Deluge-ional

Since last weeks post was entering the "droning on" phase, I thought I'd report the other side of my reclusive hermit life this week.

Anyone who is dyed in the video-card PC gamer knows that the past couple of years has been less than exceptional for the industry (barring the whole MMO thing). Sure, there's been a few titles, but many of them were the leavings of X-Box or Playstation games. Lamenting this trend is dealt with on other posts so I won't bore you (again) with them here.

The past month though, there's been a bit of a sea-change.

It started off with Lighthouse Interactive releasing yet another expansion for Sword of the Stars, one of my fave-rave all time stays-on-the-hard-drive games. The expansion introduces a new race (totaling 6 now), revamps the whole administration of planets and technology and in my opinion takes the game to "finis". They really can't do much more without a whole rewrite. I'm hoping they do.

Then a couple of weeks ago, I found Good Old Games. At first, I thought it was just another attempt to sell abandon-ware nobody wanted in the first place. Then I saw the titles: Fallout, Sacrifice, Descent, Freespace, Messiah. And others which sent me reeling into nostalgic, pixelated glory. Full games, fully patched, modded to run on XP, no DRM. And all for less than $10 a game. So I picked a couple of them up (Freespace 2 and Sacrifice). Ah, gaming comfort food.

But this week, I fell hard. Capa showed me the collectors edition Fallout 3 complete with bobble head and lunch box. I liked the first two, so I checked out the game-play and promo videos. An after work trip to Best Buy on Friday to check out cheap DVDs saw me pick this up instead (as well as Bioshock: it was $25).

I've been lost in the Wasteland ever since. Capa did warn me this could happen (from experience). So now, I have five games I'm currently playing (although Fallout 3 has taken the lion's share of my time).

And as soon as I hit the "Publish Post" button, there's some slavers that need to have things ... explained to the them. Looks like my social calender will be lost and forgotten.