Pure, unadulterated lust...

Let me preface this by saying, I'm a fairly crappy consumer. My secret shame is that I really don't do my part to keep the Mighty US Economic Engine purring along by buying lots of fun but ultimately unnecessary crap.

Case in point, I have not bought a TV in almost 20 years - yes, I still use my crummy 27 inch TV that I bought in college. Yeah, the one where I lost the remote, and where the front cover that hides the little knobs and dials broke off, and whose power cord was chewed through by a rabbit over a decade ago, and I happily spliced it back together with electrical tape.

And, yeah, I'm still driving my beat-up old Miata I bought back in 1990. It's got 100K+ miles on it, is impractical as hell (only two seats) and smells like an old shoe, and despite the fact that if I showed any inclination at all to buy a new car my wife would shriek with glee and personally drive me to the dealership, I have no desire to get a new one.

And yet, inexplicably, every few years even I am driven mad with consumer lust. It happened with my car (the first time I saw a Miata, I knew I had to have one, even though I'm too tall and have to slouch to keep my head from hitting the roof while I drive), it happened with my Asteroids Deluxe game, and now...

First, a little background. I've never been a big fan of portable gaming - in fact, over the course of my long gaming life, I've owned a single handheld game: the original Mattel Football game.

You old folks will remember this - entirely LED based, you were a little red dot that dodged other red dots. Sound effects consisted of a ticking timer, and a dismal little "Doop de doop" tune when you scored a touchdown. Looking back on it, it's inconceivable that someone would spend their hard-earned cash on something like this, and yet they sold millions. I mean, it's hardly even a game, really, and required about as much skill to play as it takes to spell "BOOBS" on a calculator (hint: 80085).

In the intervening years, I've encountered a few other handhelds. My daughter had the original Gameboy, and I spent an enjoyable flight to Montreal playing Pokemon Yellow, but when the plane landed I had no desire to play with it further. Likewise, a coworker bought a PSP (with the gorgeous, gorgeous screen), and after playing Lumines for a few minutes I yawned and handed it back to him and never gave it another thought.

But then...there was this:

Yeah, the DS Lite snared me. The more I read about it the more I had to have it. And now that I own one, I can hardly bear to set it down - I just want to sit and fawn over it, Smeagol-style.

The screens? Beautiful and bright. The features? Incredible - wi-fi for multiplayer, touch screen and microphone for unique gameplay. The polish? Unparalleled. It's like an iPod for gaming - it just feels good in your hand. I setup the WiFi connection last night, and while testing the connection it plays a little tune that could best be described as the sound of Fairies dancing. The games? Ranging from unabashedly old school (New Super Mario Bros and Mario Kart DS) to funky new genres like Trauma Center and Osu Tatakae Ouenden (did I mention that Nintendo didn't do any region lockouts, so you can play import games without modding your system)?

It's frankly impossible to justify buying another gaming system - it's not like I really needed to play games "on the go" (my Darling Wife's comment when I showed it to her was "Great, so now you can sit in the back seat and play games when we go on long trips, like the rest of the kids"). And yet, every time I play Mario Bros and close the lid, I can't keep a big goofy grin off my face when Mario says "Bye Bye!"

Worth every damn penny.

WOPR was right

One day last week, I did something I haven't done in months...

I didn't play World of Warcraft.

Barring the occasional server outage, I think the last time that happened was when I was in the hospital during Blake's delivery last year - I didn't always play alot, but at the minimum I always found the time to log in, check the auction house, farm some shards, take a flight path, whatever.

But last week, I finally called it quits...well, technically, I can't actually bring myself to officially quit just yet, so I'm telling myself that I'm just "taking a break". But the writing is on the wall.

What brought me to this sorry state? Funny you should ask...

One evening I was sitting down to my normal "couple of hours juggling playing WoW and family/relationship time", when my Darling Wife walked by and said in an exasperated voice "Oh, you're playing that game again???" - I'm sure that most serious players have heard this question, oh, a few hundred times. For whatever reason, it actually sunk in this time, and I thought "Yeah, I am playing this game again...wtf?"

Around the same time, I was talking to my brother on the phone, and he mentioned that he was still playing WoW, and in fact was part of a guild that was raiding MC, and we were laughing about whether he'd still be able to keep it up after his baby was born. He thought he'd probably be able to do it, because he only raids twice a week, and his raids only took about 6 hours each...

And then there was this, further driving home the point that WoW requires an insane investment of time and effort...

Finally, one of the things that's been keeping me plugging away at WoW these last few months was that I had set a goal to hit Rank 10 in PvP, whose reward is some fairly snazzy gear. I finally did the math and realized that it was going to take me about another month of 15-20 hours per week grinding to make it to Rank 10. In fact, since I am competing with the rest of the server population for that rank, it might even take longer since the bulk of the population will be enjoying their summer vacation by playing 8-12 hours per day.

If you look at the canonical "four types of MUD players", I'm pretty squarely in the "achiever" category - playing WoW for me has been all about setting goals for my character, hitting those goals, and then setting new ones (those goals seldom had anything to do with "level", interestingly enough - "levelling up" was just something that happened as I pursued my various objectives, which is why it took me a year to hit 60).

Thanks to all of the above, I've come to the sad realization that progress in WoW post-60 requires a level of dedication that I don't think I can bring to the task any longer. And playing without making progress has no appeal to me (I love PvP, but PvPing without at least Tier 1 gear is suicide) - as a result, I'd say that a good 50% of the time I spent playing had become not particularly fun. So...I stopped. As in, didn't log in, didn't read the forums, nada. Zip. Turns out, the longer I was away from the game, the less I wanted to play.

Unsurprisingly, removing WoW left quite a hole in my brain - I know this, because I filled it up with lots of shiny new things:

• Other games!
  Turns out, there are other games out there. In my rush to jump into Azeroth, I left some unfinished business, so I finally got around to bringing the hammer down on Officer Tenpenny as well as the Prophet of Truth and his misguided minions.
  My game queue is once again fully stocked: Darwinia, Shadow of the Colossus, HL2: Ep 1, Civ IV, Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines... Good times ahead. Heck, I may even go back and finish God of War.
  
• Arcade madness!
  A year or so ago, my DW's PC went on the blink, so I bought her a new one from a guy on Craig's list, who sells PCs out of the trunk of his car. Surprise! - it was a piece of crap, with a wonky prototype/defective CPU and a budget motherboard that didn't even have an AGP slot. I ended up just buying new motherboards and CPUs and rebuilding both PCs, leaving me with a new low-end, but still fairly beefy computer to play around with.
  
  Thanks to the magic of The Internet, I quickly filled it with pornogra...I mean, illegal classic arcade ROMs, with the idea that I'd turn my arcade cabinet into a MAME box.
  
  Unfortunately, around this same time the monitor on my arcade cabinet went out...and I started getting serious about WoW, leaving all this stuff to collect dust. Once WoW was out of the way, I had time to put a capkit in my monitor, configure an arcade UI for the machine, and order/install/build hardware to let the PC talk to my cabinet's monitor, control panel, and speaker. And now, my cabinet plays over 1000 old arcade games...which if you ignore the nostalgia factor, is not much different than having a PC full of shareware.
  
  Ah, but that nostalgia! I already owned many of these games, so I can vouch for the fact that the emulated versions are so close to the originals that you can't tell the difference. It's just incredible how well it turned out (ignore the blurriness of the pictures - I don't have a tripod).
  
  Here's the front end (1672 games! Of course, most of them are bootleg versions of Space Invaders and Pac-Man):
  
  
  
  And good ol' Robotron:
  
  
  
  Ms. Pac-Man (it's a vertical game on a horizontal monitor, which makes the purist in me want to cry, but it still looks/plays great):
  
  
  
  
  My old fave, Gauntlet:
  
  
  
  
  And, last but not least:
  
  
  
  
  Of course, no mention of Dragon's Lair is complete without the obligatory fan-service shot of the delightful Princess Daphne:
  
  
  
  I thought I'd grown immune to the arcade bug, but apparently not. Next up is a new set of joysticks (I can't very well play Ms. Pac-Man with a standard 8-way joystick), and either a spinner (for Arkanoid/Omega Race/Star Trek/etc) or a trackball (for Marble Madness, Centipede, Missile Command). I only have room for one on the control panel, sadly... decisions, decisions...
  
  Of course, that assumes that I don't just start playing WoW again...