this is the second in a series I'm doing on games I played growing up

My very first PC ran Windows 95 and was a gift from a woman my mother cleaned houses for. This woman was very rich, and thusly she often gave me great presents such as this desktop computer. One of the first games I ever remember playing on this desktop, and likely one of the first games I really remember playing period, was Oregon Trail 2.

A sequel to the original game, Oregon Trail 2 is a significantly more impressive title, boasting a much more immersive pseudo 3D world, a realistic hunting minigame (that I must have spent hours in, despite my love of animals) and repetitive and thusly comforting gameplay. If you've played one "trail" game, you've played them all, so I don't really feel the need to explain how Oregon Trail 2 works because it's basically Oregon Trail but with newer features, textures and massive graphical improvements.

I can remember spending whole days in my bedroom, the lights off, rain hitting my window as I submerged myself into the then graphically amazing world of Oregon Trail 2, hoping, as anyone else likely would, to make it to Oregon with little to no casualties in my midst. And while Oregon Trail 2 was a fun game because it was actually a genuinely good game that, in my opinion, holds up even by todays standards, there was a whole other reason to why I loved it, and that was the chance for escape.

Oregon Trail 2 - in fact the series in general - is all about traveling to somewhere new for a better life. And while I hate travel and would prefer to live in one place my entire life, I certainly didn't want that one place to be the house I grew up in. I yearned for freedom. Freedom from tyrannical parents, freedom from abusive step-siblings and freedom from a life that, quite frankly, wasn't one I cared much about keeping. Oregon Trail offered me that escapism, it offered me the chance to run as far away as possible from a life that offered me nothing but emptiness to a life that offered me grand possibilities of a future. Maybe this only hits home if you were like me, an abused closeted mentally challenged girl, but the metaphor works, so I'm sticking with it.

Despite Oregon Trail 2 having a lot to do with relying solely on yourself for your survival, I've never really managed to get that part down, sadly. I'm 31 years old, I don't have a bank account, I don't have a current ID, I have never had a "real" job and I can't manage to live on my own and be independent. But...that doesn't mean I failed at the idea of creating a community - a wagon train if you will - full of people like me who will look out for me and help me if I need it. Between the friends I've made online and my longtime girlfriend, I feel fairly secure with where I am and certainly don't live in abject terror like I once did as a child. Sure, I don't go out and hunt down hundreds of pounds of Buffalo, but really, that's for the better. Nobody should be doing that.

Oregon Trail 2 is a weird game because it's a direct sequel to a game in a franchise that doesn't feature any actual recurring characters or cast, and its so vastly different in so many ways from the game that came before it that it makes you wonder why they made a sequel to it to begin with. But either way, it's a definite step up, production wise, and leave it to something as generic as Oregon Trail 2 to make some sort of meaningful impact on my life, but it did.

I can remember the first time I made it to Oregon.

I can remember the feeling of accomplishment after starving, after getting bitten by snakes, after having my wagons turn over in rivers, of finally reaching my destination and feeling like I somehow managed the impossible. I overcame the odds and escaped my horrid little humdrum life for a better tomorrow.

And I promised myself I'd do the same in my real life one day, and I'm glad to say that, while things are far from perfect, I certainly am in a better place now than I ever was before.