Last night I had my annual/semi-annual gathering with Jaime, Laura, and Becca. We ate at Maido on Frankfort avenue, and it was AWESOME. Among the generic hibachi grills/sushi bars, it is the only “for-real” Japanese restaurant in Louisville. A little pricey, but for the amount and quality of food you get it is well worth it. I’ll be dragging people there for dinner on my visits home for quite some time now, I suppose.

We then went back to my house for a night of video game fun. We eventually played a bit of DDR, then decided to be innovative and attempt to play other games using the DDR pads as controllers.

Crash Team Racing worked very well. You could sit on the mat and hold your foot on the accelerate button, using left and right to steer and easily punching the fire button when you needed to. The difficulty came in the lack of the R1 and R2 button, so no secret hopping-over-ledges-to-get-a-boost and such.

Spyro the Dragon proved to be much more difficult. One person breathed fire, one person charged, on jumped/flew, and the other steered. Steering was really the most difficult part, and we often rotated positions to give the steerer at hand a break. We managed to clear the first world, though it took some time to do it. It is definitely something people need to do as teamwork activities at those terrible business retreats.

Lastly, we attempted Soul Caliber II. That mostly involved 2 people flailing and beating the DDR pads like the ape people in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But if you think DDR is good exercise…

All in all, it was a very fun evening. I’m mostly glad that I still see some highschool friends on a regular basis (even though it may turn out to be only as regular as once a year), it’s always a joy to gather again.