Looking through the message boards on a recent Kotaku article someone posted a response that perfectly fits why I don't do MMOs anymore.

"WoW is like a marriage. You can't just jump in and play; you need to build and nurture the relationship to get the most out of it.

Thing is, I'm a games slut. I play as many as I can when they're hip and young, then leave them quietly in the morning and never call on them again."

Don't get me wrong Fallout 3 and I have a pretty good thing going. Really though in another month or two I'll probably be seeing Oblivion or Shattered Memories. Plus I'm already getting in some New Super Mario Brothers and Darkside Chronicles on the side.

It quite literally kills me not to be able to tell my players certain things about what's going on in the game. And I mean literally. My inability to tell them has manifested itself into a physical body and clubbed me over the head to feast on the goo within. I am dead right now as I type this. LITERALLY.

So a year after everyone else I'm getting to stay up way too late hooked on Fallout 3. Damn that's good stuff. Now I'm so very tired though, and I dreamed of VATS.

Lego Rock Band is just as awesome as I had hoped it would be. Having tasks you affect with the power of rock is just the coolest thing ever. It does suck that they only allow "family friendly songs, but it's still pretty damn fun. Also it wouldn't let us name our band Fuck-Kills so we had to settle for Fuk-Kilz with an umlaut on the u. Still, best Rock Band game to date, so fuking awesome.

Often times I hold to the fact that I was never meant for this world, it's too normal and boring for me. Then I see a movie like Paranormal Activity and it almost makes me glad I live in a world where nothing like that will ever happen. The poster said "guaranteed to give you nightmares", and I said as we went in I would hold them to that. After the movie I changed my mind, I wanted no nightmare associated with what I had just seen, I have enough sleep problems as it is. In the end I fell asleep with no problems, but waking up around 4 or 5 am it was more than a bit creepy listening to the wind, the branches scraping my window, someone walking around the house, and looking around my room in the dark. If you want a good movie to put you in that Halloween spirit, paranormal activity is the one. Starts off slow, but once it gets going it drags you in.

As a GM I think the two greatest words you can hear from your players is, "Oh....shit!"

I just had a horrible thought. What if, riding the cusp of this vampire wave, White Wolf decided to put out Vampire The Masquerade : Twilight Edition.

Bwahahahahahahahahaha!

So I painted my room to look Silent Hillish. Just thought I'd share the first batch of pics even though they were taken on a crappy camera.

( Sample Pic and link to others here! )

It only makes sense that through acquisition I remove temptation. Once I've acquired every console out there, there's nothing left I have to worry about tempting me right? So to that end I've bought a $300 paper weight and will be preordering a pink dsi. Dell had the new slim ps3 on sale and I ended up picking it up for $267 yesterday, and this month they release the pink dsi. If I get a new ds or dsi this month through amazon it comes with a free accessory or game. With the economy the way it is I really can't afford not to get two new game systems this month. That's just the way of it.

The good thing is I'm actually spending $200 less on bills in the new place with the roommates. I also just got approved for a temporary $1/hour pay raise at work for teaching some classes on utilizing library resources. These strange mystical forces have aligned in just such a way as to prevent the devastation of my bank account in these consumeristic times.

Cursed Mountain just shipped, Scribblenauts is preordered and barring some other awesome game sale in the near future the only other game I NEED this month is Dead Space Extraction.

Game On!

Only got 2-3 hours of sleep last night and I'm not sure why. I guess I was pretty wound up after all the fun. Did a bit of shopping in Albuquerque followed by a live rifftrax performance at the cottonwood mall that was absolutely hilarious. Afterwards we hit Quarters for some tasty bbq and four of us failed in our attempts to conquer Mount Meat. After that we stayed up until 2 playing Mario Kart Wii going through each course at least once. You'd figure I'd be dead tired after all that, but somehow my mind managed to keep me awake until sometime after 5am.

So now I'm dragging my feet at work just trying to survive the day, should of called in sick but really didn't want to waste a sick day on lack of sleep...I would run out of sick time in a month if I did that every time insomnia hit.

So in this week alone I've acquired 8 new games and have 3 more on order from gamefly. And you know I just have all the time in the world to play through them all. I know it's ridiculous to keep adding to this monstrous collection like this when the majority of my collection will probably just sit on the self never to be played, but for some reason I can't help it. Meh, what're ya gonna do?

Games this week.

Ninja Blade -360
Orange Box -360
Bomberman -360 I know this is gonna be bad but it was $5 so I gotta see the horribleness for myself.

Mad World -wii
Alien Syndrome -wii
We Cheer -wii

The World Ends with You -DS
Puzzle Kingdoms -DS

As it was foretold in lj posts of old I may be bringing myself one step closer to damnation. There are dark days coming and I must be prepared. While they have betrayed me in the past, perhaps it is time to reforge old alliances. Deep down I know there's no other choice, it must be all or nothing. So long as gamer blood marches through my veins like giant radioactive rubber pants. The pants COMMAND me! Do not deny my veins!

I'm just saying, $300 for a slim line ps3 is sounding pretty tasty. Which will also allow me to pick up Little Big Planet and Infamous...and that's really it. However, I'm pretty sure there's an exclusive survival horror or two coming down the line on PS3.

Did a lot of painting and a lot of moving to get into my new place over the weekend. My body is incredibly tired and sore, but it was all worth it as I got to spend my first night in my new bedroom last night.

Should be quite a bit cheaper here too, which leaves more money for games! Then again my actual backlog of games I want to buy has gotten pretty small. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not, but I suppose if I have extra cash lying around from cheaper rent and less games then I can save up to go visit the Silent Hill Haunted house in California.

http://kotaku.com/5333708/silent-hill-the-haunted-house-for-real

So I was thinking that from time to time it might be fun to do a budget game review. Every once in a while I can break out a game I picked up dirt cheap, play through most if not all of it and see if it was worth the small price I paid.

Arctic Tale
Nintendo Wii
$3.33

I picked up Arctic Tale for the Wii along with two other games from Hastings as a 3 for 9.99 special. This was actually a brand new title, not used so it seems like a pretty reasonable price right? Maybe if I had only payed .33 I wouldn't be quite so critical of this game.

Judging the game by it's cover, it looked like I'd get to play a polar bear and do the things that polar bears do. Not knowing a damn thing about polar bears I assumed this would mean mauling penguins, drinking Coca-Cola, and fucking other polar bears. Well it's also rated E for everyone so we can probably rule out the first and third of those options. Still there was some potential for refreshing beverages at the very least so I gave it a go.

So imagine your favorite sand box style game, like Grand Theft Auto or Prototype. Now imagine they took EVERYTHING out of your sand box. No buildings, no cars, no game play, just sand, and the lame mini game challenges everyone ignores in sand box games. Basically you as either a cub or adult polar bear are left to your own devices to wander the Arctic wastes. You know what's out there...water, snow, and ice...or realistically...just WATER! So you're surrounded by white barren landscape, occasionally you'll encounter other polar bears and near as I can figure, all polar bears are assholes. As soon as you get near one they attack you, unprovoked. On top of that you can't fight them back. You just have to stand there and take it, or run the fuck away. You'll also run across the occasional seal or seal carcass that you can "eat" and refill your health the asshole bears have bloodlessly gouged from your hide. Technically you hunt the seals as well, but by hunt I mean touch them and they disappear. Not the most realistic of nature sims, by far.

The barren wastes are also dotted with useless coins you can collect so you can up your health bar or unlock more useless minigames . Some of these mini games like to mix things up a bit and let you play an arctic fox, a walrus, or even an orca whale. However, they all play like something you might find online and play for free in your browser window. In fact the graphics for the game look like that as well. I have a feeling the developers of this game just went out and stole a bunch of arctic animal themed flash games to make this. You swim through rings, you dig up clams, and you go polar bear curling. Granted the real Olympic sport of curling could use some polar bears to liven things up, but it doesn't help make this game any more interesting.

Despite it's general lack of any real entertainment value I can say one positive thing about Arctic Tale. It's mind numbing lack of fun is cut short by it's lack of content. I beat the game in under 2 hours. Granted I didn't play through and beat every crappy little mini game with a gold medal. However, the entire game only has two stages and after beating a set number of minigames you are allowed to fight, The Final Battle and end the game. The final battle, also really the only battle, is you getting to push another bear off a cliff. After that they roll the credits and you can finally die a little inside at having wasted a few minutes of your life that may have been better put to use organizing a poaching expedition to the arctic to put real life polar bears out of the misery that consumes every waking moment of their lives.

I hadn't realized it's been almost a month since I posted to LJ. For not having a whole lot going on lately I guess I've been really busy...or really lazy, it's hard to say. Dawn was asking me what I'd been up to or if I had any plans for the summer last night and I realized there was nothing really. Am I that boring? I'm just so busy living in half a dozen other realities that I don't do all that much in this one.

I have actually been doing stuff, just nothing particularly worth shouting about on lj I guess. Head off to Albuquerque for movies and sushi with friends, having bbqs with friends, role playing with friends, and just playing lots of video games.

It doesn't help that my comp has been under repairs for a while now and while my mini laptop is great for checking email and lj it's not so great for typing. So whenever I have anything text heavy to do I have to get it done at work. Which means, well I'm also in the middle of working.

The Star Wars campaign I'm running really has me the busiest of all though. While I half ass a lot of rpgs I run, I typically use my whole ass for Star Wars games. Even though this campaign was meant to be short and kind of silly I've actually put a lot of work into it, not that anyone can tell I'm sure.

So you know how Yoda and Vader showed up in Soul Caliber IV? That's what this campaign is actually about. Chunks of Soul Edge broke through to the Star Wars Universe and made a rift on Dagobah between the worlds. Drawn to it Vader and Yoda have gone through this rift. The PCs in my game are now trying to figure out how to get them back to their own universe to preserve the time lines. Which reminds me I have to send my Jedi another dream sequence email.

Of course not all of them know the importance of preserving the time lines so there was a debate as to whether they should get involved in this or not. Which would have been interesting...up until the universe collapses in on itself.

So ummm, that's life...as it were.

...you know except maybe with strange eons.

A lot of people after having been absent online will open with "I'm not dead yet..." However, I died a long time ago, I've just been waiting for a zombie slayer badass enough to take me down.

So anyway, this is what I've been busy with lately.

http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/transcending-history

I started GMing a Star Wars campaign recently and I think it's been going pretty well. We have a rather eclectic group of loosely associated rebels on the path of something very strange. At first I wasn't sure I'd really use this obsidian portal website all that much, but after playing around with it a few days I'm completely hooked. I like being able to have an adventure log/wiki for my players to be able to go back to in order to review what happened from session to session. Being able to put more info about my NPCs is also pretty sweet as they all generally have more going on for them than what may have been revealed in game. There have been other games I've run that years later a friend will bring up a story from and I realize I'd completely forgotten about it, hopefully this will let me keep better track of all those crazy gaming stories.

Also it turns out that buying the psp may have been a bad idea. Don't get me wrong, it's a nice little system and all. It's just the game selection that's making me rethink why did I buy this. As it turns out besides Silent Hill Origins there really aren't any survival horror games for the psp. Even DS has a bigger selection of horror than psp. So I'm really having to scrap the bottom of the gaming barrel to find stuff I want to buy and play on it. Here's to hoping capcom makes good on their promise of an exclusive psp Resident Evil so I can justify the $120.

I've done a terrible thing. I mean, everyone has a price right? Eventually I knew this would happen. You just have to swallow your pride sometimes and give in. I only have so much willpower, I fought this as long as I could. It's just...it's been over a year, and I really needed this. The money was just too good.

.

.

.

.

.

Slimline PSP 2000 for $120 from Dell, shipping included. I'll hate myself later.

It's so good to be back home. Fuck, I'm tired.

Dominic Deegan panel was all kinds of awesome. Mookie was incredibly funny and had amazing energy. He made some very good points about charcters too. I just bought lots of dice today. Saw my brother again and look forward to maybe just staying with him next year. So exhausted...

Attended a Gore/makeup fx panel by Samantha Inoue-Hart and she has to be the coolest Makeup artist in the business. It was both informative and highly entertaining. I also blew my so called 'budget' for the day, but that was to be expected. Also didn't realize my brother lived so close to Dallas. We got together for dinner and had a lot of fun catching up as we hadn't seen each other in a couple of years.

Too much cool stuff to buy and not nearly enough money to get it all. *sigh*

12 hours of driving but we made it in time to register for the con tonight instead of having to wade through the endless lines tomorrow. It's nice that at 8pm no one was really trying to register but us so it was in and out and then into the hotel.

Bed is nice, bed is not car. I sleep now!