Last weekend

So, last weekend, we had a football game scheduled for Saturday afternoon in my dear hometown of Mora.

I ditched a shift on Friday night and Saturday afternoon to play in the game, and hopefully play a little D&D on Friday. (My hometown friends and I are something of roleplaying nerds)

So, it takes me a little longer than I had hoped for to leave Mankato friday night, and I wind up getting home about 9:30. One guy couldn't make it home for the weekend, and another had to leave about 1 a.m., so we couldn't roleplay. Drag.

Three of us, including one loyal reader who is about to become a contributor to Toms for America, played EuroRails Friday night.

The rails series is a train building board game where you build a train empire across various nations or continents, in this case Europe.

It was all right, but the main event was the next day.

Bear in mind, it was forecasted to be -20 on Saturday. The day of the football game. A GFL game.

Everyone bailed. Patrick and I wound up sitting around a house for a few hours, trying to call some other buddied who didn't have their phones on. Eventually, we picked up another friend and went to the house where our other friends spent the last night, to find out that everyone had lost their chargers or forgot to plug in their phones.

Weak.

So we sat around that house playing magic cards, in a smokey ass basement. I don't smoke, and I haven't played magic cards since like 8th grade. It was nice to see everyone, but it was NOT too cold to play football.

Sigh.

Anyways, I hung out with my parents Sunday, had some fun bowling and playing Yahtzee, and came back to 'Kato.

Man, I wish we would have played football.

The REAL adventure

Hey all.

So, as I was saying, I was looking for some PlayStation 1 games.

They have been elusive, to say the least.

So, I checked out GameStop's Web site, and they have this wonderful feature that shows you how many of a given game any store within a certain distance from your town has.

The Meadow Hills store, in Sioux Falls South Dakota, about 189 miles from my town of Mankato, Minnesota, said it had Suikoden I, and II and a couple of other games I had been looking for.

I called some buddies of mine from town, to see if anyone would want to go on a road trip. No takers. As a last ditch effort, I called a high school friend of mine, who lives a couple of hours away from me, who almost never has a chance to hang out because he's married and has two daughters to see if he would be interested in coming.

The one thing I had going for me, he is a HUGE Suikoden fan.

AND his wife was going home to see her family that weekend. Huge break for Tom.

I talk to Joe on Friday night, and he says maybe. With Joe, a maybe is generally a no.

I wake up Saturday morning and give him a call, and Joe says he'll come.

About two hours later, he buzzes into my apartment, and we're off. About three hours later, we're pulling into Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Mapquest brings us right to the Meadow Hills GameStop.

We walk in, and I go up to the counter, and ask "Where are your PS1 games?"

-Pause-

"We don't carry PS1 games. We got rid of them all."

I was devasted. We looked around for a while before talking to the staff again, and told them our story, and they symphasized with me. They also gave us directions to a used CD store that carried older games.

We checked it out, I forget what it was called but it was a cool store, but no dice. No Suikoden, of any number.

I bought a couple of other games, but that was only because we had driven so far.

So we call another gamestop in town, gosh I wish I had done that before driving to South Dakota in the first place, and find they don't have PS1 games either.

We then drive around for a couple of hours to find a bar, get a couple of beers and an appetizer sampler and get ready to head back.

On the way out of town we stop at a pawn shop, and they had games, but no good ones. After the pawn shop, we went across the parking lot to this building called a casino, and poked our heads inside.

It was nothing more than 12 machines with bill intakes that had various types of electronic poker and blackjack on them. I won five dollars after my first two quarters, watched Joe for a while, and eventually dumped the five dollars into some video blackjack.

We both came out even, but I maintain that any video game screws you, I would much rather lose when the cards are out in front of me on the table.

So, we head back to Mankato, go the bars, end up at Embers and get a ride home.

All in all, it was nice to hang out with a high school buddy I barely get to see any more.

And I wound up buying the four Suikoden games on Ebay for a combined $174, not counting gass for the trip to Sioux Falls, South Dakota