Prisoner2k

I'm very nice...at playing games when I should be doing housework...oh, wait...crap.

Okay, apologies for the insane length of my holiday story. Once I had my mind wrapped around the topic, it just sorta' flowed out of my fingers...

Video games have been part of my holiday memories since I can remember, all of which, for different reasons at different points in my life, have to do with my brother. We got an Atari 2600 for Christmas when I was about 7 and he was 13, and in addition to the standard "Combat" game, we also got "Night Driver" with it. This was super-advanced technology; how did the lights know where to come on after sundown to match the cars? Can you still see the car at night (Yes I can! No you can't!)? The next year's holiday brought Megamania, and some resulting nightmares about being chased by space hamburgers...

Fast-forward to Holiday 1990 and my brother, now in college, getting a Sega Genesis; nope, THIS was super-advanced technology! That digitized "SE-GAAAAA" voice! Holy crap, that hedgehog is fast! Can you get the cheat code in fast enough to hear the chime? Toejam and Earl could've BEEN us! And don't even talk to me about level 11 of "Zombies Ate My Neighbors"; those giant Ants are STILL the source of screaming heebie-jeebies from me (which my brother loves to remind me about…).

Zip ahead to 1996; at this point, my brother lives in Tacoma, I live in Denver, and our folks back here in Central New York. We only saw each other at Christmas-time, and what was our chosen bonding experience ever year? "Play--sta--tion"! One of us packs the console in his luggage, both of us load up the stack of games the other one just HAS to play. Can you believe we ever thought the Atari was super-advanced technology? Check it out! You hit the shoulder-button, and Abe farts! Blasto and Gex become our new heroes. "Sweet, like candy…"

By 2001, we both lived back in our home town, realizing that simple=good, and as long as we had broadband Internet, the "real world" was still plenty accessible, even in the middle of nowhere. The week between Christmas and New Year's became one of the rare, planned times-of-year when my brother and I could get a day free of spouses and children, and run through our favorite co-op PS2 games. Same rules applied: one of us "hosts" the console, both bring over the stack o'games, only this time add some Guinness, and good times are had. "Lord of the Rings" and "Battlefront" tended to be the standbys.

Now, we're both 360 owners, still in the same town, and this Christmas? Well, since we've been playing together from our respective homes over XBL all year, guess what? It still gets to be a special holiday occasion for us to get together on the same couch, sift through the requisite assortment of discs (and now XBLA games...'SPLOSION MAN!!!), and wait for that moment where we both catch ourselves noticing how super-advanced the technology is, and how much more awesome it is that we're still doing this 30 years later, and still laughing like idiots the whole time...

I'm gonna start by FINALLY getting over my wussiness about playing past Medium difficulty on Rock Band, THEN hit Brutal Legend, THEN Uncharted 2, THEN capping it off with Ratchet & Clank: A Crack In Time. w00t!

Gotta say my favorite Rock 'N Roll moment is from the 1990 American Music Awards, when Slash and Duff, clearly not expecting to win for an album that was already three years old, got full-on HAMMERED during the telecast, then had to stumble up to the stage, bottles in hand, and try to give an acceptance speech. Needless to say, thus was the 7-second delay brought into regular use in live awards shows...

Okay, what about this? Do we know for certain that time moves at the same pace on the island that it does in the "real" world? Even though we got off the island in the S2 finale, do we know that, even if it's been 60 days on the island or whatever, that time hasn't passed more quickly out in the world? Meaning, do we know that, even though it's 2004 on the island, it's not 2006 everywhere else?