DS Lunch

Depending on who you are or how long you've been reading this blog, you may or may not know what the title signifies.

A FEW NERDY ENGINEERS GET TOGETHER TO PLAY NINTENDO DS OVER LUNCH AND TALK ABOUT VIDEO GAMES. I STARTED THIS BLOG THINKING WE'D ALL POST TO IT. BUT NOW IT'S PRETTY MUCH JUST "DAVE'S PLACE TO POST ABOUT GAMES."

That's how it started, of course. But it's sort of turned into my creative space to talk about something that I care about while emulating the style of some people that I admire. Lately I seem to have gotten in a rhythm of doing a quick recap of the game I just finished from GameFly. Maybe I feel some kind of need to justify the subscription cost in addition to playing the games? Anyway, I thought it might be fun to walk you through a typical day of a real DS Lunch. I don't even remember exactly how or when it started, but it's been going on for probably five years.

Every Wednesday, it starts by me remembering to bring both my DS and my lunch to work with me in the morning. Then at noon, we meet in a conference room, eat our lunches, talk about games we've been playing at home in the last week, and play DS. Typically it's about four or five of us (mostly engineers) but we've had as many as 8, which means all human opponents and no brain-dead CPU players in Mario Kart. Ninety five percent of the time the unspoken choice is Mario Kart. There have been a few other games that we try out, Tetris or Bomberman sometimes, but we always come back to Kart racing.

It's a rare game that has the perfect blend of skill, luck, and fun. It does lots of things right. I'm not gonna tell you that the DS version is perfect, far from it. Just today we were saying that the next version really needs to have a replay feature. Some crazy, improbable stuff happens when you have several people all out to get each other.

We do a lot of yelling at each other. Celebrating last second wins. Banging our heads against the walls because of last second defeats. For all of the people that schedule meetings in conference rooms nearby over lunch, or have offices nearby...I'm sorry. Well, not that sorry. We do keep meeting every week.