in town, at the guild. Each character was saved individually, so there was a nice exploit we found of pooling all the gold to one person, saving that person, then pooling it to the next, etc., until the entire party each had the full amount. Then reboot the game (I forget why this step was necessary) and do it again until you end up with way more money than you could ever spend.
If you died, however, you did not lose your progress, you were just sent back to the guild and had to have a living character "drag" (as we called it) your bodies to the temple to get resurrected, then you still had all of your xp & loot. Well, I clearly remember one night being up WAY too late on a school night playing the game. I was deep in a dungeon, and all of my characters had been hit with insanity. This would cause you to get into random encounters with YOURSELF, as your party members would turn on each other. One problem: my characters were so high level & well equipped that they literally could not hit each other. So I would take a few steps, get into an encounter w/ myself, and watch as they attacked each other futilely. All the while I was just BEGGING them to die so I could save & quit. Very rarely, one of them would actually land a hit & do a tiny bit of damage, so this went on for I don't know how long until FINALLY everyone died & I could save. It was ridiculous, and I loved it.
Last thing, my half-brother (on my dad's side) passed away last weekend, and the funeral was yesterday. He and I weren't close; he was 15 years older than me and moved out when I was only 1 or 2 to live with his grandparents. He then went into the army once he hit 18, and when he got out & came back to town, we were just in different worlds. I do feel a little bad that I didn't try to connect with him once I was older, but we were very different people. I was more upset that my dad was having to go through this - he turned 90 last Oct, same month my half-brother turned 65. The only thing we ever really connected on that I remember was music, and then only occasionally, since I had different tastes from his at the time. He had requested some Led Zeppelin play at the service (which my mom did NOT like, and I thought was a little odd myself, but that may be my traditional Southern upbringing showing). What's odd is that I had put on a Zeppelin cd this past Saturday night and listened to it. It was a cd I had picked up in an estate sale a couple years back & was mainly testing it out to make sure it played ok - I *never* listen to them, even though I do kinda like them. Thinking I'll see what other albums of theirs I have, slowly pick up the rest & listen to them some more - I know it's a little late to try to relate to him now, but I guess until I'm gone it's not too late to learn more about him.
)
- and we used to play through all these NES RPGs together (FF I, DW I, DW III, DW IV, Crystalis, Destiny of an Emperor, etc).
