Is 2011 over yet?

Yeah, another fall off the planet moment. I blame work. No, really, I do. It’s still insane, as is most retail this time of year, and has been insane since the end of October. A few weeks ago, I managed to end up at the local urgent care from doing something messed up to my knee. a week of crutches later, plus pain killers, anti-inflammatories, and a trip to the orthopedic doc later, and I had a diagnosis of Pes Anserinus Bursitis – aka “your inner knee hurts a damned lot, so quit doing all that stuff for a while.” Well, there’s more to it, but that’s about what it ended up as. One week with the crutches, one week of being banned from stairs and ladders, and two weeks of physical therapy (I start my second week of therapy tomorrow). The therapy is helping, but I have a feeling that it’s not going to completely go away until I stop what I’m doing at work, which means getting a different job. Yeahhhh, fun times. :/

With everything that’s going on (Jared still looking for a new job, Mom having her own issues), it’s going to be a slim Christmas for us here. We’ve set a monetary limit on gifts for each of us this year for the first time in a really long time. If you’d asked me at the beginning of the year, with full knowledge of everything that would be coming out in the next 12 months, here’s what my list would have looked like:

1. Apple iPad 2, black, 16g, wi-fi only
2. Apple iPhone 4S, 16g for AT&T
3. Knit1 Oxford Gift Certificate (the local yarn shop in town that is awesome)
4. New cat tree for the kitties
5. Clothes, clothes, clothes!
6. Diablo 3 Collector’s Edition

I finally got around to making my list today, and for about 20 minutes only had one thing on the list: the gift certificate to Knit1 Oxford. It took me another 30 minutes to add on 4 books and a DVD set, and I still feel meh about adding them. Like I told my Mom when she was sighing at me, I -want- a lot of things, but they’re so improbable at this point, there’s no point in adding them to the list. What do I -want-? Everything on the first list, plus ethernet cables run through the old section of the house to get better wi-fi reception (old house walls made with chicken wire to hold the plaster = leaky Faraday cages). I also want a phone call from some place that I talked to back in October to say “let’s go on Round 2, you know, nm, let’s just have you start tomorrow, k?” I want no more stress from friends and family over money, cos they all have jobs that they love (or at least like) that they’re being appropriately recompensed for. I want time. Dammit, I want to be happy for more than 15 minutes out of a week, cos I’m tired of everyone around me having a crap existence right now.

Like I’ve said, it’s not the frostbite that gets you, it’s the frost-nibble, and dammit, I’ve been just about nibbled to death. :/

Bweh. Okay, off that. Something happy… Oh! So a good thing recently? I got to beta SWTOR, fell in love with the Sith Inquisitor like I thought I would, and before everything went to hell in a hand basket, paid for Jared and I’d Collector’s Editions in full. They asked me at the store “Why now?” My response: “We have the money now, and I’m terrified that if we waited til release day, it wouldn’t be there.” In hindsight, I was right and I rule. So come December 20th, Jared and I will have our CE keys and have been playing early access for 5 days and having a blast. Yey us. ^^; Hey, at least it’s something.

A long time ago…

So yeah, I get a new job, hit the ground running with it, then promptly fall off the blogging planet. Really, I do blame the job. Most of the time, when I get up in the morning, I’m still groggy and out of it, and have a very short time to get ready for work and out the door. When I get home, I’m immediately hitting the shower to get cleaned up, as most of my day involves me running up and down ladders or stairs, hauling mannequins or large artwork, usually with little air conditioning or hot lights overhead. After that, all I want to do is not move, while various body parts yell at me for taking the job. Then it’s an early bedtime and we start it all over again. /sigh

The job itself is somewhat physically demanding. It depends on what day it is and what needs to be done. Two weeks ago, not a whole heck of a lot other than putting up new pretty pictures in little frames. This past week? Lots of ladders, lots of hauling, lots of racing around with no where near enough time. When you add in the various office politics and personalities, things get… interesting. My stress levels kinda peaked out Friday and i had a complete meltdown at work. A couple of texts and a phone call to another store’s visual department manager later, and I was a lot calmer. I’d helped the other manager earlier in the week at their store, and he reassured me that I was not sucking, i was doing a good job, and to just do what I could do. It’s always nice when someone says “Damn, girl! I wish you were closer to our store, cos I’d steal you away in a heartbeat, cos you rock!”

Oh and three weeks ago, Jared tripped at work and broke his elbow. /facepalm He’d been hoping that the doc would tell him he could go back to work this past week, but alas, he’s still healing and must stay at home some more, since work can’t accommodate his one-armed self. At least he’s got workman’s comp. ^^;

In more pleasant news, our insanely crappy internet connection will soon be a thing of the past. I need to make a phone call tomorrow to set it up, but we’ll be having a proper high-speed connection soon. Looks like it’s going to be just in time for a couple of new games that I’ve been waiting on: Diablo 3 and Star Wars: The Old Republic. I loved, nay, adored Diablo 2. Still do. There’s just something satisfying about starting at one end of a map and working my way to the other side, leaving nothing alive in between. Everything that I see on D3 just makes me more and more excited for it.

And then there’s SWTOR. When they made the announcement for it, I looked at Jared, who is a massive Star Wars fan. He said we’d absolutely be playing it, and there was no contest: we’d be playing Sith. I sighed and started looking into what little bit of information they had and started preparing myself to play Sith (just know I’m going to be the world’s worst Sith). As more and more information starting coming to light, the more excited I started getting. At this point, I’m bouncing, eager to play, and looking forward to “seeing” friends online again. Hell, I even went and upgraded my pre-order to the Collector’s Edition. We’d started getting the old guild interested in playing, but just ended up merging those from the old guild with friends in a new guild. Everyone’s still in the “getting to know you” phase, but it looks like it’s going to work out well.

I’ve been plowing through as much information as I can, and pretty much have decided to start with a Sith Inquisitor as my first character. I’m most likely taking her through the healer tree, but the DPS caster version is also tempting. SPARKLEDEATH and all that. The second character I make will most likely be an Imperial Agent, so I can pewpew again.

At this point, I’m ready to just go to bed til SWTOR comes out. By that point, we should have a better internet connection as well and hopefully work won’t suck as hard anymore. Well, one can hope. ^^;

A month of video games – Postscript

So that’s it for me and my “month of video games” posts. I know there’s games that I forgot or left off that deserve to have mentioned somewhere to show the love for them, but hell if I remember who. Hell, I could probably fill another 30 days of posts of games that I’ve loved and loathed over the years, but I think that’s for another day. For now, it’s back to regular, which is knitting, books, random life babbles and… oh… yeah. Video games. ^^;

I’ll just be over here in the corner now. ^^;

A month of video games – Day 30

Day 30 – Your favorite game of all time.

Oh dear, just one? I’m going to have to pick 2. Why? Cos one fills me with giggly silly fun glee. The other fills me with cackly ebil glee. Take your pick as to which is which.

A month of video games – Day 29

Day 29 – A game you thought you wouldn’t like, but ended up loving.

Let me go off and say right now I don’t do First Person Shooter games. I don’t even really do Third Person Shooters. If it’s got rifles, grenades, handguns and a selection of the latest in hand weapons that go boom, I don’t play it. Why? Simple, really. I stink at them. Flat out suck. No, really, it’s laughable. I’m not quite as bad as “throw a grenade and it lands back at my feet to blow me up” (that would be my friend Robin) (love ya, sweetie),  but I’m still god-awful. Jared knows this and is usually amused by it.

So imagine his surprise when I demand to go to GameStop to pick up Mass Effect 2 for the Playstation 3. “Um, there’s shooting in this. Are you sure?” “Yep.” “Why?” “…I just need it. Now gimmie! /races to bedroom to start playing”

This is NOT a normal game for me. Everyone and their brother was praising ME2 as being an awfully good shooter with this RPG game wrapped around it. Me? I set the bloody thing to casual and proceeded to kill anything that moved. For 3 weeks, the first thing I’d say to my husband and mother after we got done eating supper was “Lovely meal. I’m off to go save the universe, one head shot at a time.” I’d promptly vanish back into the bedroom where I’d been most of the day and cackle my brains out. Jared was bemused, but enjoyed watching me have a good time.

Honestly, when we got the game, I was starting to have second thoughts. I was thinking more and more about this whole “shooter” aspect, and knowing that I have trouble with shooters, was wondering if I was just blowing money that we could spend on other things, like Dragon Age 2. But I mentally shrugged and bought it, thinking that even if I sucked at it, Jared could prolly play through it fine and I’d just watch him play, since the story was supposed to be awesome. That’s me: sucker for a good story.

I was not expecting to dive into this game with gleeful abandon. An hour in, Jared was halfway poking me to see about maybe starting his character and I was snarling and hissing at him, clutching the controller to me. I went from “Hm, not real sure about this but ::gulp:: let’s see what happens” to “OMGLOVEMINEMINEMINE!”

I can’t tell you what clicked in my head with this game, but I can tell you it seems to have left. We downloaded the latest DLC for ME2, The Arrival, and Jared played through it. I was (and to some degree still am) having a “meh” moment, flitting from game to game, project to project. So when I finally got around to it the other week, I started up and immediately started struggling with the controls. Same control scheme as when I was playing it a few months ago, but the ME2 mojo has definitely gone on vacation for me. I finally pleaded with Jared to finish the content for my account. When we got to the spot where I’d been stuck, barely any time into the content, he just looked at me and asked “Really? Here’s where you got stuck? This isn’t even the hard part!”

/sigh

I still want to get ME3 when it comes out at the end of the year. But right now I’m hoping that either I get my mojo back between now and then, or they reduce the “shooter” bits a little back to more “RPG with guns and don’t have to worry about that pesky aiming thing.” ^^;

A month of video games – Day 28

Day 28 – Favorite game developer.

Aw crap. I have to pick just one? /whine I refuse to do it! I’m picking three! HA! I’m not scared of you! RAWR!

::cough:: Anyway, back to the dev love. In no particular order: Square Enix, Blizzard, and Bioware. Why these guys? They all tend to develop games that are “must buy” for me. Their games tend to have decent plots, decent gameplay, and decent art. They tend to have a higher baseline set for quality in everything they produce. I expect more from them, and rarely am I disappointed by them. Their “meh” products are other studios’ blockbusters. Sure, sometimes they do some things that leave me scratching my head, but overall, these guys help set the standard by which other games are measured.

That’s overall, though. Specifics to each company? Well, SE showed me that not all RPGs were “dude in loincloth and axe picking up loot” and could tackle things like life and death is a somewhat adult fashion. Blizzard showed me that not all developers were concerned with pushing a game out as fast as they could AND were happy to develop their games on the Mac to be released at the same time as their PC versions (still almost unheard of to this day). And Bioware showed that it is possible to wander into someone else’s universe (Forgotten Realms, Star Wars) and create something amazing, while still being able to create their own worlds and keep that same level of depth. (I’m scared to think of what their internal lore books for Dragon Age must look like. Gotta be huge monsters.)

So thanks guys, for pushing the various envelopes in your own ways and giving us such wonderful games.

P.S. – Special bonus mention of thatgamecompany, the creator of flOw, Flower, and the upcoming Journey. You guys are awesome and I can’t wait til Journey comes out.

A month of video games – Day 27

Day 27 – Most epic scene ever.

I’m giving this one up to World of Warcraft, even though I haven’t played it in over a year. I can think of quite a few scenes in games that have left my jaw on the ground, me bawling my eyes out, or me cheering loud enough to scare the neighbors down the block. But for an overarching storyline, this scene (and it’s wrapping up of plot lines for the expansion) is total win. I may not have been able to see it in-game, but it’s still epic all the way.

A month of video games – Day 26

Day 26 – Best voice acting.

Voice acting is really kind of a “newish” thing, but it’s not really surprising how fast VA can make or break a game these days. Not whether it has it or not, but whether it’s any good. Given the choice between meh to bad voice acting and no VA, I’d rather have none.

There’s actually a few games that I like the VA: Dragon Age, Final Fantasy (X, XII and XIII), Mass Effect, KOTOR. I’m sure I could think of others, but those are the ones that come to mind immediately. Right now, I couldn’t pick one over the others to save my life. There’s something that I like in all of them. Of course, it helps that they all have decent to excellent writing for the actors to read through. That always helps.

A month of video games – Day 25

Day 25 – A game you plan on playing.

Aw yeahhhh. /drool

A month of video games – Day 24

Day 24 – Favorite classic game.

Oh man, classic games? How “classic” are we talking? Ah nevermind, I figured out probably the “classic” game that I loved the most.

Centipede. This game used to make Mom and I fight over the controller at home. In the arcades, I used to hunt this one down. There was something about the trackball that I just connected with. Add in the Space Invaders-like “tromp-tromp” and I was a very happy camper.

…

Well, up until Mom started to regularly kick my butt at it. /sigh At least I could still beat her at Frogger. She liked running Frogger into the traffic to make him go splat too much to ever last long at that game. (Hey, you guys know I’m warped. I do get my warped-ness honestly.)