Old friends and good memories

So I decided to kick it old school last night. Okay, Star Wars Battlefront isn't exactly old enough to be old school but it's close enough. It brought back a lot of memories.

I was a little intimidated when I first got Battlefront and saw my brother playing it online. It looked there were too many things to be aware of that I wouldn't enjoy the game. But is was Star Wars so how could I NOT at least try to play it?

I joined a couple of rooms and quietly got my ass kicked. I almost gave up, but I'm too stubborn for that. After a lot of play time I finally got to the point where I had more kills than deaths. I then came up with a plan. I'd pick someone on my team who was better than me and just follow them around, watch what they did and learn from it. I picked Killafoola and set my plan in motion. Even if we weren't on the same team I'd still try to find him and hang back far enough not to get killed but close enough to watch.

After a couple of weeks I found my skills greatly improving. I was now able to get the better of Killafoola every now and then when we were on opposite sides. I was feeling pretty confident in not looking like a fool while I played. This was about the time I started talking during games. Several people were surprised I was a girl but most of them accepted me and have since become good friends.

I did find out however, that I wasn't the best player out there. Far from it actually. Since my strategy worked before I decided to apply it to another regular player in the game. Evil Ric became my next target . . . I mean mentor. And to be honest he still is today. But once I learned all I could from him I moved on to the next one. Big Gamer67 (or is it 69?) and MasvHdWndHarry (or spelled something like that), Sdlkal (who we used to call sol-cal because of the way the fonts looked like in the game), Brno32 and HarleyRacer, Kralon and CleeLost, El Sand Dog and DewBird. Devo and Snakes Venon. And all the other regulars I played with and learned from.

But there's one player I always wanted to learn from and although I'd tried my best I was never able to beat him . . . and never will. Ice008. If you've played the game you know the name. Cool as a cucumber, quiet and reserved but with the deadliest skills I had ever seen. And although he doesn't play the game as much as he used to his skills are not as rusty as anyone else's. He's a guy that knows how to play the game. And it's always a challenge going up against him. If you kill him it should count as 2 kills because, more often than not, it will be you who does the dying.

So when I jumped in to a game last night and it was like no time had passed at all. We laughed. We cursed. We killed. We died. We took it personal when we lost. We gloated when we won. We had fun. Some of those guys have moved on, like myself, to the Xbox 360. The new system and newer games take up a lot of our time. But every now and then you can find a bunch of us still kicking it old school. With old friends and good memories.