I came *this* close to having another game on the “played through” pile Saturday.

I don’t often have people over – I have lots of friends who I’ve known for years and share interests with, but most of them live nowhere nearby anymore. We’ve all spread out across (mostly) the Pacific Northwest and keep in touch via the normal chain of cc:’d emails.

That portrait of a hermetic otaku lifestyle aside, however, I do have a good friend nearby who comes over every 3 or 4 weeks so we can play co-op games. This is how I finished Battlefront II this year. Since Battlefront II, we’ve played a couple of other games but the one that’s really stuck recently is Earth Defense Force 2017. This is a glorious game – short on plot, heavy on explosions and full of lots of unintentionally hilarious NPC dialog. We play through usually 8 or so levels per session and we’re even very proud of ourselves for playing on NORMAL difficulty level – not easy! We are real men, doing real men things.

Anyway, last visit, we’d gotten to a level in the high 30s and gotten stuck, so we started there and for some reason it just clicked with both of us and we started blowing through levels – all the way to level 53, the final level in the game.

At which point, it was well after midnight, so our shooter fu deserted us. Two losses and we needed something to wind down with.

Spoke he, “I don’t care what we play or what system.”

Hmm. Something I bought to play with the wife was an old PS2 title, “The Adventures of Cookie and Cream”.

It’s about bunnies. Cute, hoppy bunnies. So cute, in fact, that my wife took one look at it and refused to play it. It’s designed expressly for co-op play, so I’ve never felt like popping it in for solo play and had no idea how it played, but what the hell.

That consumed the next two hours.

That is one unforgiving game. We died FAR more often than I would have expected from the cutesy visuals and kid-friendly story, but it never got really frustrating – what finally made us shut it down was a puzzle that we couldn’t quite fathom at 2AM, and that it was also 2AM and he needed to drag himself out to his car so he could go home and feed the dogs and collapse.

Damn fine way to spend a Saturday. Doing real men things. Like real men do.