HighCastle of Geek

​A blog/journal about my life and the stuff I like. Popular subjects include music, guitars, gear, books, movies, video games, technology, humor.

Filtering by Category: Video Games

A Break for Gaming and then Back to the Grind...

I’ve been neck-deep in Baldur’s Gate III for nearly a month, and I just finished the game earlier this morning. It was one of the most satisfying experiences I’ve had in over forty years of gaming, dating back to the Atari 2600 and the nascent days of online gaming (Compuserve, anyone?) Larian Studios has had an incredible run since Divinity Original Sin I and II and now Baldur’s Gate III. In many ways, it’s the spiritual successor to DOS, with just a different setting.

Larian manages to get you heavily invested in the story of your main character as well as that of your allies. I found myself repeating boss battles that I had won just because one of the key allies had died and was unable to get brought back after the battle’s culmination. In the epilogue, a certain character’s story was drawing to the ultimate conclusion and I found myself overcome with emotion that it was truly over. Thankfully, they left an option open for future DLC or sequels and I’m looking forward to that day although it’s likely years away.

The game isn’t perfect, there are bugs in gameplay and quest lines and some weird NPC reactions to murder versus looting. Murder okay, looters go to jail? Inventory management could also use a big overhaul, but I’m hoping we’ll see those sorts of improvements in future updates. Those small complaints aside, Larian got so many things right. A compelling story and characters, flat-out amazing level design, architecture, modeling, sculpting, animations, VFX, etc. It’s one of those games where you repeatedly pause and just look around at the environment design and how much thought and care went into it.

I’ll be replaying it in the future, the variety of possibilities is essentially endless. I want to put it down after such a heavy time investment and give them time to keep updating it and maybe eventually announce DLC or a planned sequel. As of now, I can’t imagine I’ll want to go back for several months, maybe even a year. But, this feels like one of those games I’ll probably play multiple times over in the coming years.

Gaming news aside, I’ll be back at the grind with Berklee Online for likely my penultimate semester if not my last. I’m not highly motivated to go back, but another semester of housing allowance will get us that much closer to paying off our mortgage by the end of next year. I’m taking Private Guitar Lesson III, Solo Guitar (Performance, Accompaniment, and Arranging), and Game Design Principles. I would prefer to be taking a Blender course over the Game Design but they discontinued it and of the options I have for electives, Game Design was the only interesting one. Maybe I should have gone for the interpretative dance class?

The solo guitar course might be interesting, it’s something I want to get better at, but you never know how these courses are going to be presented. Hopefully, it’s not another theory fire hydrant and regurgitate course like so many of them are. I switched from Shaun Michaud to Norm Zocher for my guitar lessons. Shaun was a good teacher and an amazing guitarist/musician, but I don’t think his style combined with my goals was an ideal mixture. I’ve had a few classes with Norm and really appreciated how laid back and non-pedantic he is about the material. I find his style more conducive to learning, regardless of the material.

Meanwhile in geekdom

There have been some cool developments amongst my various pleasurable pastimes here of late. The Mandalorian and a few video games are keeping Star Wars alive and honoring the best of that tradition. The Mandalorian is a series on Disney’s tv channel, and we’re about halfway through the second season. It’s essentially a western in space, which is what Lucas intended for Star Wars in general if memory serves.

Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni among many others have given the franchise a much needed shot in the arm after the sequel trilogy self destructed by the end. This past week’s episode was of special significance with the debut of Rosario Dawson as the first live action Ahsoka Tano. I thought they did a great job with the character - with everything from the look, her fighting style, and her place in the story line.

I sort of had to force myself to watch all of the Clone Wars series, although it got progressively better near the end. I haven’t watched the more recently released final season, but I’m feeling like I want to go through the entire series again. The Mandalorian has been doing a great job of bringing in characters from Clone Wars and the expanded universe, and this week’s episode had a name drop that I doubted I would ever hear. Ahsoka Tano was on a mission to locate a certain Imperial Admiral, and she was in the midst of this mission when the Mandalorian tracked her down.

When the episode played out, we found out she was seeking none other than Grand Admiral Thrawn. Since his character appeared in Rebels (I think), we’ve known for awhile that Disney was going to include him in the updated SW canon, but we’d never had any confirmation that he might appear in a live action show or movie.

Thrawn first appeared in Timothy Zahn’s Lucas approved trilogy in the early 90’s, and I still think it’s the best version of post original trilogy events yet written. The problem is that it took place immediately following the events of the original trilogy, so after the 90’s it would have needed reworking to make sense giving the aging of the characters. The Mandalorian takes place in the aftermath of the destruction of the second Death Star, so Thrawn is contemporary to that time.

Thrawn is arguably as interesting as any character in Star Wars canon in my experience. A member of the race of Chiss, he is a brilliant tactician, typically several moves ahead of both friend and foe. He can orchestrate large space battles as if he were a self-contained supercomputer. He uses a variety of techniques to understand other cultures, often obtaining priceless works of art for appreciation and as a means to understand the psyche of those who capture his interest. Zahn has written some more recent Thrawn sequel novels that I’ve read, and so far they’ve been a mixed bag, not necessarily as good as his original sequel trilogy. That said, there should be plenty of material to work with for The Mandalorian and whatever other properties they consider.

Also of note, there have been a few good games from the Star Wars milieu. Jedi: Fallen Order came out a year ago and is on the Xbox Game Pass as of now. I’ve played a bit and I’m enjoying it. Also of note was the release of Star Wars: Squadrons which is reminiscent of the classic X-Wing and Tie Fighter games for PC from the 90s. I’m still figuring out the controls and fighting schemes, but it’s a lot of fun.

I went against my own best judgment and padded my backlog even further this year by purchase of the Xbox Series X, the GamePass (which essentially means I’ll have dozens if not hundreds of potential games to choose from), as well as a few games on sale for black friday. I resisted the urge to buy most of them as they may eventually show up on GamePass or at least get an even bigger discount. I knew I would buy Cyberpunk 2077 no matter what, so I took advantage of at least a $10 if not $20 discount (not sure if it will cost $60 or $70 at launch) and bought the Xbox One version (which should upgrade to Series X for free) on Amazon. I also bought the three sequel games to Assassin’s Creed for $9 from the Microsoft store.

I think I documented my backlog a post or two back, but you can now add (at least): Assassin’s Creed II, AC Brotherhood, AC Revelations, SW Squadrons, SW Jedi: Fallen Order, and any number of GamePass games. I’ve already played through a season of Madden 2020 (which justified the GamePass purchase by itself since I usually only play through one season), and I’ve got several other games in the queue, including Forza Horizon 4 which has been a lot of fun thus far.

I’ve said it many times, but this modern era in which we live is the most fruitful and plentiful for media consumption. We’ve long since passed the point when there wasn’t anything to read, watch, or play. Now it’s a matter of triaging out what you will devote your time towards consuming. It’s a great problem to have.

Zee Backlog

One of the myriad outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic has been more free time. Significantly more than I had ever planned to have. As it happens, I had an extensive backlog of games that I had never completed and in many cases hadn’t played at all. As I’ve said in other posts, I never got down to the level of even what I would consider mild depression, but it is fair to say that I’ve had intermittent COVID funks where I lost some motivation for my normal pursuits. Most days I’ve got that full schedule of practice, study, and work that I maintain, but there are just days where I feel like doing little to nothing. These are often well suited to games, books, and movies.

So, on that note, I was trying to think of all the games I’ve cleared out of my backlog since COVID-19 began. I had games going all the way back to the launch of the Xbox 360 in 2006 and around the same time with several Steam games. The typical scenario was I would buy first-run games with a new console launch or more often when a bunch of games went on sale during the holidays. It’s a holiday tradition now that retailers will put many triple AAA and other highly rated games on sale at pretty steep discounts. Most years I end up buying a game or two and they’ve just accumulated since I was mostly busy with work and musical pursuits.

With COVID-19 and all the additional time on my hands, I decided to start trying to whittle away at the backlog. So far these are the games that I have completed since then:

Divinity Original Sin 2
Red Dead Redemption
Assassin’s Creed
Gears of War
Battlefield 4
Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition
Wolfenstein II
Shadow of Mordor
Horizon Zero Dawn
Bioshock
Alan Wake
Far Cry 3

These games have all been fun. I’ve generally gone with the standard difficulty level if it was modifiable. This is my normal practice but I have lowered difficulty if I kept dying and had to repeat the same fights ad infinitum. I enjoy exploration, discovery, and story far more than I enjoy any certain game mechanic so it’s an old habit of mine. I don’t really feel a sense of accomplishment in completing a difficult fight as much as I’m looking forward to the next new area for exploration. That’s why I’ve logged so many hours (days) on World of Warcraft despite never raiding and only very briefly being a member of a guild. I’d rather run around the map and find new dungeons, ruins, etc.

I still have an extensive backlog to clear on PC, Xbox, PS, and Switch including:

The Witcher: Enhanced Edition
The Witcher 2: Enhanced Edition
Bioshock 2
Bioshock Infinite
Dishonored
Batman: Arkham City
Deus Ex: GOTY Edition
Deus Ex: Invisible War
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Deus Ex: Human Revolution: The Missing Link
Uncharted 4
Uncharted: The Lost Legacy
Assassin’s Creed: Origins
Shadow of War
The Last of Us: Remastered
Game of Thrones (Telltale)
Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Fallout 3
Pillars of Eternity

I’m not including various Kinect games as well as a few driving and sports games. Although these often have career modes, I’m almost always inclined to play the latest versions since they don’t provide me a unique experience like these other RPG and action/adventure type games. I’m also not including a multitude of games I intend to eventually play that I haven’t bought yet.

To make matters worse (or better depending on viewpoint), my new-fangled Xbox Series X is arriving this week and will likely result in the purchase of a few more games to add to the cache. By far the two most anticipated games coming in the near future are Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur’s Gate III. CP2077 will be an Xbox purchase, but I’ll be playing BG III on PC. After that my most anticipated game is probably Elder Scrolls 6, but that’s likely several years off.

I’m thinking I’ll keep working on the backlog preferentially until I get CP2077 because I have a feeling that one will be hard to resist once it’s available next month.

Back to the Infrequent...

…updates I suppose. Nothing monumental has happened in the past month. There has been slow progress on the work front. I’m not sure if it was within the last month that the director sent an email stating that VANTHCS would return to full operations with incremental steps for routine face to face encounters with a planned 100% restoration of services by October 6th. I’m not tracking the play by play, but it seems they’re on schedule at this point.

All that said, that doesn’t mean fee-basis will be needed in C&P in that same timeframe. Our department chief and program analyst had sent emails to the FTEs notifying them that face to face examinations would resume so they would be back in the clinic full time in the upcoming weeks. I responded to this email saying I knew that didn’t mean fee basis would be needed for quite a long time and they essentially confirmed this and expressed appreciation for my patience.

The unknown factors here are whether they will be able to stick to the plan and how quickly there will be a resumption of the normal flow of exam requests from VBA. Until they start getting a normal flow that exceeds the FTEs capability, it’s not likely we’ll see any request for fee-basis exams. My feeling for a long time (and probably expressed here previously) was the end of the year at best, and Dr. Potu (Chief of Ambulatory Care) had already expressed this timeframe as well. If anything, I could see them asking us to help out during the holidays as there’s always a shortage of providers since everyone wants to go on vacation, although it’s hard to say how that will be affected by COVID. If travel remains sketchy, those leave requests may drop off quite a bit.

I still think it will be well into next year before we can expect a resumption of full activities and fee basis numbers reaching anything near where they were at their peak. I hope I’m wrong, and I don’t necessarily need the desired workload to make a difference in our budget. One good day a month would be enough to put our monthly ledger in the black, and two days would make things comfortable. This wouldn’t facilitate the faster mortgage payoff schedule, but at least it would allow us to slowly accrue some cash reserves and give us some breathing room. My hope is we can get back at least to my normal salary limit, which would allow faster mortgage payoff, although it might take 2-3 years instead of the planned 12 months we were previously on track to achieve.

In other developments, I’ve started studying Korean and drawing again in the past week. I decided to go back to the beginning in Korean, and I’m still trying to figure out my battle rhythm with drawing. I had been bouncing around several different instruction programs and I’m starting to think I need to pick one and just stick with it through completion before moving on to the next thing. I have multiple training programs I plan to complete as I go along. Notice I didn’t mention writing. I still plan to start writing again, I’m just looking for the right window and motivation.

Although it’s incremental and often hard to quantify, I feel there has been progress in my musicianship, mainly drums, guitar, and keys. The downpicking drill based on Tommy Emmanuel’s fast run from Endless Road is definitely paying off, albeit slowly. Drumming has felt slower, but my added focus on kick pedal is slowly reaping rewards. I started alternating drill days with song days where I just play songs so I can apply some of these techniques, and I think that’s helping. Many of the drills I practice are isolated and don’t prepare you for the application within a song where all the other limbs are involved.

I need to start practicing bass again and my vocal drills have been functional but not really stretching my capabilities and I need to start singing some actual songs again. I’m not necessarily happy there was a drop off in some disciplines in light of the mild COVID funk, but I can understand it, and at least I kept applying my most primary disciplines. Not to mention, that game backlog has continued to shrink, so there’s that.

I just finished Divinity Original Sin 2 yesterday, and I’ll probably finish off Horizon Zero Dawn next and then I’ve got to decide what to tackle after that. I’m thinking Demon Souls although I realized today I might not be able to play that or Fallout 3 on my PS4, at least using the disc-based versions I own. I think there are versions if you have a subscription to Playstation Now, so I might look into that option.

Life is pretty good, all things considered. I’m not happy losing a significant chunk of earning potential, but we’ve managed to stay afloat for several months and with a few more adjustments to the discretionary expenses we could probably do it indefinitely. I’ve gotten into more cooking with the time off but the downside is that my waistline has grown with my cooking skills. It doesn’t help that I’m having a flare-up with my right knee again and I’m unable to run.

To add insult to injury, I had been trying to reintroduce push-ups and situps to my regimen so I could recover some muscle mass and stave off another ravage of aging. As luck would have it, I strained something in my lower abdomen and I’m hoping it’s just a delicate atrophied muscle and not a hernia waiting to happen. Location wise it could totally be an inguinal hernia. I’m not sure but I think it’s the same side in which I had hernia surgery as an infant and I doubt they used mesh back then. I’m hoping it’s just a muscle strain and I can resume activity in the coming weeks. One of the greatest frustrations of aging (besides becoming progressively more gray and squishy) is that your body starts to betray you and things that you are mentally and psychologically ready to do become difficult to impossible due to injury and declining function. Still, it could be a lot worse.

Speaking of, I’m essentially done with social media. After shutting down FB completely (two times now, most recently in June) I went ahead and pulled the trigger on twitter and Instagram as well. This was another decision based on the sum total effect of interaction and they both are responsible for bringing a lot of negativity that I can’t control. My political leanings are progressive and liberal and I’ll continue to support those candidates and causes, but I just can’t tolerate the day to day social media drama any longer. Every day is a new deplorable act, quite often by the nominal leader of the country and it’s easy to despair. I’m not sure the US as a country can recover from the damage it has sustained (and not just in the past four years), and although I make my best efforts to contribute, there seems to be no shortage of people who are willfully ignorant, obtuse, and have no regard or empathy for their fellow human beings. I hope we can overcome the hatred, greed, and racism running rife at present, but I have my doubts. I don’t endorse much that the catholic church says, but they got the seven deadly sins right.

Hey Folks

And by folks, I refer to the singular. It's been a fairly action packed few months. I was really busy with school in the fall semester, especially near the end. I discovered that the workload and complexity of the courses as I proceed through my degree plan were increasing to the point that I was burning myself out. I managed to pull off the grades, but I felt I was sacrificing true understanding and deeper absorption of some really important concepts. So, in reaction I have decreased my courseload to two going forward. The heavier courseload was predicated by my (I think now, false) assumption that I needed to take a full courseload to receive all of my GI Bill benefits. I had actually been told that by multiple advisors at Berklee, but I managed to get the supervisor of financial aid to weigh in and he said otherwise.  Apparently taking two courses for 3 months would be the same as taking four courses for 1.5 months. I won't know for sure until I look at my explanation of benefits after this semester is complete, but I think it's accurate. It's a huge relief and weight off my shoulders. I'm not taking these courses at Berklee just to check a box or get a certificate. I'm taking them because I truly want to learn this material. 

There's not much new to report at work, same behavior from the same jackasses. I compiled a DBQ report for October which essentially was unchanged from the report a year ago. Submitting this report to dickless did result in more maneuvering as expected and he actually endorses the idea of counting exams for providers in the interest of capturing workload. That being said, it's apparent that the same non-performers are being protected and given credit for "other duties" which essentially means they're getting a pass since he's unwilling to grow a pair and actually do his job. I'm not surprised, it's essentially what I expected from him. My only faint hope is that eventually when the contract supports runs out (if it does) he'll be left to explaining why the clinic can't meet the demand to his bosses. He probably already has detailed plans on how he'll tap dance his way out of that scenario if/when the day comes. I just can't bring myself to give a shit what he and the other oxygen thieves are getting up to. Life's too short.

On the homefront, we finally got Aeyong her new car, a 2016 Toyota Highlander. It worked out pretty well, and it's a really feature packed nice car. We traded in the Ranger, so I've got the Pathfinder now. We saw Patton Oswalt and Kathleen Madigan on back to back nights at the Majestic last month, and they were both hilarious. I got a cool one off poster that was made for Patton's Majestic show featuring him as various Star Wars characters. On that theme, I've mostly gotten all the concert and music posters framed and put up in the drum room as well as the upstairs living room. I bought four different framed artists renderings of Jimmy Page, David Bowie (as a statue head from the Man Who Fell to Earth), Kate Bush in a sort of airbrushed painting from the back photo of Hounds of Love (probably my all time favorite photo of her), and then an alternate view of Battersea Power Station (from Animals) in black & white with a small colorized flying pig. I think it's the same photographer who shot the album cover, just an alternate view. 

Continuing in the home decorating theme, I sort of grabbed the torch from Aeyong and attached jet packs to my feet before taking off. Aeyong had bought a Daenerys Targaryen doll from one of the local stores a year or two ago. We had incrementally bought these little pop figures (cartoonish versions) of the other GOT characters in the subsequent months. I had seen an article or video showing various Star Wars characters from The Force Awakens, and this led to more exploration into miniatures and figurines. I added several pop figures from TFA including Rey, Finn, Kylo Ren and Captain Phasma. This led to further investigation, and long story short, I've ordered several miniatures from Star Wars, LOTR, and GOT. This includes premium versions of Darth Vader, C3PO/R2D2, and Rey with BB8. The pop figures are little rubber/plastic dolls and fairly cheap, but the premium format figures are made of quite sturdy material and feature multiple poses, articulations, working lights, etc. 

I have some cool versions of Tyrion and Arya that we've already received. Also coming is a miniature of Strider (it's called Aragorn, but he's definitely in ranger mode with this figure). I also have ordered some really cool Weta miniatures and artwork. The biggest is a huge miniature of Smaug laying on his pile of gold with a tiny Bilbo underneath. I'm also getting a miniature of Bag End, and I've got my eyes on Minas Tirith. We're also getting some lovely prints of various LOTR/Hobbit scenes - a wide angle Bag End with Gandalf at the door, a close up of Bilbo looking out the front door, a wide angle of the Argonath with the fellowship in canoes crossing the water, and a shot of the meeting pavilion from the Hobbit where Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel and Saruman held their dawn counsel. 

The really cool thing is that Aeyong is into it, and actually wants to display the artwork and miniatures around the house. My first instinct is to keep most of it in the home theater area, but ultimately we're going to run out of room and it will naturally spread. I don't care if this fits with the better homes and gardens of vacuous assholes aesthetic. This is the stuff we're into, and we can do what we want with our house. It's a bit childish I suppose, but in a repeating theme for this blog and my adult life, I still like the stuff I liked as a teenager and I learned a long time ago to do what makes me happy not what meets other's approval. Stephen King made a comment in an updated preface for a comprehensive version of the Dark Tower series (which I've finally got around to reading, mea culpa) that his adult personality and tastes were basically established by age 19. I think that's essentially true. I know most of the stuff I really value was already present in some shape by that age. I've expanded my tastes a bit and I've accumulated a lot more music, books, movies, etc. in the intervening years, but I essentially still love the same stuff.  Continuing the geek acquisition theme, I got a really cool Marvel Graphic Novelish omnibus of the Dark Tower series that I need to hold off until I finish the proper series. I'm on the Waste Lands at present. I had gotten on a bit of a coffee table book kick in the last year which included Jimmy Page's photo biopic, the Kate Bush photo book created by her brother, a comprehensive three volume set of my favorite webcomic Ctrl - Alt - Del and several others. My geekdom spreads its tendrils like kudzu. 

I've gotten some new albums over the past few months. I especially love Beck's 2014 album (yes, the one Kanye had to interrupt the Grammy presentation about), Morning Phase. This is easily one of my favorite albums, and it's gone on the stress reduction anti-depressant album list (sharing space with the LOTR soundtracks, Zero 7, Metheny, Emmanuel and a few others). I've also added a few more Radiohead albums, and I really love Kid A.  I went back and got three Big Audio Dynamite albums as well as The Big Heat by Stan Ridgway. This was after Matt had posted several 1985 era tunes on Facebook. I had forgotten how much I loved that music. This isn't the complete list, but I also added Mozart's Requiem and Symphone Fantastique by Berlioz. 

The past few months saw some devastating losses, but one positive addition. In music we lost David Bowie, Lemmy, Scott Weiland, and several other key musicians. In my personal life, we had to have Bridget put to sleep in November. She was 15 years old, and the small benign growth on her abdomen had grown so large it was affecting her movement, breathing, and she was beginning to behave erratically.  We grew concerned that she would hurt herself, as she was doing things that didn't make any sense. Aeyong was finding her digging in the back yard for hours in the early hours of the morning. She just seemed confused and not herself in the past few months. She didn't seem comfortable or happy anymore and we had to make the hard decision. We had a similar experience with Lucy. Once they got to the point that their personalities changed and they no longer seemed comfortable, it was time to let them go. It's still the hardest thing we've had to go through. These are our children, and as much as I loved and miss my parents, their loss didn't hit us as hard as losing our pets. The silver lining is that we noticed our two other dogs were missing her (unsurprisingly), but we also have grown accustomed to a three dog dynamic since we first got April in 2007.  So, on that note, I charged Aeyong with finding us a new puppy. She looked at several shelters and eventually found our new chihuahua (mix?), aptly named Skittles. She could have also been called skittish or skitters, but Skittles seemed appropriate. She was a rescue and she still has some of that street mentality (she apparently wasn't fed well and has a predilection for plants, acorns and various other flora). She is a sweetheart and I think she knows she is a member of our family now. 

I would be remiss if I didn't further discuss one of the most devastating losses I've ever experienced as a fan of music and the creative arts in general. Two days after the release of Blackstar (on his 69th birthday), David Bowie suddenly passed from this world. Apparently well aware he had terminal cancer, David composed and produced this album as a sort of swan song and parting message, and it's proven to be an amazing piece of work. I can't give the album an adequate review in this space, and neither can I adequately express how much David and his work meant to me. I'll do my best in the future, through spoken word and music alike. For what it's worth, his loss has proven to be just as devastating for artists around the world of every age and genre. Almost anyone of note has expressed their immense sadness at his loss and the profound effect he had on their lives. The number of tribute songs and covers are too numerous to count. I have been working on versions of his music for years, and so a short term plan (which was already in the works long before he passed) is to put together a cover version of "Life on Mars" with me performing all the parts including vocals. This project derived from a desire to put together an audition for the Music Composition program with Berklee (I'm currently in the Music Production program, but want to dual major), but it's also been a long term goal to further my musicianship, production, etc. skills in being able to cover entire tunes by myself. Life on Mars was one of a few select tunes that I felt capable of not making a complete ass of myself in the process. We'll see. 

Troops...

I suppose it's been a bit. We're fast approaching holiday season here with Veteran's Day weekend starting tomorrow evening followed by Thanksgiving in a few weeks. Significant events since the last post?  Mostly purchases of stuff. Dining room table, what for the holiday eatage. The prematurely necessary upgrade (replacement) of the iMac and Aeyoung's further cracked iPad.  I was wanting to wait and buy a new Mac Pro when they went on sale in December, but I decided to try the mobile hotspot option with my iPad and Aeyoung's laptop and discovered I could have essentially full laptop functionality with the interwebs at work. Which is nice (without going into detail about said use of interwebs). Did I mention I started playing WOW again? No? Never mind.

Apple's most recent reveal included new macbooks and ipads. I bought the high end version of the macbook pro (from which I'm typing this) and the high end lte version of the ipad. I am fairly confident I would have waited another year or two for any of these upgrades if the imac's graphic card hadn't bought it and aeyoung hadn't delivered the killing blow to her ipad (I drew first blood with the thing a few weeks after we bought it). We've been trying to conserve the fundage a bit until we get the 401K replenished in another two years, but some of these things have a mind of their own. I've essentially stopped looking for concerts to attend, which is sometimes a significant part of the budget. There are a few artists that I will go see no matter what, but last I heard Zep and Floyd aren't due to tour anytime soon.

 Things at work are okay. We have actually had quite a light schedule thanks to our leaders in Washington and the furlough. The number of claim requests getting processed drop to nil since the regional office was affected by the furlough, but I expect the numbers will start climbing back up before too long. My last post discussed the unfinished game conundrum. So, with that in mind, I decided to jump back into playing WOW which won't help me complete any of those unfinished games and is just adding more time/money into a game that I've played around 40 days worth of. Yes, that was days.   WOW just has a special quality that always draws me back in. I'm leveling another mage this time, although I'm specced as a frost mage as opposed to my previous fire mage. And I can say frost is much more effective when soloing. I've been playing for a month and I'm just about level 73. I'm probably going to keep going and then upgrade to Pandaria once my character is ready for those zones. 

Most likely the new PS4 and Xbox will be released while I'm doing this. It's a veritable surfeit of gamage, my friends. I'm starting to think I'll never finish the PS3 and 360 games that are gathering dust currently. I've got a few steam games I'll play when I get around to them. I'm actually more interested in the new technology in these systems as opposed to any specific launch titles. The new kinect's higher resolution and ability to track not only individual limb movement but also the force of the movement means that the interactivity for the fitness programs is at a much higher level now.

 I watched a demo of a chubby game journalist (redundant?) trying to follow the Insanity workout and it looks very promising. It constantly tracks body movements and gives you instant feedback with various scoring metrics. At one point it was comparing his score to females aged 30-45 and he was falling short so he put a bit more effort into it to reach the goal. I gather there are all sorts of data to use like your former best, your xbox friends/family, all time records, etc. That's just the kind of geeky oneupmanship I like. Basically it's saying, "We know you know you're a fatass. But do you realize how much of a fatass you are? Didn't think so. Try harder, fatass"  It looks like most of the P90X workouts are on there as well and it also appears that all the kinect fitness programs (and there's a metric ton) will be free to play (at least for the first year) for xbox live gold subscribers. I think I may be moving my workouts up to the home theater in the near future. 

 

First World Problems: Unfinished Video Games

This doesn't quite rank up there with food, water, affordable healthcare, anything a respectably productive person would complaint about, etc. I have a bad and quite long lived habit of not finishing video games. This dates back at least to circa 2000, and probably even before then. It became a significant issue when I was stationed in Korea between 1998-2000 and pc games were available at well below the retail cost, and that's all I will say. I had a habit of visiting one of the game "retailers" about once per month and stocking up on several titles. The results was that I had a significant library of games nearly overnight, most of which I never finished (if there was a campaign or progression to the game at least) and some I never even played. Seeing as how cheap they were, and the fact that many of them weren't exactly marquee games with high ratings, it didn't bother me so much. 

Fast forward to my resumption of guitardom, I have even less budgeted time for video games, at least compared to the past. I go through video game phases now, where I will really be into games in general, or I'll have a specific game that I want to play and then I'll be playing more than usual. That being said, I never completely neglect music, so I don't ever have those long gaming sessions I would have in the past. I'll go sometimes months or longer without playing at all, and then I'll have brief periods of regular play. 

I have had a few periods of a massive increase, most notably since 2004 was WOW in 2005. I played WOW essentially every day for a few hours if not more until I hit level 59 a few months later. I then put it down for I think over a year until the next expansion came out. I would repeat this cycle with new expansions, although I have never bought Mists of Pandaria, and won't. Ironically, although I have played WOW probably more than any other game in history (I think my total time played count is up around 25 days or so, yes, that's 25 days as in 24 hour days, as in 600 hours), I never really got into being a guild member and doing raids. 

The aspect of WOW that sucked me in was the enormity and variety of the world, regions, dungeons, cultures, etc. There was always another area of the map or dungeon, etc. that you either hadn't checked out yet, or your character wasn't strong enough to go into that region yet. 

In reality, you don't "finish" WOW so much, but after playing 600 hours or so, I've had my fill. Where I've had the most unfinished games is probalby within the past few years, mainly since I started playing guitar again. If memory serves, I at least have the following games with campaigns or main story lines that haven't been completed:

Red Dead Redemption, Bioshock, Mass Effect 3, Fable II, Assassin's Creed I/II, Crysis II, Sim City 5, Demon's Souls, Deus Ex (recent one), Alan Wake 2, Arkham City. I'm forgetting several I'm sure. You could add several games I've played briefly, mainly in the MMO category (The Old Republic, Guild Wars 2).  I will say that I have finished several games that I had either already owned or otherwise intended to play and never got around to it. This is an example of how long I wait: I didn't play COD4 Modern Warfare and MW2 until 2012/2013, essentially 4+ years after the second one came out. The graphics were definitely dated by that point, but it was nice to pay $10 for games that still stood up (at least in campaign mode for me, I have no interest in multiplayer with the legions of trolls and nerdragers that frequent those games).  I also finally got around to finishing portal 1 and 2 which were brilliant games (especially 2), and Arkham Asylum which was a good game for what it did, although some of the boss fights were extremely frustrating.

Now it's fall 2013 and with the impending release of two new consoles, I'm really at a point that I feel I need to finish at least my console games so I can start the new generation with a clean slate. Some of those games listed are PC games, so I don't prioritize them as highly, although I'd like to finish all these games. I guess it's a good problem to have, my problem is that I don't want to just give up a game that I paid money for. I guess I'm just going to budget some weekend time and finish Red Dead, Assassin's Creed I, and Fable II. Demon's Souls is such an enormous pain in the ass that I'm not sure about that one.