Bringing back those stars and times…

“It’s something unpredictable, but in the end it’s right.
I hope you had the time of your life.”

-Green Day on “Good Riddance”

I was thinking recently to the good things that happened when one Thursday night when my brother and I were both near the beginning of our community college and high school portions of education, respectively and I can’t begin to tell you that this was one of the funnest days in our time spent together. I recall that I had recently bought Dynasty Warriors 3 xtreme, which is the extended version of the 3rd Dynasty Warriors game. I didn’t have much fun with it because at first I remember that we couldn’t really do anything with the characters outside of Lu Bu or Meng Huo. I was easily bored by the fact that I bought the game but then my brother decided to rent the original part 3 and back then it was 5 days for a game and we got to playing it right away. The fun part about playing this xtreme version was that the game was much harder and funner as well. The fun part was that the better powered up all our characters attributes were, the more it made it capable that you could play in xtreme mode. I remember just how much fun and my brother would have throughout all these various stages such as Chi Bi, Hu Lao Gate, Wu Zhang plains, or even Yi Ling. Now, if you’re not familiar with the game, the basic objective is to make it through the stages without getting killed or even your commanding officer getting killed. The way you can keep yourself healthy and made sure that you don’t die is to collect plenty of buns for your health and also plenty of musou that you may find throughout many of the crates. Musou is especially helpful when you are surrounded by a good number of soldiers that are trying to aim for your head and like in any video game our fellow comrades are of little or no help to you. Musou is essentially the special combo move that every character does to take out large numbers of enemies and also to ensure the defeat of several captains that are spread out on the opposite team. There are also various objectives that must be completed and also to make sure that more soldiers do not stampede the premises, you have to attack all the gates so that more do not intrude you. Now, for myself and my brother we were looking for a challenge and our characters were maxed out by the time we had gotten to various stages that we felt that we could handle. The easiest way to do this was to find the characters that had the elements with their weapons including lightning, fire, and even death which automatically would take out the soldiers and cause big damage to the captains. I remember thinking that this was sort of the way we bonded after I had left my hometown and I was almost starting over. By this time, my brother and I were not really “friends” and we would just leave each other alone essentially. I feel that this was what brought us together. That bonding that he and I had when he was Cao Cao and I was Zhao Yun and we were facing dire consequences going up against the Allies. The feeling that I had was that we could pull this off and jokingly I would add special effects noises to say as if I had no clue as to what I was doing. The golden goal for most people is to kill at least 1000 guys and doing that seems almost impossible at first. But, once we got into xtreme mode there was no looking back. My brother would take out a few guys with his death element and I would go around trying to take out every single guy I could. The fun part was that you knew your back was against the wall. Playing the underdog meant that we couldn’t let ourselves down because we knew that winning the battle was only part of the game. We did it because we wanted that ultimate goal of being able to play a video game with pride and joy. One example I can think of is playing the stage “The Battle of Chi Bi” which is often considered a difficult stage if you don’t hold your feet up. Usually playing with my brother, we would be on the side that had the most to deal with. For example, in this case we had to deal with ships being on fire, winds blowing, the allies marching against us, and generals dropping like flies. I remember he would grab one side and try to conquer that side while I grabbed the other side of the stage. What made me happy was that whenever one of us was in trouble, we would get on a horse (yes there were horses too), and run over there to save the other’s behind. Now, more so than not, if he was in trouble there were more guys than I can count on my finger trying to kill him and we would take out these guys before anymore came and they kept coming. The best part about this was that you knew there was another guy watching your back and you could count on him to help you out when and if you were in trouble. Usually, the morale bar would be very low until my brother and I would come back and draw a rally against the enemy. In Chi Bi, we would have to take out gate captains, archers, generals, and commanding officers and it wasn’t an easy task but it was worth it. I remember if my brother had some extra buns or some musou he would tell me to grab it and sometimes we would be mistaken because we never really knew what was inside these crates that carried either the musou or the buns. All in all, we would reach victory after many failed attempts and it was worth it in the end. We would do better on some stages than others but I’ll never forget this installment of Dynasty Warriors because there was so much we did on every stage that it is hard to sit down and ever remember a gaming experience like this one. Looking back, this Tuesday the seventh installment comes out and I’m more excited for this one because it’s been a while since the last one came out. Part 6 was decent but it wasn’t the same experience that I had with parts 3 and 4. This one, from what I’ve heard, has better graphics, more detail, a better story, more characters, and it is getting good to excellent reviews. I recently have been trying to get into playing video games again and hopefully this and maybe a few other games will get me back into it. I don’t know when I’ll buy this but when I do, I’ll be sure to recollect my experience and tell people about how awesome and special this game really is. Till next time!