WARNING! Super-Geeky Post. Normal friends beware.

My dear readers, you may remember my "birthday wish" post that I put up last week, as I struggled to find silliness and happiness in the midst of my 27-year-old-to-be gloom. I cheered myself with goofy links to farfetched wishes for gifts and to random pages that made me laugh. Turns out that someone took me at least partially seriously...

My little brother just moved to Austin, Texas, apparently the live-music capital of the world. I'm thinking it's not much more than Athens, GA with cowboy boots and prairie dogs, but Matthew is getting to love it (I think).

Anyway, the one thing that he and I have always had in common is an interest in video games: console, PC, and otherwise. Let me tell you, he was a bit disappointed that I bought a Mac laptop, since game programmers hardly ever make games for that platform. But I have WoW to keep me content, and that's all I need.

As time has gone by, our consoles have changed, as have our interests. I was formerly a strict Super Mario Brothers (esp. #3), Castlevania, and anything with fast cars and the option for manual shifting. Matt and Dave, my older brother, got into PC first-person shooters, like Half-Life and Counterstrike, and while I enjoyed the heck out of the storyline Half-Life, as well as Duke Nukem - really hilarious - the Doom series didn't appeal to me at all. I would say that it was the violence and gore, and perhaps I'd be somewhat correct, but really it was the stress and tension that arises when playing against others, usually 12-14-year-old angsty brats that like to snipe - and whine when nobody listens to their rants - that turned me off of most FPS. In college, though, I remember Matt and I playing Diablo on PS-1, for 8 hours straight one weekend that he came to visit me at JMU. Crazy fun, that game. With two players, it's always a battle to see who leads the way to the next engagement, and with Matthew and I, you know that's a good time.

Matt and I found common ground again in H.S. with a series on PlayStation that was so graphic, my mother banned it after Matt had already purchased it. He took it back to the store... only to buy it again several months later, when we got televisions in our own rooms and he could be sneaky about it. I know he re-bought it because I had fallen in love with it.

The game was Resident Evil, by Capcom. Ooooooh it was good. Replete with spooky sounds, slasher-flick camera angles, make-you-jump scare sequences, and crafty little puzzles to solve. It was like Castlevania on steroids. And with guns. RE-1 was the first RPG console game I'd completely beaten since Castlevania, back in the day. I mean, of course I'd beaten MegaMan and all of those fun Nintendo Games, as well as Sonic the Hedgehog on Sega Genesis, but this! This was something to accomplish. Those of you who've played - remember listening down a long hallway, with the camera view at an angle that rendered it impossible to see ahead, waiting to hear the sticky-stomp footsteps of a wandering zombie? What about the time you jumped - and you know you did - when those dogs first crashed through the line of windows?

It wasn't until RE-1 that I realized that the kinds of gaming that I prefer is the *gasp* RPG. You'll notice that, even now, I have a hard time expanding that acronym to Role-Playing-Game. RPG is a nice little euphemism for those of us just on the fringes of absolute geekdom. Or, those of us who like to believe we're on the fringes. Heh. I loved the idea of solving puzzles and advancing an interesting storyline, as well as battling the bad guys that were obvious bad guys, as opposed to the FPS that encouraged me to shoot other human beings on the opposing team. I guess one might argue that RE-1 isn't really an RPG, since it doesn't involve chance (dice-rolling, or saves, in RPG terms), or experience points, but you can alternatively argue that the increasing weapons capabilities and storage capacity is a form of character-leveling. At least I think so, and I'm the one writing the post. But for the sticklers, RE is technically a "Survival Horror" game. Whatever that means.

Anyway, after beating RE-1 (twice), I moved on to RE-2. I didn't find it as compelling as the first one, all though there were definitely more zombies. There was something about the puzzles being too easy and almost perfunctory that I found kind of bland. I didn't play Resident Evil just to shoot up some zombies, after all.

RE-3 rediscovered its creepy self, with new characters and monsters and puzzles and goriness. I won't give away any of the secrets, but I will say that players get fun prizes for beating this one.

Now, I could only play 2 and 3 because my awesome little brother "lent" me his PS-1 while I was at JMU, because he'd gotten a Nintendo 64, and because he was far more invested in EverQuest on his PC than in his console systems. When I moved to GA, the PS came with me...and, um... I finally returned Matt's Final Fantasy VII to him this past Christmas. Sorry, man. I didn't even play FF.

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately for my grad school career, RE-Code Veronica and RE-4 were released only for the PlayStation 2, which I did not have and had no intention of getting. Money was tight, and so was time. I happily played EQ for a while, until the game visuals outstripped my PC processor capacity. I didn't play much of anything until EQ-II, and that was only at home with the bros. Blizzard, brilliant company that they are, decided to release World of Warcraft as a dual-platform game, which means that we poor, oft-overlooked Mac gamers got in on the goods right at the beginning.

But I still missed my Resident Evil.

So, my brother continued his outstandingness this year, and actually sent me a PlayStation 2 for my birthday, along with a still-in-the-plastic copy of RE-4. Wow. WOW. Of course, it's wonderful for me in a selfish, time-consuming, geek-chick kind of way. But the best part is that for me, RE brings up the connection I have to my little brother. Yeah, I know, it's dorky. But it's important to me. I don't know, maybe he didn't even think of any of this when he bought it and had it sent; but it's still an incredibly thoughtful gesture to remember my favorite game of ALL TIME and send me the components I need to play it at the next level. I'm a lucky girl to have a brother like that.

I'll admit, I played for 5 or 10 minutes last night, just to see. It's beautiful. And, of course, horrific. I promise I'll get my work done before I get a memory card and start really playing...but when I do, you may just have to leave a message, 'cause I'll be busy for a few days.

Bro, you rock my face off. Even if you are a psuedo-commie-robot-space-cadet.