Steam has been having its usual slew of sales and I've been bored so I've actually been buying some. One of them, for just under $3, was The Game of LIFE. It's an updated version of the (original?) PC game from almost two decades ago. It's a neat little time-chewer and has some cute animations and colorful graphics but it really can't hold a torch to the late 90s version.
That version was played to death (pun not really intended) by Ric, Gary and I "back in the day." What year? Not super sure, but you know, when it's all said and done, we don't have a whole bunch of years to choose from when trying to narrow down the time frame of when we'd done things together. Ric met Gary late in the summer of 2000 and Gary was dead by the spring of 2004. Not even a full 4 years. A short time in the scheme of things. Compare the number of years Ric and I have known each other: 22.
I watched a play through of the game posted by someone on YouTube and it brought back so many memories. As usual, Gary and I would always gang up on Ric and laugh at him if he got a "bad" card. Ric would get pissed, even though we were fully adults in our 30s (except Gary in his 20s) and didn't really care so much about this "kiddie" game. But it was fun, with the then pretty good graphics (incredibly dated now), music that traversed the decades from the 50s to the "soon-to-be 2000s" (game released in 1998) as you drove along the virtual game board road and hokey jokes that would best be known as "dad" jokes today. And especially fun playing after a night of beer and weed.
This CD-ROM game, like its physical board game, was all about money. Good things gave you more money, bad things subtracted it. Like that other beloved Hasbro game, Monopoly, it was all about having the most money. If you won, like the couple pictured above, you retired with your first place trophy and your stacks of cash. 'Cause you know, kiddies, that's what it's all about. That's all there is.
Well, if that's true, I guess I lost. Guess it's time, as usual, for me to queue up my fav torch song in this regards: