Teamwork makes the dream work. You’ve heard that before. There are some games that you play that have difficulty levels to them, so you can beat the game on easy mode, well maybe you should try it on the next level. Contra is a one player or two player game in which your goal is to destroy all the bad guys and get to the last bad guy and maybe if you have enough lives left beat the last guy and be the last one standing and see the actual game ending and not some try harder thing.

Konami does a lot of good games, they brought us Metal Gear, Silent Hill, and Contra. Contra is old school, before 1st person shooters, but the concept is about the same, shoot, blow them up, and don’t get hit. There are tanks you can drive, there are enhanced weapons you can acquire to assist with taking out more bad guys, but your work is cut out for you. You have to be engaged and if there is someone in the room watching you play, they must be silent because if you die, it was because they were talking.

On hard mode, Contra 3 the Aliens Wars is impossible to beat by yourself. I mean I guess you could, but I really don’t think so. Team playing is hard too because there are levels that if you don’t wait for your partner to advance you could lead them to an untimely death because of their position. They introduced split screen in some levels and that had a better dynamic, but it still involved who does what kind of thing.

“I have lazer so I can take out the shelled nest dude.”

“Ok go for it, I got a couple smart bombs, and I will come to you and blow up the surrounding enemies.”

This is level 2, and there are 6 levels I think, it takes complete concentration to get there. At the last level, if you get to the main boss, they have two arms that dump out enemies from the left and the right as it tries to shoot you with fireballs and lazers and whatever else it has in its arsenal.

Mike and I figured out if we side by side blast enemies spawned from the arms, we can get tons of extra lives to have enough to take on the brain that comes out at the very end. So, we do that, and we weren’t about to sit and watch the lives pile up, we taped the buttons and waited.

Once we got about 30 lives each, we felt we could take on the last boss with enough lives to get the job done. We did.

This is a silly example of depending on someone else to accomplish a goal, but Mike and I did it. We didn’t cheat by using some Game Genie code, we very well could have, but that would have been inauthentic. We beat the game together.

I am very saddened that my sempi is no longer with me, he truly was an interesting person. He was moved by the arts and understood the mathematics. He just wanted someone to take on the quest with him. He loved cars and loved speed. I raced him once in my BMW and despite the greater horsepower in my beamer he kept up with his mom’s Mazda and was wondering why I was running from him. I thought it would be fun, and it was.

We had a lot of fun; we did a lot of crazy stuff together. We’d throw firecrackers out of the sunroof of the BMW to people’s yards that we had no beef with but thought it would be funny to get a rise out of them. We climbed Abe’s mango tree to the top, and fell all the way to the bottom, slowed down by the pilau mailae.

We went fishing and spearing. We talked football and stats. If I needed money, he’d lend it, but I had to pay him back even if it was a penny a day brah.

I never got the chance to talk to him after that one conversation we had in 2001 I think, but I hope that he has moved passed his pain and is doing better in whatever that means for him in his next phase of this world.

Rest in peace sempi.