Best I can remember, I started playing Zack & Wiki with my girlfriend about two and a half years ago as an attempt to introduce videogames into our relationship. The game itself is marvelous and one of the hidden gems of the Wii library. It's essentially a single-player game, so two player involvement requires a bit of patience and a willingness to give up control, but the experience is what you make it. We had a lot of fun puzzling our way through the early portions of the game, but the last couple levels are downright fiendish and stumped us. As we counted down our last few months together (we were about to part ways and move to our respective residency programs, half-way across the country from each other), videogames moved to the backburner and Zack & Wiki became a distant memory.

Since that time, we've had other adventures; we've butt-stomped our way through Wario, unraveled the imaginative world of Kirby, and shaken our booties to the beats of Dance Central, but never finished Zack & Wiki. Fast forward to March of 2013, my girlfriend is now my fiancée, we are entrenched in our residency programs and working 80+ hours a week, we are about as far apart geographically as possible (fully across the country instead of half-way), and we have nearly an entire week together. We started our vacation with our usual date-night dinners, romantic walks, and trips to the city, yet inexplicably, our conversation turned to a silly little game that we never quite finished. We are different people now--our jobs, our goals, our lives--are unrecognizable to those who have not known us for years. Even so, cuddling up on the couch and laughing at the most inane solutions our warped minds can conceive is as enjoyable as ever.

Our previous save was created on Jan 11, 2011. We graduated medical school on June 12, 2011. We finished intern year on June 30, 2012. She said "Yes!" on February 9, 2013. We finished Zack & Wiki on Mar 30, 2013, exactly 809 days after our previous attempt.

Maybe it's not a landmark event that should be included in the above list of life accomplishments, but it means more than the simple sentence conveys. The number of holdovers from our care-free days of youth is dwindling daily. It's a sad, yet exciting thought because it means things are changing, and change is scary. We don't know what our next adventure will be, but it will surely take us across space and time and life, and that's good enough for me.

-n