Long live the game

GTA does not mean Grand Tourismo Auto (right papI?) It actually means Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. This is not a review of the game but how it affected my law school performance and perhaps that of Homer's.

I love playing video games, but I am more into sports video games like FIFA, Madden and the like. When San Andreas came out, Homer heard all the great reviews and wanted in some of the hype. So I brought my playstation to his place and we rented the game to see how it was. We rented the game in December of our third year, as if we needed distraction before finals.

I played the first GTA and wasn't a fan and I didn't think I would be for this one either. We started playing and it was interesting, then it progressed to funny, then exiting then obsessive.

How obsessive you ask? It became to the point that I was crashing at Homer's place 3 times a week because we would play the game from 8 to midnight and most times even later. We took turns solving the missions. When we failed we started again and again until the mission was accomplished. During lunch times most of our conversations were no longer things like "did u get what Bush v. Gore has to do with the Schiavo case?", it was more like "when you approach the ballas turf what weapon do you use for CJ," or "Make sure that when you make the turn by the pizza joint you have the SMG ready to fire at the ballas." Pretty pathetic right? It got worse. At times we would skip class just we could be a mission. It gets worse.

After playing the game so much, I think we started thinking like the main character Carl Johnson (CJ). Homer and I would be walking outside and see a bike unchained and jokingly we would say something like "hey we should steal that, we'd get to class quicker." One time there was a armored truck parked outside Homer's house and we said to each other "bazooka would take that truck right out."

I'm telling you the game was obsessive. A lot of the missions interesting and exiting and others were just plain dumb and long. We discussed strategy during class. We inquired info from other fellow GTArs. More importantly we consulted the geniuses of the internet that had hints on beating the game.

Then came exam time. The hours spent studying decreased and the hours spent playing increased. I was hopping for a successful semester grade wise. It wasn't, but at least we conquered all of the Ballas (rival gang) territory, and we knew when to use the AK-47 and an SMG.

We talked about it during class, during lunch and online. How nerdy right? We had no control over this. It took over our lives and the only thing we wanted was for CJ to have his revenge against Ryder (Eazy E look a like) and save his brother Sweet.

Oh how sad it is. This reminds me of a funny story. Homer and I were talking about the game in the phone when I was home. Some background; CJ's girl in some scenes was this annoying ass Bitch name Catalina. She was bossy, bitchy and annoying, like most girls only she had a really annoying voice (just kidding ladies). Homer and I were talking about Catalina when my wife walks in and asks "who's Catalina." I didn't want to tell her who she was because she didn't know how much time we actually spent playing this game (I hope she doesn't read this post, otherwise I'm fucked). I tell her "Oh Homer met this chick at the bar, her name is Catalina and he liked her at first, but is now starting to annoy him." I describe Catalina just as she is in the game. She buys it, I'm home free.

The game took us into second semester of third year. Freakinrican will attest as to how often we talked about it and how annoying it was, and how nerdy we sounded.

It was a sad day when we completed the game. All the highfives were gone (we did this after completing every mission and getting "Respect") no more screaming "RIGHT ANALOG" (it took us a while to figure out what this was, but when we found out, we were unstoppable) and no more booty calls with Catalina. After the game was finished life didn't have much of an importance, we were left with nothing to accomplish. The neon lights in the street lost it's meaning, we didn't want to steal bikes or cars anymore, and we stopped scheming how to steal that armored truck. I miss those days

I think that is as much as I will bore you with the obsession of GTA. By the way, I did really bad that semester and the one after that, but by then I had a job lined up and didn't worry too much about it.

LONG LIVE CJ and GROVE STREET