For those of you who haven't guessed from my lack of updates here is the official: I don't have time to check/update any more post. I have been working a lot (still) and I still love it. Add to that the fact that I do work in Video Games now and so I try to curtail what I do post to avoid sounding like I'm speaking for my company (I'm not, any opinion expressed here is my own solely) and/or accidentially commenting on something where I have more knowledge than is publically availible.

No, I won't reveal which company I work for, but I've helped on several games and I couldn't be prouder of where I'm at today.

Thanks to all for the good times and I wish I could check this more often, but it is amazing that when you love your work you actually do work harder and more.

*hugs to all*

Dawn

For those of you who don't already know:

This week's FREE Rock Band Downloadable content is "Still Alive", from The Orange Box/Portal.

I downloaded it and played it on both guitar (medium) and vocals (easy). It is very much fun and I encourage you all to play around with it.

I know I'm not posting much, but life is keeping me busy. I'm still playing WoW, been playing a little Hellgate: London, watching the first 4 seasons of LOST via Xbox Live and working at a job I adore.

I was very sad to see Brad leave GameSpot, as he is a friend of mine. I spoke with him privately about it and meant to post something here but forgot. For those that don't know, Brad had been with GameSpot as an editor for almost a decade. I loved reading Brad's stuff and seeing his take on upcoming games. I'm very happy that one of his last contributions was the awsome preview of StarCraft II, Zerg Rush as it was a great preview, a good article and I now wish to kill him and wear his skin to be able to try to sneak into Blizzard and play myself.

I'll try to update more often, sorry been away.

I'm a very happy girl. I ventured into Japantown in San Francisco this past Saturday with a friend to do research for her Brownie troop. We oooh at all of the pretty kimonos, ahhhhh at the traditional architecture, giggled at the various lucky cats in every store, and salivated over the various candies that you can't get in normal stores.

But then, I saw him. Those eyes, that hat, the overalls... the whole package was utterly entrancing. I had to have him. I ventured over shyly and then stroked his oh so soft cheek. Finally, I told the clerk I would have him, as long as I could afford him.

And now I do.

(Mine is actually a bit bigger and I can pose his arms, but I couldn't find a picture online).

While I still don't have a lot of gaming time, I did take a few hours the other night to play some Civ IV. I've been a fan of the Civilization series sine Civ II. I recall to many hazy nights of hitting enter until the wee hours of the morning in the dimly lit internet cafe after hours (it was owned by friends). My friends and I whiled away many hours figuring out the quickest way to elephants (which could still take down tanks in the late game). I didn't actually 'win' many games, as I would get too caught up in individual pursuits to look at the big picture.

I still do this in Civ IV. While there are some easier win conditions in Civ IV than Civ II for a pacifist like me (cultural victories for the win), I still found myself whiling away the time. Rather than looking at the game as a win/lose scenario and trying to figure out the best way to 'score', I tend to just build every building, research the tech and improve my surrounding countryside. I will go to war to get someone out of the way of my expansion or to stop bothering me, but I won't cutthroatly go to war and I'm in favor of peace treaties. I don't expand as much as I should or as soon as I should. I don't research only necessary technologies, I try to research them all. It is a valid way to play, but a game ends up taking a total of several hour play times over the course of days instead of a single sit down or only two. I know that there are ways to optimize winning and I find that I just don't care. I play Civ to hit the 'one more turn button' rather than to really win. This hampers my ability to play on the harder difficulty levels and prevents me from doing well in multiplayer games.

There are other games I care about winning. I worked hard on Geometry Wars and studied YouTube videos to get to my respectable high score (over 600,000 iirc). It isn't nearly as high as some people I know (my boyfriend has a high of 3 million plus), but it is still enough to garner respect amongst my friends. The only point of Geo Wars is to get that high score. I play RTS games (Starcraft, Warcraft III, Company of Heroes) and there I will figure out optimal build orders down to the second to gain an advantage. But for whatever reason, I don't treat Civilization in that way. I treat it almost more like an RPG, where I'm just running around and expericing the world.

I never finished Oblivion because I (seriously) got too caught up playing with the herbs and alchemy profession to bother to advance the main storyline. I tend to wander a lot in Zelda games, not because I want to find all the secrets or to explore all the zones, but because I just enough moving around in the world. I won't finish a RPG quickly, if I finish it at all.

I don't know what it is about Civ that pulls me in this way. It isn't a story thing. There isn't really one and I certainly don't tell myself the story of the Great and Powerful Dawn. And the world is familiar as it is history & earth, more or less. But I always would prefer to have 'just one more turn' instead of winning.

Anyone else like this out there? Are the other games that people savor instead of playing to win than the standard open world ones? And, related, I wonder why it is that I'll have a blast doing Civ or Oblivion but I'm not into the open world games like GTA.

As stated before, I've been playing a bit of WoW. With my new work schedule (still love the new job, btw) I don't have a lot of time for gaming and what little time I have has been mostly spent in WoW. Though there was a brief Xbox Live Arcade binge wherein I played a good amount of Root Beer Tapper.

WoW is addictive for many of the reason previously stated, but one really resonates with me. As elucidated by Tycho Brache (aka Jerry Holkins) in a news post the other day.

I knew it before, and then in some moment of weakness I let my cohort twist me into this thing. I don't know how much game is here. What I do know is that they have set up a system that allows me to rent my friends on a monthly bwhlasis.

One of the reasons why WoW is so addictive and so satisfying and so hard to choose something else over, for me, is the social aspect. My boyfriend plays it, so we sit together and go out and farm or quest or run a heroic with other friends. There were several of my friends from real life on the server we chose and we've made more friends with our guild. So even if my boyfriend isn't home or busy, there are usually at least 3 people on who I know and usually more like 12 - 20 who I can just talk to via our vent server while running a battleground or doing arena work or just flying circles around Shatt.

I'm now 70 (have been for a while, actually, before Xmas break) and I only have one character (Elemental Shaman makes things goes zot, as per William Shatner) because I suffer from the reverse of character ADD. I focus pretty solely on one character because I love raiding.

My weekends are currently spent for at least a good portion killing internet dragons with 9-24 other people. My guild is decently high end (currently ranked 15 overall for our Server). The core of the guild is completely done with Kara (translation for the non-WoW geeks: a several hour dungeon for 10 players with 11 bosses. It takes a lot of coordination and several passes to open it all, let alone complete it regularly). This means that new people, like me, can tag along with really good players to get new gear quickly. But still, I get to talk to 9 other people for several hours, crack jokes and feel like we've accomplished something together. And when we aren't at Kara on the weekend we are pushing on two of the high end 25 man instance. There is a really neat feeling of working together with 24 other people in concert to get something done. You are supporting each other, watching each others back and only when you all work together does something get accomplished.

The tower of Karazhan

However, group dynamics can quickly sour. My guild is focused around raiding, though we are a 'casual' guild about it. Meaning we aren't usually raiding every night, we don't force people to respec constantly for optimum play, we don't disallow certain c14asses just because they aren't the 'best' fit and we don't have an out of raid commitment toward material gathering. But there are those people who want to explore the PvP aspects of WoW and often the raiding gets in the way of that. This is a problem between expectation and reality. PvP is not the core view of our guild. Sure we like it, but it isn't our number one priority. But when it is one person's number one priority they can be disappointed when raiding takes precedence over PvP.

Other way group dynamics can get skewed is feeling left out. While we aren't going to say no to lesser options, we will leave out someone if they are clearly a make or break choice. Which is hard on the officers, because they have to make the call for the greater good of the guild over the personal enjoyment of one. And the one person can become a bother if they don't realize that they were left out for reasons of the greater good (i.e. they can't actually play very well or would in fact be deadweight due to not having the ability to survive fights) and instead attributes the drop to favoritism.

A guild is a very complex social animal. I enjoy participating in the social game as well as watching it from a far. What is highly interesting to me about WoW is how it brings so many different people together. Most of our guild is aged 25 and older. At least half are married. And yet, we have several members under the age of 18. We also have a good proportion of females to males. We have some members from Alaska, Florida, California, New York, Texas, Massachusetts and elsewhere. We have programmers, military men, stay at home moms, college students, security guards and video game industry workers. I learn a lot about life listening to people from various backgrounds talk. I like hearing the other side. While we usually avoid talking about politics or religion outright, some of those still creep in. And there is a lot of random nuggets of information.

I think the social is part of why games like Halo 3, Team Fortress 2, and Call of Duty 4 are so popular. There is a team multiplayer aspect. That working together for advance brings people to the game and keeps them coming back. If I miss a few nights due to working late or going out with friends, my guild in WoW notices. They ask after me and encourage me to come back, because they miss me. My real life friends miss me too and have noticed my WoW playtime and occasionally are like 'Why do you want to waste your time with imaginary monsters?'

I'm not. I'm playing with my friends. And some of my friends are in WoW. And some of them are in the 'real world.' But they are all my 'real' friends.