Nick was probably one of the biggest reasons I didn’t fully lose my mind when I was living at home.
Two hours wasn’t that far apart, but I wasn’t seeing him every day like I had in college. We’d spend hours after work, in the dead of Ohio winter, at Bryan’s apartment, blasting Hot Chip, ashing cigarettes into empty (or sometimes, by accident, half-full) beer cans, and playing the trashiest indie games that Bryan could find on Xbox Live- Maids with Balloons and Try Not to Fart were our usual go-tos, though sometimes we’d put on Techno Kitten Adventure or Rez, depending on if one of us had weed.Īt the same time, one of my other best friends, Nick, had moved to Columbus with his girlfriend. Bryan and Mason had been friends before I met them, and I spent the first few months hanging out with them simply worrying if I was fitting in and why the hell these guys wanted to hang out with a nerd like me in the first place.īut we did have several things in common, namely that we all smoked cigarettes, drank a lot, and loved getting high and playing video games.
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An academic nerd, I’d never had friends like Bryan and Mason, who I saw as free spirits in that sort of rundown, hardscrabble, Rust Belt way. One was a former skater kid who was taking a break from school at the moment, and the other was an aspiring writer like myself who dropped out of pre-law and was trying to figure out what the hell to do with his life.
The difference was that I’d met two guys from the Caribou in Macedonia who happened to transfer to the Caribou in Akron around the same time that I had. I was keeping busy with school, but I was still drinking way too much and getting high, and I was still playing a ton of video games. Sure, I had my own apartment, but I was still working at Caribou when I wasn’t in school or tutoring undergrads. Of course, I was wrong.Īfter moving to Akron, little about my life changed. I was horribly depressed, so I thought that going to grad school 45 minutes away in Akron would help. The year or so I’d taken off of school, I’d moved back in with my parents and was working at a Caribou Coffee in my hometown of Solon, Ohio, a half-hour drive from Cleveland, getting high with my coworker behind the dumpster and drinking too much in my off-hours.
I was 23 when Bad Company 2 launched in 2010-a year and a half out of college and in my first year of grad school. But a decade is a long time, and some things can’t help but change. Bad Company 2 might be rough around the edges when compared to more contemporary shooters, but at its core, it’s still as good as it ever was. After having uninstalled Battlefield V in the most melodramatic fashion possible, I recently returned to the game that started my decade-long affair with the franchise, fully expecting to confront my own rose-tinted nostalgia.Īs it turns out, you can go home again.
Maybe, just maybe, if you can recapture the magic of those times, the future might look brighter.īattlefield: Bad Company 2 turns 10 years old today, at a time when the franchise is seemingly at one of its lowest points. When the present isn’t looking too great, and the future is uncertain, it’s only natural to look back on the good old days and wonder what made them so special.