Note: Narutimate Hero is a VS type game, like Street Fighter/Mortal Kombat. You pick your char and fight all the other characters to beat the game.

I was talking about Naruto today and it got me thinking about this one weekend where Mark, Vince, Zena and I stayed up all night playing Narutimate Hero 1 (PS2). My parents were out of town and Mark came to Toronto to chill for the weekend. We called up Vince and just hung out at my place. I don’t remember when we started playing. There are only 13 or so characters to unlock and you have to beat the game 9+ times or so to get them all. As we unlocked 1 or 2 characters, we kept wanting to play more and get more characters unlocked. So that’s what we did….we played all night, the 4 of us, switching turns and playing through all the characters…defeating enemies over and over. Soon it became midnight…then 2…then 5…and 8…and then 10am. All 4 of us stayed up playing the same game for over 10 hours…after which we ended the night (or morning) just before noon with our trademark McDonald’s runs, just like how we used to do it in Waterloo. I popped in Narutimate Hero 3 (PS2) and Narutimate Hero Accel 2 (PS2) just now…sadly, the visuals don’t carry over to an HDTV very well, everything was very…non anti-alias (jagged).

Anyways, these Narutimate Hero games always make me remember this night and the fun I had. I know the night doesn’t sound too special…but those were good times, good friends, good memories.