Inspired by a particular Tumblr blog, drawing this map has brought back a flood of memories and emotions. Around about 1997, I was hooked on the original Command & Conquer, having first read about it in one of those great 90′s UK game magazines (CVG I think it was) and deciding to get it on the Sega Saturn. (As an aside, I used to always hate how reviews of the Saturn version criticised the gamepad controls, especially the inability to assign teams of units to buttons – but you could! It was the PS1 version that didn’t have that function!)

After pouring hours into the game, and gaining perhaps far too much satisfaction in slowly building up a ridiculous and unnecessarily large GDI army to crush and torment those enemy NOD bases (I used to have my units wait patiently outside their barracks, annihilating any newly produced men as soon as they walked out), I had finally met my match. I mean, as far as difficulty levels and player feedback went, I’d gotten used to playing all night and failing missions, using that trial-and-error experience and coming back stronger the next time round. But wow…this one stage. It was almost as if there was hidden karmic balance code on the disc, keeping track of the number of enemy soldiers I’d brutally vanquished and just waiting for the right time to punish me for it and striking down with furious anger. And with the debut of the NOD Flame Tank unit, all it took was one, slow-moving, ugly-looking but devastatingly monstrous vehicle to achieve such righteousness.

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[Gamasutra Feature], [Mapstalgia]

*Warning: Spoilers ahead*

Inspired by Pep

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A trigger takes me back

to a precious moment I’ve kept dear

The mere thought of which elicits a tearful sadness

alongside a warm sense of comfort and safety

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Revisiting a golden time and place from long ago

with a fresh wonder and joy for a world so new

That innocence and purity of my exposure to life has since been lost and replaced

by knowledge and language too descriptive, and needlessly complicated

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I feel the pangs of mourning for a homesickness of my youth

accepting that it is impossible to appreciate the richness of existence again through such a cherished, simple perspective

-

What is that

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It hits me only now that this image I’ve had of my mother, all this time

Has long been affectionately biased by the rosy tint of these youthful eyes

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I am now at an age, corresponding closely to that time when she had me

Faced with a similar prospect of our lives changing ever irreversibly

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I’ve known her only as my mum, an enriching role model for an only son

It makes me wonder how she was as a young woman and how we would have gotten on

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Adulthood is thrust upon us so soon, often catching us unawares:

Not fully ready to undergo that morph into a generation of greying hair

~… Read More