Here's an oldie but a goodie. A spontaneous argument broke out between me and my mom. She claimed that Stephen King is jealous of Stephanie Meyer, and implied that Meyer is a better writer than King. I argued that Meyer writes like a fanfic novice, her stories are shallow, and she owes her success more to luck than talent.

This led into a bigger argument where we started countering each other's points. Long story short, she claimed that women want aggressive, domineering men who will take charge of every aspect of their lives. She argued that stalking is romantic, breaking and entering is romantic, kidnapping is romantic, post-breakup suicide attempts are romantic, etc. I, meanwhile, am getting increasingly disgusted. So I finally said "so, if a woman answers the door with a black eye and said 'he hit me because he loves me,' you'd consider that romantic too?"

Her answer was yes.

The argument just fell apart from there, to the point where I just had to walk away because there was no getting through to her. It didn't help that she claimed that any argument, no matter what it is, is invalid because I don't "get it" because I'm male. She basically claimed than no male can criticize Twilight no matter what their arguments may be. "So what about all the women and young girls who are saying the same things?" I asked. She said their opinions don't matter anyway.

So her arguments are based on wild generalizations and sweeping dismissals. I got a little upset when she came within an inch of claiming that Meyer invented the vampire genre.

Overall I'm a bit irritated, but mostly sad. Perhaps I'm reading too much into this, and I'm fully aware that her views do not represent those of others. I'm sure most Twilight fans would be disgusted by my mother's assertion that abusive = romantic. At least, I hope so. I am not a feminist, and am not one prone to moral outrage, so I like to think that if I am getting morally offended by something that feels insulting to women, something is fucked up.

For this entry I'm going to write about something that offends me personally. That thing is this: people who do not say what they mean.

This behavior takes several different forms, all of them infuriating to varying degrees, but for the sake of length I will focus on one form in particular. There have been some instances where, seemingly out of nowhere, someone has just exploded on me. Apparently I had done something to offend this person, but I have no idea what that might have been. It gets even more aggravating when I ask what I did and the offended responds with "you KNOW what you did!"

No, I really don't know.

So after trying (and usually failing) to get the offended party to calm the fuck down, and he's finally rational enough to talk about the issue without resorting to ad hominem attacks and accusatory slurs, I ask, "if this thing bothered you so much, why didn't you bring this up sooner?" To which the response is invariably "because I didn't want to hurt your feelings."

At this point I am just stunned. I mean, think about it. The person in question thought that simply taking me aside and saying "that thing you just did or said made me uncomfortable and I'd like you to stop" would be too devastating, and yet he thinks that building resentment towards me to the point where he ends up shouting in my face is somehow less hurtful?

In the former case I may have been a little embarrassed by whatever social faux pas I'd committed, and I may feel self-conscious for an hour or so, but I'd get over it. In the latter case, both of us get hurt and a relatively small matter is escalated into a full-blown fight that could potentially sour a friendship.

This also leads to me feeling a little resentful. What, does this person think that I'm too fragile to handle a little criticism? Resentment turns to anger if the offended party had decided to talk about me behind my back. That behavior displays not only a lack of trust, but an active disrespect towards me.

I have very little tolerance for this behavior, and I have been known to cut ties with people who pull this kind of bullshit. If someone can't be open and honest with me and feels they must resort to underhanded tactics and petty gossip, I don't want that person around me. I do not suffer fools gladly, nor will I suffer cowards.

The fetching slab of man-meat shown at the end of my last post is James Vega, a new party member introduced in Mass Effect 3. I had intentionally avoided Mass Effect 3 news for fear of spoilers, so I wasn't aware of him until I sat down and played the Mass Effect 3 demo. When I first saw this guy I imagined the Brokeback Mountain theme playing in the background. It looks like I wasn't the only one.



The thought that ran through my head when I first saw this guy was "OMG, if this is who we get, then all is forgiven, Bioware! He's SO worth waiting 3 games for!" I was so curious as to whether or not he was the new gay love interest that I ignored my spoiler blockade to learn more about him. Unfortunately Bioware has been extremely tight-lipped about who is or is not a romance option, so it wasn't until the game was released that I was able to get confirmation from the Bioware message board members who are playing the game.

The answer was: no Vega for you!

It wouldn't be a Mass Effect game without a cock block.

So who DO we get? Investigating further, it turns out that male Shepards get a new character named Steve Cortez, a shuttle pilot. I haven't played the game yet, so I know nothing about this guy, and I'm not curious enough to risk spoilers again to learn more about him. Maybe he's interesting, or maybe not. I'll just have to see.

So it's been 3 games and all we get is some new guy who isn't even a party member? I know I should be grateful that we got anything at all, but I'm beginning to feel a little shortchanged here. But, oh, was I in for a surprise.

Rumors had circulated that Kaiden Alenko, a returning party member from Mass Effect 1, would also be a male love interest. It sort of made sense since, as I pointed out back in part one, Kaiden was originally supposed to be a male romance option to begin with. The question of "is he or isn't he?" lit up the Mass Effect forum and sparked quite a few arguments. Rumors led to "leaked" information, some of which was publicly disavowed by a Bioware staff member as misinformation. Kaiden's romance status remained a mystery up until the game's release, when video evidence was finally made available.

Kaiden Alenko is available to male player-characters.

At first I was ecstatic. I'd wanted him since the very first game, after all. Then, shock and horror, I remembered that Kaiden no longer exists in my game! I let him die in the first game. I had a female Shepard romance him, so it seemed logical that my Male Shepard rescue Ashley instead of Kaiden so each of my characters have one of them.

Mass Effect has managed to make me unwittingly cock block myself!

You know what? No! I'm not accepting that. So you know what I did? I started over. I went back to Mass Effect 1, replayed the section where I choose to save either Ashley or Kaiden, and saved Kaiden. Thank goodness I happened to have a save file right at that point, and I only had to play about 2 hours to finish the game and make the change permanent.

I imported that save game into Mass Effect 2 and I'm playing it from start to finish, for the umpteenth time, so I can have Kaiden available to me in Mass Effect 3. I waited almost 5 years for this, and I'll be damned if I'm going to get screwed out of getting what I've wanted since the first fucking game!

I just spent the past 12 hours playing Mass Effect 2 practically non-stop. I am going to finish this game, do every sidequest, complete every god damn DLC mission, and have a perfect save file with which to continue into the third game. I planned this shit out. I intend to do all this by Sunday.

My collector's edition of Mass Effect 3 sits on my shelf, unopened. I'm not even going to look at it until I get this done. Yes, I am that crazy. Yes, I am that obsessive. Yes, I have WAY too much time on my hands. I'm doing this mainly on principal. Bioware removed content from the first game, content that interested me, and now that they've made amends I am going to reap the benefits even if I have to go through the whole goddamn series to do it.

So my copy of Mass Effect 3 will sit, forgotten, on my shelf until Sunday. Monday or Tuesday at the very latest.

At this point I pretty much wrote off the possibility of there being any same-sex content in Mass Effect and went on about my business. It didn't make me love the series any less, and outside of a brief moment of irritation I had no negative feelings about the series in regard to its romance content. When Mass Effect 2 was announced, you'd better believe I pre-ordered the collector's edition in a heartbeat. On the whole I considered Mass Effect to be a universe in which gays simply didn't exist, which I was fine with. It's how most video game universes are, after all.

But then something happened to change that perception.

As an eager fan, I pretty much devoured the Mass Effect novels as soon as they were released, anxious for more Mass Effect content to consume. In the novel Mass Effect: Ascension we're introduced to a character named Hendel Mitra, a former Alliance Marine and current security chief of the Grissom Academy. Hendel is also the first homosexual male character in the Mass Effect series.

That surprised me, to say the least. Here was an actual gay character in Mass Effect. On top of that, Bioware released Dragon Age: Origins, a fantasy role-playing game, which features a homosexual male romance option in the form of Zevran, an elf rogue. A part of me began to hope that things would be different in Mass Effect 2. Bioware were clearly open to the idea of same-sex romances, as proved by the previous two examples. Maybe, just maybe, I'd be pleasantly surprised this time.

There is no gay male option in Mass Effect 2, though a female Shepard can have a kinda-sorta fling with the human female yeoman. I had been cock blocked a second time.

At this point it felt as if Bioware were just plain messing with me. I shrugged it off and went on to consider Hendel an anomaly, something that will only appear in the books. I had a blast playing Mass Effect 2, and completed it multiple times. When Mass Effect 3 was announced, I once again pre-ordered the collector's edition at the first opportunity. I am a huge Mass Effect fan, and whether or not it includes GLBT content is completely irrelevant to my enjoyment of the games. It would be nice if it were included, but I never considered it to be the end of the world if it wasn't.

But then the announcement came: Mass Effect 3 would FINALLY feature a gay romance option that isn't ambiguously lesbian. I suppose I should have seen this coming after the everyone-is-bi-and-wants-to-fuck-you cast of Dragon Age 2, but the news took me by surprise.

I was still a little cautious, though, determined not to get my hopes up. My Shepard had already had his heart broken by Kaiden, so who could Bioware possibly include in Mass Effect 3 that could replace him?



Oh ... oh my!

I'll be in my bunk.

This is the story of Mass Effect, which I consider to be one of the biggest cock-teases in all of gaming.

I'm a gamer (though I dislike the term), and a huge Mass Effect fan. I'm also gay. Being gay and a gamer pretty much means that you are, like everywhere else, in the minority; but unlike cinema and literature, which have their own sub-genres of GLBT media, you'd be lucky if the most you get out of a video game is an effeminate stereotype played for comic relief. This has noticeably improved in recent years, thanks in no small part to Bioware. It's important to note that I am not criticizing Bioware, and in fact I applaud them for their contributions to GLBT visibility in the gaming medium, which has been a long time coming.

Bioware has been open to the idea of gays in games since pretty early on, but until fairly recently they've been pretty timid about it. About as brave as old Bioware got on the subject was including a gay romance in Jade Empire. The problem with this is ... well ... look for yourself.



So, yeah. Heterosexual and lesbian kissing are perfectly okay to show on screen, but having two men kiss is crossing the fucking line. The gay kiss fades to black before you get to see it. It's possible to access that scene on the PC version with the help of mods, though.

This trend would continue into the first Mass Effect game, which features heterosexual and lesbian options, but no gay male option. There's a little more to it than that, which I will explain shortly. With the lesbian option, Bioware tried to get a little clever. You see, the only female character a femshep can do the dirty with is Liara, who belongs to an alien species called the Asari. The Asari are monogendered, meaning they're all female. Bioware's rationale, and that of some fans, is that since the Asari species only has one gender, a female romancing her does not technically count as lesbianism. Personally I think that reasoning is bullshit. Asari are, for all intents and purposes, female. While the differences between males and females may mean nothing to Asari, it certainly means something to Shepard, a human, and to the human gamers who are playing this game.

Now here's the interesting part: Bioware had originally intended for there to be a gay option in the first Mass Effect. The characters Ashley Williams and Kaiden Alenko were supposed to be same-sex romance options. This is not some stray idea that never made it out of the cutting room; they did the work; they recorded the dialogue. The files are accessible on the game disc.



For whatever reason, they decided to remove the gay content from the game. Maybe it was executive meddling from Microsoft, or maybe they were afraid of consumer backlash. I don't know. The end result was that gay gamers were definitively cock blocked.

Of course, I knew none of this when I first played Mass Effect. I didn't feel the least bit disappointed that there was no same-sex romance at the time, because, let's face it, the very idea of being able to romance other dudes in a video game was a pretty ludicrous expectation. Part of being gay in the gaming world is being used to being excluded. Nearly all hardcore games are made to cater to white heterosexual males. Occasionally gay gamers might get tossed a bone (no pun intended) in the form of a gay supporting character, or a somewhat ambiguous character, but nothing that is given anywhere near the weight, emotion, or seriousness of what the straight guys get. That's just how it's always been.

But knowing that the content was there; that the scenes were recorded and pretty much finished, but taken out at the last minute ... I must admit to feeling a little cheated. Knowing that this content had been targeted specifically for removal made this feel personal. It felt as if Bioware were saying, "you can't have this content, because we think that who you are, how you were born, is too offensive."

Of course it isn't as dramatic as that, but that's the impression I got at the time.

There have been many, many occasions in the past when I read about the gaming audience's latest temper tantrum and could do nothing but shake my head in disbelief, then promptly smack my forehead with my palm when I realize that, yes, gamers really are behaving that childishly. It's at such moment when I think that Fox News's portrayal of gamers as anti-social basement dwellers might have some actual merit, then I take a shower in order to wash away the shame.

I'm just saying, it's really hard to stick up for gaming when the gaming community itself provides, through its own behavior, the best evidence to support its opponents' arguments.

This latest moment of "what the fuck is wrong with these people?" comes from a manufactured controversy based on something a Bioware writer said five years ago. Long story short, she voiced the opinion that it would be handy if games had a feature that allowed players to skip combat scenes, much like present-day games allow for the skipping of cutscenes and conversations. She also said that's she's not much of a gamer herself.

Now any rational person who disagreed with this view may have written a well-reasoned rebuttal, or perhaps sent her an e-mail explaining why they believe that her idea is not very feasible. The less rational response would be to go on a forum somewhere and bitch about it, as gamers so often do. I have no problem with going that route; I understand that irritated people feel the need to let off steam, and it is ultimately harmless.

But no! Gamers have opted to skip the rational and less rational (yet understandable) response and go straight for this.



Cue the flooding of her twitter accounts with sexist, vulgar, hate-filled bile. Lovely comments such as "fat bitch" and "ugly cunt" were thrown around, sprinkled with a few requests for her immediate suicide. As if that wasn't enough, her e-mail and home phone number received similar treatment.

Now, I can understand being irritated by an opinion, or even offended. Goddess knows I've had my share of outrages on some issues, but this level of vitriol is just plain uncalled for. Shall we now add video games, along with religion and politics, to the list of things that shouldn't be discussed in mixed company? Are games really such an important, hot-button subject that one person's opinion should warrant that kind of abuse? The woman gave an opinion on game design; it's not as if she raped and tortured a newbown baby and forced everyone to watch!

TVTropes has a name for this behavior. It's called disproportionate retribution. This is the equivalent of beating someone unconscious for drinking the last soda in the fridge ... FIVE YEARS AGO!

This is why I called this a manufactured controversy, because the sense of urgency behind it is completely artificial! Five years is quite a chunk of time. A lot can change in five years. Maybe she doesn't hold that opinion anymore. Maybe she's played games more regularly in the intervening time. If not, then so what? Judging by the things people have written, there is this sense that they think that the entirety of gaming is under attack; that Hepler, and, by extension, Bioware, are on some massive campaign to remove gameplay from video games. Never mind that there is more to video games than combat, and having an OPTION to skip certain parts of the game if you CHOOSE has absolutely ZERO effect on how you play the game. Ignoring that bit of logic, Hepler made that statement five years ago! If there were some conspiracy to destroy gaming by removing combat, don't you think it would have happened by now?

This controversy is entirely made up. People are going apeshit over baseless fears and assumptions. But I get the feeling that it's not even that. I think there is something even more insidious at work here, which leads me to the second of Hepler's so-called crimes.

She stated that she doesn't enjoy games. To the people calling her every swear word under the sun and labeling her as a "cancer," that statement is nothing short of heresy. They attack her with the same kind of mob mentality that convinced people that murdering women under suspicion of "witchcraft" was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. "Anyone who makes games must be a GAMER!" they cry. "You must understand your medium!" they scream. Statement which, when given any amount of thought, are obvious bullshit.

What gamers forget is that video games are a business. As with all businesses, not everyone who works there is going to have a burning passion for the product being produced. I once worked in the shoe section of a department store, despite the fact that I have no fucks to give about either retail or shoes.

Hepler is FAR from the first writer to write for a paycheck rather than passion. Just look at the Twilight knock-offs that started flooding the shelves after that horrible book got big. I find it highly unlikely that every one of those faux-Twilight authors were writing their dream book. Hell, even that comparison doesn't apply. She could positively love writing her characters and seeing the words she's written turned into a piece of interactive fiction. I don't watch many movies; I barely watch any television compared to everyone else, but I'd LOVE to see one of my stories made into a movie or a TV series. Hepler has been working in the gaming industry for years; she understands more about the medium than the majority of the idiots shouting that she doesn't understand the medium.

If every writer, every artist, every voice actor, and so on, had to be a hardcore gamer in order to make video games, it would not be that big of a stretch to say that the gaming industry would find itself on life support very quickly.

This attitude of "games for GAMERS!" hints at another form of stupidity that has been an emerging problem in gaming culture for quite some time now. That problem is gamers' desire for gaming to be exclusive; accessible only to those they deem "worthy" of the privilege (meaning, hardcore gamers like themselves and no one else). It is an insularity that borders on downright xenophobia. The Game Overthinker touched on this problem in one of his videos, and I couldn't put it better myself.

Hepler's real crime isn't simply stating an opinion that they disagreed with; if it were just that, the response wouldn't have been as over-the-top and downright vicious as it has been. No, her real crime was not being a hardcore gamer, and advocating inclusiveness in games so that you don't have to be hardcore in order to enjoy them. Gamers used Hepler as a representation of the mainstream audience, and their response was basically them telling the mainstream to go fuck themselves. This also leads to one of gaming's biggest hypocrisies, which was spelled out in the video I linked to above. In case you don't feel like viewing it, I'll quote one particularly good statement from it.

"Because, you see, we didn't really want everyone else to become gamers or to find games they enjoyed. We wanted them to enjoy OUR games and increase OUR standing. We wanted all the benefits of gaming becoming mainstream without any of the inherent change that mainstreaming brings. We wanted THEM to bolster OUR ranks and lend us legitimacy, but not to have any input or needs of their own, and that's bullshit, gang!"

Gamers have demanded that games be taken seriously, to be considered an art form, to be considered just as legitimate as television and film. Yet, at the same time, they want gaming to remain exclusive, an insular industry where games are made only by gamers and only for gamers. So when a person like Hepler, who works in the industry, admits to not being a hardcore gamer, they brand her a heretical cancer and call for her head on a pike.

So they want gaming to have all the benefits of being mainstream without having to let the actual mainstream crowd in, at least not without them being converted into hardcore gamers who share their taste for Call of Duty and Halo beforehand. And that is, indeed, bullshit.

You can't have it both ways. Like it or not, gamers are getting exactly what they claimed they wanted. Gaming is growing into a more widely accepted industry, and with that comes the inclusion of people whose idea of fun might not be blowing each other up in an online First-Person shooter deathmatch (I'M one of those people, and I was practically RAISED as a gamer). There will be those who might not be interested in combat heavy games and might like to skip over those bits so they can enjoy the story instead. Hell, I've experienced both sides of that. There have been times when I wanted everyone to shut the hell up so I can get back to the killing, and times when I wasn't at all interested in the combat areas and wanted to learn more about the characters instead.

You can skip a boring part of a book. You can skip chapters on DVDs. You can fast-forward your DVR-recorded television shows. Being able to skip over the bits of games that don't interest you will no more destroy gaming than the fast-forward button destroyed movies. The mere existence of the option does not harm you in any way; you're not being forced to skip over combat levels if you don't want to. If the very idea that someone, somewhere, might be enjoying their games in a different way than you, offends you so much, then I can only offer one piece of advice.

GROW THE FUCK UP!

When my father died and we were making the funeral arrangements, one of the things I really wanted was to add a track to the playlist Mom was making. I tried to find the perfect song that expressed my feelings, but I could find nothing. I don't generally listen to love songs, so the selection was pretty slim to begin with. I had a couple of tracks in mind, but they didn't feel right for one reason or another. Too happy, too sad, or the melody is right but the lyrics aren't appropriate. Even after the funeral was over I kept looking for that one song, and I found it in an unexpected place.

When I saw the trailers for Final Fantasy XIII-2 I thought the song playing in the background sounded nice, but I didn't pay attention to it. The game's characters talked over the music and I was much more interested in what they were doing rather than the background music. Then I played Final Fantasy XIII-2. When I defeated the final boss and viewed the ending, that song played. That was the first time I truly heard the song, and I was moved by it. I went over to my collector's edition, which includes the game's four-disc soundtrack, and looked for that song. Unfortunately, it was not included. So I tracked down the song, downloaded it, and gave it a listen. Outside the context of a video game, where I could really pay attention to the lyrics, I know instantly that I'd found the perfect song to express my feelings about Dad's death.

I added the song to my Final Fantasy soundtrack on my iPod, putting it at the end of the fourth disc, and then I went straight to my mother and played it for her, after explaining how I'd been looking for just such a song for months. She was deeply touched by the music. As the song went on, she began to cry. I almost cried myself. She thanked me deeply for finding it for her and had me transfer a copy to her iPod. She's listening to it right now, in fact. I can hear it through the door, with her singing along.

If you haven't played Final fantasy XIII-2 or watched the trailers, the song is "New World" by Charice, from her 2011 album "Infinity." I don't listen to pop music, but I can recognize beauty no matter where it comes from.



Mother asked me to put the song on a CD so she can give it to a co-worker. This co-worker's husband died three weeks after Dad, of the same type of cancer, and was diagnosed exactly three weeks after Dad. They are, as she describes it, sisters in grief. I hope that this song will move her as it has moved my mother.

Wow, gamers sure are difficult to please.

I just finished playing Final fantasy XIII-2, and I have to say it's a very impressive game. To listen to the reviews and the general comments going around, you'd think this were terrible. If you cut through all the ridiculous hyperbole, though, this is just another case of the Final Fantasy curse. What is the Final Fantasy curse? It's the overblown expectations which stems from one particular game in the series that has been romanticized to cartoonish extremes. That game is, of course, Final Fantasy VII.

Once upon a time Square released the seventh installment in the Final Fantasy series, which received critical acclaim and to this day is considered one of the best games ever made. The game had groundbreaking production values for its time, and it got by mainly on that. When you looked past all the pretty visuals and cinematics you were left with a pretty cut-and-paste RPG that didn't break any new ground at all. In terms of gameplay and story, Final Fantasy VII was average at best, but its visuals and cinematic flare were unprecedented in the genre for its time. In terms of gameplay there have been better, more inventive games before Final Fantasy VII and after it, some of which were even previous and subsequent entries in the Final Fantasy series.

Final Fantasy VII managed to cement itself into the hall of gaming classics not by being a good game, but for introducing a new level of technical mastery that hadn't been done quite so well before. Final Fantasy VII was, for many people, their first RPG, and even RPG veterans of the time were wowed by all the pretty. A result is that modern gamers tend to look back on Final Fantasy VII through nostalgia goggles which renders them blind to the more average qualities of the game. This has eventually led to a lionization of the game, with praise heaped upon every aspect of the title, even in areas where the praise is entirely undeserved.

Final Fantasy VII is more myth than game now. There are effectively two versions of that game: the version people remember and the version that actually exists. The former is a thing that has been risen to almost divine levels of praise and is considered exempt from criticism (for example, the mere fact that I called the game average is sure to piss people off), and the latter is, well ... an average game that is more style than substance. This is not to discredit the impact Final Fantasy VII has had on the gaming world. It was a technical marvel for its time, it introduced a lot of new blood into the RPG genre, and the industry is better off overall for its existence. What I am saying is that, where Final Fantasy VII is concerned, gamers tend to throw objectivity out the window after beating it to death with a seven foot buster sword.

The end result of all this is that Square's newer Final Fantasy games are compared to the lionized version of Final Fantasy VII and not the actual version of the game that exists, which is an impossible standard. Square would have to release a game that is ten times better than the real Final Fantasy VII for it to be considered even a fraction as good as the mythical version that it's being compared to.

Final fantasy XIII-2 is better than Final Fantasy VII, and many of the faults people levy at XIII-2 apply even more so to VII.

One of the larger complaints about XIII-2 is its story, which has received many a cry of "convoluted!" You want to talk about convolution, try explaining the plot of Final Fantasy VII. Hell, just try explaining Sephiroth in a way that makes sense. Lordkat pointed this out in one of his videos. Compared to VII, the plot of XIII-2 is downright simple.

What I find most baffling is how people tend to ignore something very important that has happened. When Square-Enix released Final Fantasy XIII it was greatly criticized (and rightly so) for its linearity and several issues with the gameplay. In response, Square actually LISTENED to their fans and released a follow-up which specifically addresses the issues that were raised. The fans spoke and Square listened. The response to this has been a collective "meh" from gamers everywhere. Not only that, but some of the reviews I've read have actually painted Square's acceptance of fan feedback as some kind of desperate act, painting XIII-2 as a sad apology for XIII. Holy shit, are we a bunch of assholes.

So now we have gamers leaving comments declaring "Final Fantasy is dead" and longing for a return of Final Fantasy VII. The funny part is, Square's latest entry into the series is more Final Fantasy VII than Final Fantasy VII, and surpasses that game in several ways. I find Caius Ballad to be a stronger, more compelling villain than Sepheroth ever was. At least I can understand what the hell Caius is.

I've been playing Star Wars: The Old Republic quite a bit recently. And by "quite a bit" I mean that I now have a level 47 Imperial Agent (Sniper) and will probably hit the max level (50) before my 30 day free trial is up, and I didn't even really start playing until a week after I bought the game. Did I mention that it is ABSURDLY easy to level up in this game? It's not necessarily that it takes less grinding to level up than in other games, though that's part of it, but rather it's how the game is structured that makes the difference.

What I really like about this game is that each class has its own unique story, fully voiced and acted out in Bioware's signature style. So it never comes down to "I got to kill X amount of enemies for exp," it's all about "I really want to see what happens next in the plot!" The MMOs I've played beforehand either had a non-existent story, or a shoehorned-in story which is basically just a thinly-veiled excuse to explain why you're running around and poking goblins with sharp things. The Old Republic reverses this, and the story takes center stage. So I'm not all that interested in min-maxing my character or mindlessly killing enemies for money and experience point. No, I'm actually interested in what's going to happen to my character from a story perspective. Frankly, I think that's awesome.

Probably the best thing about The Old Republic, in my opinion, is that you can play it solo. There is, of course, plenty of group-based content. Every planet has at least several group missions called heroic missions, and there are also "flashpoints," which are special group-based dungeons with their own storylines that give some great rewards. There are also operations, which are basically flashpoints but involve more players. An operation is the equivalent of a raid dungeon in World of Warcraft. There are also player vs. player options if that's your thing. I personally hate PVP in any game and don't participate in that, so I tend to favor MMOs that don't try to force PVP on you.

For me, though, I play The Old Republic solo the vast majority of the time and pretend I'm playing Knights of the Old Republic 3. I honestly think that this would have been a better game if it were an offline single-player RPG, but that's just my opinion. I have done heroic missions and flashpoints, and when I hit 50 I do intend to try out some operations. I probably won't do so heavily, as I have absolutely no intention of going back to my raid-happy World of Warcraft days. Frankly, if my brother hadn't badgered me to play this game I probably wouldn't have bought it in the first place.

I can easily see this being the last MMO I ever play, and I'll probably cancel my subscription in a few months. It's not that this is a bad game (I wouldn't have praised it otherwise), but I'm just not into online games and playing with other people. I'm a single-player kind of guy who, frankly, doesn't give a damn about online multi-player in any form. If The Old Republic turned out to be one of those MMOs where you have no choice but to group constantly in order to get anything done, my subscription would already be canceled and my copy of the game would be on its way to the nearest dump.

I picked this game up initially out of curiosity, because I'm a big fan of the Knights of the Old Republic games, and also because my brother really wanted me to play. Had The Old Republic been just another World of Warcraft clone with no identity of its own, even those reasons wouldn't have been enough to keep me playing, and I'd have stopped a few days into the game. The Old Republic managed to hold my attention because it spins a genuinely interesting story that I want to see the end of. I may even make other characters so I can experience their stories as well.

Some good news: My psychotic sister received a fair bit of heat for her willfully imposing herself on Mother when she least needed it. As a result, she decided not to move in as she'd originally planned.

In other news, I'm catching up on my reading. I'm trying to read Inheritance by Christopher Paolini, but that book is a massive doorstopper that is padded to all hell. The sheer level of dull, useless padding in this book is actually remarkable to behold. Reading this book has turned into an endurance test to see how much of this crap I can withstand in one sitting until I finally have to put the book down. My best record, so far, is three chapters.

I finally get myself a brand new Kindle Touch and I choose THIS as the first book to read on the device? Am I a glutton for punishment or something?