A Geezer’s Take on Extra Life

This probably won't make it onto Sarcastic Gamer website/blog, so I'm going to post it here for my friends/wife and admirers. Please realize that I wrote this after the 24 hours of gaming and before I fell asleep in exhaustion.

"Did I realize what I was getting myself into? I must not have but I do have to say that I am proud of myself and SparkStalker, as well as, the thousand others that participated in Extra Life. It’s funny how things go. When Halo 3 first came out, I played it on Legendary over the course of two to three days (that was over a year ago, for those of you keeping tack). Now, 24 hours of playing video games seems to be something that could be handled with ease, but you’d be wrong. Well, this is how Spark and my 24 hours went.

First, we started off with some Halo 3…easy right? Not if you try and tackle Halo 3 on Legendary in one day! Now with four people, Halo 3 on Legendary is not very hard, but with three people, it gets harder, and in our example, with only two people, it’s really hard. But since Spark didn’t have all the skulls or hadn’t yet defeated the game on Legendary before, we decided to attack that first…but in reality, it was more like the game attacking us.

The first level alone took at least an hour. Then thankfully, reinforcements arrived. With the help of at least one more person at any given time, Spark and I finally complete the campaign on Legendary but it took us seven hours. With that done, Spark, in his infantine wisdom, decided to play Duke Nukem’ on the highest difficulty. I’m not sure how many times we both re-spawned, but we sure did need an extra life. After becoming royally annoyed with Duke Nukem’, Spark and I went our separate ways for a while. I hooked up with another friend who was play Gears of War campaign on Insane and finished Act 4 and 5. Then it was time to take on some of the arcade games that I had left behind: Hexic HD, Mega Man 9, Carcassonne, Dig Dug and Golf: Tee It Up.

Then at around midnight, with Spark still entrenched in Halo 3 (he did manage to play other games) I decided to work on my garden…my Piñata garden that is. At one point (around 4 AM) I sent a message to Spark wanting to know if he wanted to do some Gears of War on Insane and that I was playing in my garden. For one reason or another, I never get tired of Gears of War. He responded with, “You and those (expletive deleted) piñata’s!”

At five in the morning, after 20 hours of gaming, SparkStalker and I hoped into Gears of War and played it on Insane…yes we are just that. First we play Halo 3 on Legendary from the beginning to the end, and now we’re going to punish ourselves some more by doing Gears on Insane from the beginning to end. Well, we didn’t quite get to the end; in fact we only got to Act 2 before we just got sick and tired of it. At 20 minutes until 9 in the morning on Sunday (23 hours and 40 minutes into our marathon) Spark and I left Gears of War and finished up our time in Uno.

But what Spark and I did wasn’t as special as why we were doing it. As of writing this, I’ve head that this Extra Life challenge raised over $100,000 in donations. Way to go, EVERYONE!"