Extra Life Results!
Last Saturday was Extra Life, where I played games for 24 hours to raise money for The Children’s Hospital Foundation of Manitoba. My goal in the days before was to raise $200 and I not only reached that goal, but greatly surpassed it by receiving $550 in donations! I did not expect my coworkers and family to be so generous so it was very heartwarming to see. I also knew that I definitely had to make it through the whole 24 hours now. I can remember only one other time in my life when I managed to stay up that long so I knew it would not be easy. Between my excitement and other thoughts going through my head, I ended up awake at 5:30am after about 6 hours of sleep, so I knew this was going to be extra rough.
I started with 2 hours of Wurm Online, because as much as I like that game, “exciting” is not a word I would use to describe it. And I knew that I would need something pretty enthralling in the last hours of the game-a-thon. Then I spent a good chunk of time in Planet Explorers, trying out the adventure mode for the first time. It was a lot of fun, even if there were still bugs like the map not rendering at all. I got as far as building myself a helicopter and the start of a colony before switching to Fallout 3. The last time I had tried it was over a year ago so I decided to start anew. Only it kept randomly freezing on me so I took a break from trying to troubleshoot it to go play Rockband with my brother. After my voice wore out (I can’t play any instruments, only sing), it was some more Fallout before it froze yet again. I tried to play Trove for a little while then but by this time, I was getting rather tired and it wasn’t enough to keep me awake. So on I moved to Banished. I was going for the Uneducated (300 pop. with no schools) and Isolationist (300 pop. with no traders) achievements, which was going splendidly until I made the mistake of running out of food, causing some of my citizens to die of starvation. It became this vicious cycle of people dying and leaving their houses empty, which other citizens would move into and have children…so there were even more mouths to feed and not enough food to go around. It wasn’t pretty, let’s just say that. So out of frustration, I moved onto The Sims Medieval. Big mistake. While a great game, it’s also not exactly riveting and the last few hours until 8am Sunday were very VERY hard. I kept gazing longingly at my comfy bed with its fuzzy blanket and thinking how wonderful it would be to lay down for just a few minutes…but I knew I would just fall asleep right there if I did.
So I managed to just crawl over the finish line before I climbed drowsily into bed and finally slept. It was hard but I kept reminding myself it was For The Kids and that some of them go through things that are much worse than staying up for 24 hours. Overall, I had a lot of fun and the donations I received were worth it. I’m planning to do it all again next year because it’s just too awesome an event to pass up again.
I tried to take screenshots every hour and post them on Twitter but that kind of petered off in the end. Here’s the ones I did remember to get though:
And last but not least, I’d like to thank all of the people who donated to me and others, and congratulations to all of the Extra-Lifers who gamed for a great cause (and raised over 5.5 million dollars!) You all rock! 🙂