Pumping Irony

My Year in Gaming

2009 was, to a degree, a rough patch in gaming for me. I started the year off with Mines of Moria then decided I was due for a total MMO break, which lasted four months, where I mostly got some quality Guild Wars action going with the new guild and alliance there, and just some PvMP in LOTRO. A couple months and burnout set in again and I’ve actually been on MMO break the rest of the year other than a few quick stops in LOTRO and a few weeks with Age of Conan before my PC went on the fritz. I actually intended on restarting LOTRO a month or two ago but the whole PC thing put the kibosh on that.

Luckily, my 360 came through and man, oh man was 2009 ever the time for major high-quality console games! Some of my absolute favorites from this year are Batman: Arkham Asylum, Borderlands, Dragon Age: Origins, and The Saboteur but it doesn’t take but a quick check at my Gamertag profile to see the huge list of games that saw a lot of playtime this year. I’m semi-tempted to add Modern Warfare 2 to the list but I’m still undecided on that one. I can at least admit to having some fun with the multiplayer even though I typically can’t take it for more than 20 or 30 minutes at a time.

For next year I actually hope the release cycle slows down. I haven’t been keeping tabs on the games for 2010 at all since I bought so many this year that I haven’t finished yet. All I know is Mass Effect 2 is soon and Bad Company 2 in March. Otherwise I hope to get back into MMO’s this year; primarily LOTRO with some GW and perhaps AoC on the side. I might — might — finally shut the hell up and actually give EVE a brief shot. Undecided though. I’ve seen it being played and it didn’t strike me as anything I’d enjoy actually playing myself. As I write this, I am hard-pressed to think of a single upcoming MMO that I’m looking forward to, however. Guild Wars 2 doesn’t count since that will be a 2011 game. Possibly Black Prophecy, mostly because I have a sinking feeling that Jumpgate Evolution will end up being WoW in Space with circle-jerk combat. Frankly, Black Prophecy might be a circle-jerk game too, I really don’t know enough about it yet but it’s from the guys who made Neocron — a cool, though flawed as hell, first-person cyberpunk MMO — and the little I’ve seen gives it more of a “darker” feel than JGE, which I think I’d enjoy more. Every other MMO that comes to mind is just another Diku-MMO with yet another pretty, fluffy layer add onto all the layers already devised over the past 5+ years to mask the rotten stench of the broken Diku core.

Honestly, at this point being mostly away from MMO’s it’s been very refreshing to be able to just enjoy gaming without being so genre- and platform-elitist. If I’d sequestered myself in my man-cave with the PC limiting myself to MMO’s — which themselves are extremely limited as games just for the sake of having all those players per server — I would have missed out on some wonderful experiences elsewhere. I suspect most of you could give a crap when I blog about non-MMO games but I always hold that little vestige of hope that if you bother to read my posts, you’re a little more open-minded and not so dead-set on MMO-way or the Highway.

The Best of Intentions

We’d planned on my girlfriend coming to my overnight in Newport News for New Year’s Eve. Everything looked good, I had her listed round-trip all the way here and home again. Then today arrives with bad weather along the East Coast and especially in the Northeast. Flights to Newport News and Norfolk were delayed and downsized so that filled everything up and left no room for non-rev standby passengers so she ended up flying back home after several hours trying. She’s never come on any of my trips or even a single overnight during a trip with me, so I was looking forward to seeing her and spending the night with her for a change. Not to mention it’s a holiday and I very rarely manage to get a holiday off or see family or friends. But just that she was willing to fly up to our hub and put up with all the hassles and passengers — though I must say that New Years’ passengers are much nicer than Christmas passengers; those people are downright evil and retarded — just to end up flying right back home, means a lot to me. I arrived shortly before she headed to her flight home so I at least got to see her for a few minutes, which made my day. No, that made my whole trip! December’s schedule has been rough and I’ve been more exhausted, on edge and moody than usual as a result but today after seeing her smile and sneaking a quick kiss wishing her well as I left for my next flight, everything was ok in my little world for awhile. Happy New Year, I love ya babe!

You, Me, and PI.net

First and foremost, I want to express my heartfelt appreciation and gratitude to those of you who still stop by or have kept this blog in your RSS reader despite a very obvious decline in my writing. So many of us get on our ADHD high-horses and delete any blog that doesn’t update every couple days, minimum, so those of you who have kept me in your feed list, just know that holds meaning to me.

Obviously I decided to keep the server running. I was all but decided on shutting it down, even if it were temporary, but I simply didn’t have the time to handle backing up the blog, images, etc. so it was easier to just shell out the $100 than to lose it all like happened with my previous blog. Offhand, I don’t necessarily know that I plan to increase the number of posts per month, but we’ll see what happens. But I do plan on continuing my pattern of console and PC gaming; MMO and “real” video games. So I hope you’re all ok with that!

I hope you’ve all had a wonderful holiday season so far, and that you’re having a great New Year’s Eve tonight. I look forward to beginning not only the new year but the next decade in the 21st century.

Besides, this is the year we finally get to make contact with those Monoliths before they turn Jupiter supernova and tell us to colonize all its moons except Europa, right? Right?

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 31st, 2009 at 11:30 pm and is filed under Whatever. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.