I’m just going to pretend that I haven’t been persona non-grata for weeks and go ahead and talk about gaming as if I was never gone.

I will admit that a great deal of my absence has been… well let’s call it a “WoW related symptom.” I took my third character to level fifty-eight and Outland and frankly I’m not sure why. The mage character has been extremely enjoyable to play if for no other reason than the holy ass-whippings one can deliver with the myriad powers of the arcane at hand. My sister and I pulled off a double pass on Dragnut in the process - a feat which we bragged about but frankly had no right to do so. We suffered mightily in the action both mentally and physically. After a short period that can best be described as a cool-down, we’ve both quit playing. Not for long, I’m sure, but the itch has been scratched. Scratched till it bled.

In the brave new Minimally Single-player Offline world I have reverted to the classics of childhood. I have a GameTap subscription and I’m finding it to be interesting if not directly money expedient. The service is a mixed bag, mostly because I find the GameTap interface to be imperfect in its translation of controls. For example, the Quest for Glory games are a loss because the type-chat interface is fuxxored beyond usage. It’s a shame really, because those are games which I wish would be released in some sort of historical compilation. Turns out my dusty old DOS 3.50s don’t work so well anymore. There are lots of new games I haven’t tried yet though, most notably Overlord, Sam and Max, and the entire Hitman franchise.

Mostly I use it to play the old arcade classics. I used the power of infinite quarters to see levels of games I’m pretty sure are actually impossible to beat in their original arcade form without the expenditure of several months worth of laundry payments.  If I get my shit together I may make you a “guess this game” image collage with the shots I’ve been collecting, but it turns out my shit is scattered far and wide, scattered by the hand of a particularly spastic monkey. On the upside I found a game where I can score, get this, 200 trillion points and still not be on top of the leader board.
What else was I going to say…

I was in Boston for a job related conference last week, and I stopped in at Jeff’s to catch up and play Bioshock. It’s pretty fantastic. As a fan of the System Shock games I can tell you that they’ve really caught the feeling of the franchise. In all honesty I had to quit playing because the tension was making me sick to my stomach. I’m not sure that it’s better or worse that I’ve played System Shock, as I do not feel the burst of revulsion upon discovery of something awful, rather a long slow dread as the game foreshadows conventions I have seen in the past. I’ll let someone with more play under their belt review the game fully though, as I was drunk on cranberry and vodka at the time.

Mmm… vodka…