New New?

This is an odd time in my gaming career and in my adventures as the Do-Nothing-Man. Disinterest has infected my perspective of gaming. I mentioned earlier that I'm consistently playing Diablo 3 on my computer and Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness on my hacked PSP. That's it.

I've taken little breaks to play things like Aliens: Colonial Marines and The Walking Dead. I even sat down to play Halo 4 with my roommate for the first time in several months last weekend. The point is: I haven't been playing much. And, I'm not necessarily happy with what I have been playing.

Even with games like Diablo and Disgaea, the repetitive nature of each game is wearing on me. On both of these titles, it's the grinding and leveling up that initially peaked my interest; however, I find myself only able to stand Disgaea in smaller and smaller segments. Clear a couple levels in the Item World, and then I'm putting my PSP to sleep. Diablo 3 is getting a similar treatment; I measure my playing time in accumulated gold. Once I acquire 100,000 gold in a play session, I'm done. Paragon levels don't even interest me anymore. In both games, I'm chilling in the end-game, doing only the things that I want to do. And I'm still getting a little burnt out.

What I've noticed while playing these two favorites is that I'm in no mood for marathon gaming sessions. A couple years ago, I could sit and play Fallout 3 all freakin' day. That doesn't happen anymore. Part of it could be that I have a standing desk now; when I'm playing Diablo 3, I'm on my feet. Not sitting on my ass. But I've had the standing set-up for over a year and when D3 first came out, I was playing marathon sessions to power level my crazy Witch Doctor.

The PSP is a little different; I'm usually playing Disgaea while sitting on our porch (now things are warming up) or while in bed right before going to sleep. Plus, that little machine is hacked, so I'm constantly tinkering with it while it's connected to my computer. I need to learn how to take my own screenshots. There must be a way.

I thought, for the longest time, that I could be a perfectly content gamer only playing Disgaea and Diablo (at the time I was thinking of Diablo 2), maybe include a Resident Evil 2 play-through every so often. Disgaea and Diablo will always be go-to games for me for me, but maybe it's time for me to branch out and play something that's completely outside of my gaming repertoire.

What a weird word.

Cartridges: Our Link to the Past

While currently trying to ignore whatever pops up about Aliens: Colonial Marines, I need something to write about. Luckily, something interesting happened this week that hasn't happened for a long time: a friend and I swapped game cartridges.

Yeah, like totally old-school. I brought my copy of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance for the the GBA to the office and he brought his copy of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past for the GBA (the one with the Four Swords multiplayer thing). We traded, identified save files that we didn't want overwritten, and agreed to return them as soon as we had finished. School yard ethics dictate that I name my save file PENIS or something, but still, how long has it been that you and a friend exchanged games? And cartridge games at that?

This single act has made me look over my collection of emulators and roms and think: "Wow. This is the future."

I remember when that cartridge was a key, unlocking a little portable world. I used to guard them with my life, especially if it was a borrowed cartridge, because that meant it was a game that my parents didn't want me to play. I had Tetris and a chess game for the Game Boy (not high on the school yard trade list), so I relied on the good graces of my elementary classmates to take one of my crappy games hostage so I could play their infinitely better TMNT or Mario game.

Now, these games are just zip files on my hard drive. Games that I would have begged to borrow are purely dismissal. I'm having fun playing A Link to the Past on my GameCube GBA player, but I've had that rom on my computer for years, and I've never touched it.

I guess that's the magic of cartridges and nostalgia. Back then, the first thing I did when I borrowed a game was pop it into the old Game Boy and give it a spin.

Mad, Mad Scientist

I wish I were a mad scientist. Is that enough to constitute a blog post? One wishful sentence. Probably not, but that doesn't mean it's any less true.

Part of the problem is that I don't have a laboratory. I have access to a space that could be a lab, but no one has given me permission to clean the space up and transform it. Sad. Like a hermit crab without a soda can.

What would I do in this imaginary laboratory? Research, develop, and build computers, robots, and (oh yeah) hack and modify video game consoles. This seems like a phase I go through: it gets cold and dark out in the world and I desire to take things apart and build something better.

Things have flared up again with the original Xbox. I found a pretty sweet and thorough video about the soft-modding process and swapping out hard drives. The original Xbox has an 8 GB hard drive (which seemed like a lot at the height of its console days) that can be easily upgraded to 320 GB or even 500 GB. Considering that I have 8 GB SD cards spilling out my ears now, upgrading doesn't seem like a bad idea.

Finding the right kind of hard drive might be a challenge. In the video, the guy pulled one out of an old computer. I'm not sure I will be able to do that. The computer stuff is always a little complicated. I've successfully soft-modded a Nintendo Wii and completely bricked a Phat PSP. So, despite some success, I'm always a little nervous about this sort of thing.

I'll have to take inventory of older computers that I have around and see what I've got for hard drives. My biggest problem with this stuff is that if I do it (or attempt it) then I stop messing with it for some time, I'll forget all about it and how I did it.

My Wii is probably my best excursion in this realm because I kept track of everything that I did step-by-step and I have a folder with all the set-up files, channels, emulators, and everything else that I downloaded still on my computer. I also use this modded Wii enough that I remember everything. That's important too.

That's What I Need: More Doom

Some pretty crazy news has surfaced about a Doom 3 re-release. Openly, I'll admit to being a rabid Disgaea, Fallout, and Resident Evil fan; I'll even quietly admit to playing the Pokémon games and older Final Fantasy games. But the fandom started with a little 3.5 in floppy disk containing the shareware version of Doom.

If I still had that floppy, I would snap a picture for this post, but I don't. I did what we all did back in 3rd grade with that disk. Someone gave it to me. I took it home and installed it. I brought the disk back to school and passed it on to the next kid. That was how sharing software worked back then. To this day, Doom is still one of my favorite games. It still ends up on all of my windows machines. When most people get bored at their computer, they open up solitaire or click through minesweeper. Not me. I open up Doom.

This is not what Doom looks like, but this is my screen capture output. I thought it looked cool anyway; fits the blog color scheme and I'm too lazy to try and fix it.

The original Xbox was a dorm room stable during my college years; we all played Halo and Halo 2, of course. But when Doom 3 made its Xbox debut, I went out and bought my own Xbox console. So I could play Doom 3 and not have to share with all the crazy Halo nuts. The Doom 3 experience was solely single-player for me; I blasted my way through the Mars UAC research facility, going late into cool spring nights with my own Xbox and 19 inch television stashed in my dark bedroom. While playing the game, I wanted to be scared. And, for the most part, I was.

Doom 3 was an excellent experience, but when I want to play Doom, I still turn to the Doom installed on my little netbook. If I'm sitting at my Xbox 360 and I get the Doom itch, I can play the XBLA version of Doom, which I downloaded on a whim when first appeared. I didn't even know it was taken down and put back up until recently. I do prefer the keyboard instead of a game controller when it comes to the original Doom games though.

Like I need excuses to play more Doom, but a graphically enhanced PS3 version with the Resurrection of Evil expansion and new levels. That's more than a good excuse to play more Doom; that's a damn good reason to play more Doom.

The Last Half Hour

It's a difficult period of time to describe.

Last half hour to go
Seconds feel like eternities
I am almost done

My van waits below
Eager, impatient, ready
Calling for its keys

Three flights of stairs down
Escaping the parking lot
To the long sprint home

Only minutes pass
And I remain keyboard glued
Working and waiting

Just Sippin' Blue Mana Margaritas

There was a time in the not-to-distant past that I hacked and slashed my way through the realms of the sanctuary. I'm not sure if I should capitalize that or not; I'm not up on the lore. Perhaps, "I've been clicking monsters to death since 1998," is a better way to describe my endearment to the world of Diablo. At the time, I was amazed I could play both Diablo and eventually its sequel on my old desktop machine. But I am bummed that I've never had the chance to play Diablo on the PlayStation. Someday.

Nothing is better than swinging a sword or an axe into an army of skeletons, so I always played a warrior in Diablo. I tried the rogue once and hated her guts; I completely ignored the sorcerer. I'm an in-your-face demon slayer; if I'm not feeling the spray of blood then what's the point right? This trend continued in Diablo 2 with the barbarian. In fact, my first play-though was all barbarian, all duel-axes, and all whirlwind. The image of this armored giant with a battle axe in each hand spinning and flailing around in the middle of enemy hordes just made me laugh.

After my barbarian urges were satisfied, I explored the other classes and fell for the necromancer. It was love at first summon.

"You mean I can summon an army of skeletons to do my bidding?! I'll just sit over here and let Mr. Bones and his badass buddies do all my dirty work while I sip mana potion margaritas."





Again, a necromancer with a yew wand in one hand and a blue margarita in the other just makes me all happy and tingly inside. Then I discovered my true beverage of choice: poison.

Ever since the Lord of Destruction expansion, I've been running poison necromancers. Letting the monsters swarm around me then casting poison nova is one of the best feelings I've ever had in all my years of playing video games. Still so much fun.

With Diablo 3 landing next week, I am looking forward to the long-awaited sequel; however, I don't think I'll get the same gush of excitement that Diablo 2 supplied me since the turn of the millennium. With the little research that I've done, I know I'll play my first run as a witch doctor and I don't think that Plague of Toads or Acid Cloud will be as awesome as Poison Nova. Some of the doc's passive abilities look very compelling; for instance: Fetish Sycophants grants the chance to summon those jibber-jabbering little midgets from the jungle levels of Diablo 2, Act 3. I love those little dudes.

Then there's also the Firebats ability which summons a flock of flaming bats; I would rather chuck flaming cats at my enemies' faces. But whatever. That seems like something a crazy witch doctor would do, right?

Besides reading about the witch doctor and watching a sweet Diablo vs. Angels cartoon, I haven't looked into Diablo 3 that much. Maybe because I want to be surprised. This Diablo fan is hopeful.