As for gaming, around the time I left for Kelli's place (hehe, good times), Ben had started playing Final Fantasy 7 again. He had never beaten it and was starting a new game. Matt and Catie both started new games of Final Fantasy 9 at the same time. Neither have beaten that before. I was motivated by watching them and remembering my saved games I had of the same games. I lost my memory card for the PS1, so I'd have to start a new game of anything besides FF7, which is on the computer. I started playing my game of that again and basically beefing my characters up for the fun of it. When I returned from Kelli's, Ben had beaten FF7 and Matt and Catie had also beaten FF9. Matt had started a new game of FF7 (even though he's beaten it before) and Ben still played FF7 just to get his characters strong like mine (yeah right, good luck on that, Ben). I believe he would settle for defeating Ruby Weapon and Emerald Weapon, the 2 strongest enemies in the game. He's been trying and trying to beat Emerald Weapon and I don't think he's even depleted half of his life on any attempt.

If you were to look online for turorials involving this game, you'd undoubtedly run into some describing a tactic to use in order to kill these creatures. The most common ones include getting the strongest Summon Materia in the game, "Knights of the Round", and using a sort of loop-hole in the game to cast this spell over and over without using up magic points (MP). Others require Yuffie to have her strongest weapon and be equipped with many Counter Attack materias, along with Cover. This makes it so that she will take the damage from Emerald Weapon, no matter whom it attacks, and then will hit Emerald Weapon back for as many times as the number of Counter Attacks she has equipped. Just from these 2 things can we gather that this monster must be formidable, for guides have been written to make his defeat possible. I, on the other hand, saved my game, got in a battle with Emerald Weapon without tailoring any of my equipment to this battle, and killed him by using only my normal attacks. You could safely say that my team is powerful. =) I still need to fight monsters until I have 3 more Hades materias and I can equip one to each character's armor. Then I'll be complete. I had just mastered 3 of them and put them with my character's weapons and that took a long time, so I decided to go try my hand at Emerald Weapon because I was tired of fighting the same monsters over and over. I convinced Ben to play Xenogears and, just like I thought, he likes it a lot.

I walked into the front room one time and heard a Sega Genesis game. I hadn't heard one of those in the longest time. Ben had rented Battle Tech, but from the sound of it, I first thought it was Dune. I remembered how the Dune songs sounded, and decided to go online and find the songs for downloading. The site I found had the songs to that, and also an array of other Sega games. I downloaded the ones I wanted, some of them being the songs to Ranger-X, Sonic the Hedgehog 1, 2, 3, Sonic and Knuckles, Sonic 3D Blast, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Tournament Fighters. After listening to them and remembering how cool those games were, I downloaded Sonic 2 and 3 in ROM form and played them. I played Sonic 2 to the last place and then decided to try out Sonic 3 again. I beat that one. Sonic and Knuckles is the best, in my opinion. I'll have to get that one. Hmm, maybe I'll go get it right now... nah, I'll finish this first. So basically, I'm back into the video games. I've told Kelli how I have to introduce her to all of these and, surprisingly to me, she is pretty willing to give them a shot. Yay, that makes me happy! *hugs Kelli*