Purchases This Week
Some Gold to spend in Tribes:Ascend
And I switched my Dragon’s Dogma pre-order from 360 to PS3
Oh, and I bought the current Humble Bundle for $15

Played This Week
It’s been the kind of week where last weekend feels like it was years ago. I vaguely recollect playing Tribes:Ascend and enjoying it in limited doses. 2-3 matches is all I can take before I have to go do something more relaxing…I get really worked up playing that game! LOL.

I also got my first taste of Diablo III last weekend after I finally took advantage of the beta invite I got in November. As I feared, it played hell with the RSI issues I have in my wrist. But I enjoyed it. So much so that I’m considering just wearing a wrist brace and playing it, but that sounds really self-destructive.

I continue to plug away at Legend of Grimrock but honestly these online games have their hooks in me again. I managed 3 hours of it though. I was switching between Tribes and Grimrock Friday night and Saturday.

Sunday night I popped back into Guild Wars with the hope of adding to my HoM points. After I whined here I got some fresh advice from Jazz and Scott and played some more. My new goal is gearing up in order to make Eye of the North less brutal. Raptr says I played for 7 hours this week.

Then Dusty and Arislyn lured a few of us into trying the free-to-play version of Aion. I just got my wings when I got distracted AGAIN.

Last, the open beta of Tera. Raptr isn’t tracking it yet but I played until much too late last night.

Plans for the Week to Come
My plans never really pan out, do they? As of today I intend to play Tera over the weekend while the beta is going (our characters will roll over into launch so this isn’t ‘lost’ time) and then hopefully back to Guild Wars. On Tuesday the demo for Dragon’s Dogma comes out and I’ll be taking that for a spin. Otherwise…who knows? I’d like to dip back into Tribes before my slightly-angry skillz atrophy, though. (Get it? Instead of mad skillz I have slightly-angry skills…oh, never mind.)

It’s a crazy spring for MMOs. Diablo 3 (not an MMO, I know, but seems to be a game lots of MMO players are interested in) and Tera have open beta weekends this weekend. Guild Wars 2 has a beta weekend next weekend. Tera launches on May 1 and Diablo 3 on May 15th and The Secret World beta weekends have to start really soon given that game launches in June.

Busy busy busy!

Short version: PAX was crowded and noisy and good for my soul. I was considering ditching the whole thing but Angela really wanted to go, and I’m really glad she didn’t let me follow my melancholy. I came back from the show with my love of gaming totally re-energized. Now the melancholy I’m feeling is from wanting to be back among my people!

The highlight of the show was, once again, the Tweetup. For me, it’s really the only time of the year I can sit around with serious gamers and just ‘talk shop’ for a few solid hours. We arrived at about 8:15 pm and packed it in at 2 am. My only regret is that I didn’t do a better job of mingling at it. @creeptheprophet & @grimnir_ are both people I’ve ‘known’ from afar on social networks, both were there, and other than hello and goodbye I didn’t spend time talking to either of them. I was always too engrossed in the conversation immediately around me. Maybe next year we need to set up the Tweetup like a Speed Dating Event!

Anyway, my apologies to everyone who was there that I didn’t talk to. It was definitely my loss.

Anyway, I’m back-logged on post ideas but I’m also back-logged on the day job, so I’ll do my best to get caught up. I jumped on a new Kickstarter project while waiting in line for a PAX Panel, and there’s a new project coming out today I want to talk about. Been playing some games, both old and new… lots going on, so stay tuned!

Oh, almost forgot. Turns out my phone with digital zoom is a terrible device for taking pics of fast-moving gameplay so very few of my shots are worth looking at, but Angela had a real camera, so check out her photo gallery from the show.

Purchases This Week
Steam had a Dungeon Siege bundle on sale for about $10 in the middle of the week. i’d wanted a digital copy of Dungeon Siege and for some reason it isn’t available as a stand-alone so I grabbed the bundle. It included DS I, II & III plus the Treasures of the Sun DLC.

Played This Week
Suddenly I was into SWTOR again, spending 8:23 playing it (according to Raptr). I wrote about finally unlocking my Legacy but since then I haven’t been back. I also spent an hour or so in Kingdoms of Amalur:Reckoning and about the same in The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky.

I also spent an evening messing around in Browser Quest and checked out a demo of an indie called Cell:Emergence, which I frankly didn’t understand. After I’d uninstalled and deleted the demo, I stumbled on a video that explained the game somewhat but by then I’d moved on.

Plans For The Week To Come
Well, I’ve got a social thing to go to tomorrow, and next Friday PAX East begins, so my gaming this coming week will all happen Sunday-Wednesday, which means I doubt I’ll do very much. I’ve thinned my list down a bit, putting a few things on the back burner. Here’s my new list:

• SWTOR (I can play alts again!)
• KOA:Reckoning
• Vessel
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky
• Mass Effect 1

Have a great weekend, everyone, and maybe I’ll see some of you at PAX!

Purchases This Week
I picked up 4 new games this week, three of them due to sales.

Amazon had a $5 BOGO deal on Ubisoft PC titles last weekend so I got The Settlers: Rise of an Empire Gold Edition and Call of Juarez 2: Bound in Blood both for $5.

Steam had a daily deal for Spellforce 2: Gold Edition for $3.74 so I snagged that.

Finally, I bought Ys: The Oath of Felghana from Steam for full price ($14.99) just to send a message to the developer to please keep localizing these kinds of titles for PC!

Played This Week
Minecraft snuck up and sunk it’s fangs back into me this week due to the discovery of Minefold which I wrote about at ITworld. It was my most-played game this week, but I wasn’t tracking in on Rapt over the weekend. I’m guessing I spent 10 hours playing it, at least.

I finished Journey earlier this week, and wrote about it here at Dragonchasers.

I’ve been spending my lunch hours playing The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, a PSP game I’m playing on the Vita. I guess I’ve squeezed in 3 hours or so on that. Still very early in the game but I’m really enjoying this old-school turn-based RPG a lot.

I also put 3 hours into Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, an hour into Vessel and half an hour into Star Trek Online. [Sadly, once again my brain has emptied of any and all knowledge of how to play STO.]

Plans For The Week To Come
At this point my ‘playlist’ is way too long. I need to start finishing some games before I start any new ones. But here’re the games in rotation at the moment:

• SWTOR (still have some time left in my sub)
• Star Trek Online
• Minecraft
• KOA:Reckoning
• Vessel
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky
• Mass Effect 1
• Uncharted: The Golden Abyss

Yeah, clearly I’m trying to play WAY too many games at once!

The Chase from Philippe Gamer on Vimeo.

Lately though, I just can’t seem to get along with anyone, with the end result being that more and more often I stepped away from the computer either angry or depressed or disappointed. When things get to that stage, what’s the point in engaging, right? And unless the entire world has suddenly changed (not likely) the problem is with me, not them/you.

On the plus side (no pun intended) I’ll get back the hours I spent every day chatting with people over there. The trick will be putting those hours to good use.

And yet… already I’ve seen 3 or 4 things online that I just wanted to share with SOMEONE. Like “This is so awesome..I NEED to show it to someone!” But on the other, other hand, recently things I’ve shared mostly get a snarky response from my connections.

But here.. this is my blog! I can share whatever I want to share. And you can feel free to remove me from your RSS feed if I’m bugging you. I’m going to turn comments off since otherwise I’ll just be moving the frustrating discussions from G+ to here, but hopefully some of the stuff I share will be of interest to some of you.

I suppose this is what Tumblr is for, isn’t it? Well, no sense in me creating a Tumblr account since, knowing myself, I’ll move on to a different project in a week.

Anyway… here’s my first share. Birdman finally flies. This is pretty damned incredible.

[EDIT: Turns out this whole project was a big fake...I wanted to believe in spite of the naysayers! Oh well...]

I moved this blog to a new ISP today. If you’re seeing this post, you’re seeing the site at its new home.

I’m sure -something- got broken, so if you notice any bugs, I’d appreciate it if you left a comment.

So I’ve kind of organically slid into a break from MMOs. I’m down to logging into Rift about once every two weeks at this point, generally with Angela who is still dabbling. Otherwise I’ve been playing single-player games.

I wasn’t sure why I’ve stopped being excited by MMOs, really, which lead to some introspection. What is it I’m looking for from my games? I think the answer to that question changes constantly, but here’s what I came up with right now.

Progress. There’re two levels of progress that I enjoy. The first is in-game. Advancing to a new zone, reaching a new level, learning a new skill. Basically ticking off a checkbox from a list. I think that’s a basic ‘itch’ in a lot of people; I’ve known folks who’ll go back and add ‘interrupt-driven tasks’ to their To-Do list after they’ve been completed, just so that they could then check them off.

I’ve had this itch since I was a kid, really. Before there were video games or personal computers, I’d undergo weird projects like re-typing a dictionary or a volume of an encyclopedia. Why? Well, clearly I was a crazy child, and loved the satisfaction of finishing a letter or whatever (in theory…I never got very far on these projects). Plus any excuse to use such a cool gadget as a typewriter…

The bigger Progress is finishing stuff. I love the feeling of satisfaction I get from finishing a game (or a book). I don’t (in the case of games) do this very often. I’m very ADD when it comes to games; my interests are extremely broad and my time is fairly limited. I literally don’t have time to play even a fraction of the games I’m interested in. But in a single player game, the possibility, at least, exists. You can certainly be ‘done with’ an MMO but you’re never going to see those closing credits, right?

The second thing I’m looking for is Narrative, or story. As has been pointed out by many people, a mediocre single player storyline is generally better than the best MMO stories, just because the world can morph and change to support the story and that one character who the story revolves around. MMOs have lore, but not a lot of story. This, at least, is true until you get to higher levels; I’ve heard about some pretty interesting storylines that happen in dungeons in some MMOs.

But I never get to dungeons since I play solo, so all the content in the dungeons of MMOs, which is often the best content (from what I read, anyway), may as well not exist as far as I’m concerned.

And that’s another issue. I’m a single-player gamer. I always have been. Again, going back to the days before video games, I used paper & cardboard chit wargames as a place to escape to in the way a lot of unhappy kids escape into books (I did some of that, too). I always preferred tactical games because I’d have stories in my head about the various units. Essentially I translated the make-believe games little kids perform with plastic army men into more elaborate make-believes stories about soldiers involved in house-to-house fighting in WWII, or the captains of tall ships sailing under Nelson’s flag. I was role-playing before there were role-playing games, I guess.

Here at the other end of my life, I’m reverting to the same kind of thing, in a more adult manner. After a long day of work and chores and work, I’m really enjoying slipping into someone else’s skin via playing a single player game. I *can* do that, to a certain extent, in an MMO, but it isn’t as peaceful. I always have people jarring me out of my reverie via just being people, y’know? (This is also one of the great strengths of MMOs; it’s all about context and what you need.) For the same reason, I have zero interest in playing non-MMO multiplayer games, even though when I hear twitter friends talking about their gaming sessions I feel a bit envious because it does sound like they’re having fun.

I generally get around to gaming time about 10 pm, though, and by then I’m feeling pressed for time so don’t want to have to fiddle about, and I’m sick and tired of dealing with people, even people who I love, so really need that alone time to recharge.

I’m also, honestly, tired of the MMO community as a community. There are a lot of MMO players out there who I am very legitimately fond of, but the ‘chorus’ of the community is starting to grate on me a bit. We just seem to recycle the same old arguments and debates and, when playing, I can’t help but be drawn in, almost against my will. Now that I’m not playing MMOs, a lot of the discussions (Is SW:TOR just WoW reskinned!!?!) just wash over me. I hear them, but I don’t really care about them enough to get into it.

Like Scopique, I’m just kind of tired of the bitching. Single player gamers bitch too, but I don’t know many of them so I don’t hear it very often.

Of course, the downside to all of this is that I no longer have a lot to say to my friends, which makes me worry that I’ll lose them as friends.

I also know that my gaming habits are like a huge pendulum, and eventually what I want from a game is going to be a vibrant, living world to explore, and those can only be found in MMOs, so eventually I know I’ll go back and I’ll be posting here about how lifeless and dull single player games are!

These days Christmas is more or less a non-event, but on the opposite side of the calendar is E3. I *love* E3. I’ve only actually been to the show a couple times, but I ‘attend’ it remotely via TV and internet. And I just love looking at the reveals and trailers and daydreaming about what’s possible in the world of gaming. Some very few games go on the ‘Day 1 Buy’ list, a good number more go on the ‘Keep an eye on this’ list, but the vast majority I just let kind of wash over me.

I doubt that I’m alone in enjoying the spectacle of E3, but sometimes it feels that way. As I surf around the blogosphere, it seems that every year more and more words are devoted to aggressive apathy towards the show. What do I mean by that? Well, it’s fine not to care about the show, but what I don’t understand is why people need to make a big deal about not caring about the show, or about the games that are shown there.

We can’t make ourselves like stuff we don’t like, of course, and our blogs are our blogs. I’m not saying folks shouldn’t vocalize their “Meh” reactions to E3. I’m just saying I find that it’s a little sad. After all these are games; we don’t need them to survive or even to be happy (I hope). A preview of a bad game, or a game that doesn’t interest you, doesn’t harm you in any way.

I just think a lot of us are becoming rather cynical these days. I’d love to remove all video and computer games from the world for a year or two, and then re-announce them via E3 and see if that could re-kindle the joy. Maybe if we weren’t exposed to games 365 days/year we’d feel less apathetic about them.