John Zeitler

Looking at me, many people assume I’m either younger or older than I am. When I say I’m 29, people look at me incredulously. The problem is, though, that the aphorism “Age is just a number” is a total lie. I’m almost thirty. Most days I still feel like a little kid, but sometimes I start to feel the weight of that “mere number”.

Case in point. Last night, after getting everything taken care of for the next morning, I decided that I wanted to play a little bit of a game to unwind. I started playing around 7:30p, and I selected a puzzle game on the Xbox Live Arcade– Yosumin Live, which got some mediocre reviews but is still an engaging game (I strongly recommend waiting until it becomes a Deal of the Week title, and also getting the $1 Adventure Mode DLC). My first goal was to grab one of the more interesting achievements: clear a stage in under 8 seconds. After managing that, though, I decided to keep going as it was only 8p or so and I was still a little wired. So I kept playing through the “Endless” mode, since there are achievements for reaching 100 million points and for completing Stage 50.

This was both a good and bad idea. It was good because I wasn’t aware that the score achievement was cumulative (the description doesn’t say so), so I got that somewhere around Stage 40. It was bad because I got to Stage 40 around 11:00 and didn’t stop then. I knew I should have stopped. I even saw the clock, and said out loud, “I should be in bed.” But I didn’t stop. I reached Stage 50 around 11:45. Fatigue really had started to set in, though, and even though I banged my head against it for about half an hour longer, I could not clear that last stage (even though I got a luck-based achievement during the course of that assault). It should be noted that the requirements to clear that stage were far beyond Stage 49′s requirements (49: “Clear 10 square sets, and a total of 600 pieces”; 50: “Clear the entire board four times and a total of one thousand pieces”). And I came within 32 pieces of finishing before time ran out on my best run. I’ve learned a few tricks since then, though, so I should be able to get through it the next time I give it a try.

Which would be a Friday night, or sometime when I don’t need to be awake in the morning.