A day of sadness made better through Metal Gear.

For the past five years my birthday has been a terrible time for me. I associate my birthday with bad happenings instead of good and I try to hide away from people so that I can be by myself and not have any chance of something terrible happening. Between girlfriends breaking up with me, friends backstabbing me, or just general bad luck such as heading to work and getting splashed by a muddy puddle during the walk and having to cancel my shift... My birthday is synonymous with trouble!

Last year however was different. I booked the day off and told my room mate to go somewhere else for the night. He had grown quite accustomed and aware to how depressed I get on my birthday but he unwillingly agreed because he'd known me for three years prior and knew it was a twenty four hour period I needed to myself.

So there I was sitting in my living room, playing my PSP by myself, content with my day, knocking back some rum while I played Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker. I had just completed the game on solo the night before so I decided to take on the insane challenges after the main story online through Ad-Hoc party. I joined a four player co-op game and had a grand old time playing four or five missions with three other team mates. Nothing could stop us! We were destroying everything! In between missions we'd sit and plan what we were going to tackle next and chat amongst each other through the PS3's chat window. I humbly told the players it was my birthday and it was great to be a part of such a great team with my first online experience, they all said Happy Birthday back through the chat window which almost felt robotic and customary but a good thought nonetheless.

We played another mission and we completed it with ease... Something odd happened this time. The load time for my game was taking a lot longer after the mission and I was losing patience with my PSP. I thought it was my connection at first until the screen lit up and a midi file came up in my game and sang an 8-bit version of the Happy Birthday song to me. I then had received three gift boxes in the game from the three users I was playing alongside with that are not so easy to get.

I was ecstatic! I didn't know this game had the capability to do something like this but my three team members knew about it and utilized it! It actually put me in a very happy mood too! Call me a loser but it was exactly what I needed to see: three random people sacrificing good items and swag to a person that had played six missions with them just because it was my birthday.

Gaming is incredible and full of surprises at times. I was thankful for this day and it made me love this game even more. Thank you for reading.