Who blogs here:
Erik spends his night and weekends saving worlds, slaying beasts and organizing mismatch shapes into straight lines. While First-person shooters (FPS),
survival horror and platformers are some of his favorite, there are no genre of game he won't play. From PC to PSP, Xbox to Wii. Erik is just as passionate
with playing games as he is talking about them.
J.R. is the sorta-completionist gamer. He almost always completes the main story arc in all games he plays, but seldom plays the "gamer's game" to complete everything. He'll never get all 120 stars or fight Emerald Weapon, but he will save the day. His favorite genres are RPG, Action/Adventure, Platformer, and MMO. He doesn't like fighting games and is rather picky about FPSs.
Ted has been hooked on gaming since the birth of the Atari 2600, when high fantasy adventure consisted of maneuvering a colored square through a castle maze while dodging pesky dragons that looked like 2D seahorses with beaks and wacky bats that took great pleasure in stealing your keys. To this day, while he enjoys platformers, first-person shooters and puzzlers, he is most passionate about RPGs and any other games which weave great stories into the overall experience.
Amethyst, a gamer that giggles at calling herself a gamer because she fits none of the glamorous stereotypes of female gamers, has been gaming since her father brought home the sparkly new Nintendo Entertainment System back in '89. Up until then she had dabbled with the Atari at a cousin's, but it was Super Mario Brothers, Duck Hunt and pounding with her hands on the Power Pad in World Class Track Meet that sealed her fate. Despite a three year stint that she doesn't talk about, she has been playing video games and other nerdly activities with enthusiasm. She enjoys puzzlers, RPGs, MMORPGs, certain shooters/fighters, platformers, magic carpet rides and um, mechanical pencil sharpeners. She hates, despite a couple of exceptions, racing games and sports games. Amethyst is married to Erik and is friends with J.R. and Ted.
Skipped Birthdays Yield Belated Surprises
Spyderbyte
| 1/06/2009 9:33 am |
Game On
I know it's uncommon for anyone to skip a birthday. Some celebrations get postponed for various reasons, true, but usually everyone alive eventually acknowledges (admits? concedes?) that they have grown one year older.
Today is the birthday of fellow Game On writer (and one of my wonderful friends) Amethyst. Unlike the topic of mine today, acknowlegement and celebration of her birthday today shall not be skipped (evaded?) - please join me in the well-wishes: Happy Birthday, Amethyst!
Her birthday, though, also brought to mind one of my holiday activities one day over the past weeks. I re-entered a world I've long neglected, Guild Wars, mostly to see if it still worked on my aging laptop, but also because I'm starting to crave playing an MMO again. I'm pleased to report that I was able to get the game running without any issues. And there they were; my old friends. Characters I've created as many as three years ago stared back at me from the the virtual beyond.
I logged in with my eldest, a level 16 Necromancer/Warrior, and waited while some of the data updated. Once loaded, I began to try to refamiliarize myself with some of the key commands. I checked my inventory, and there I found a few surprises. You see, I did not know it had been over three years since creating this character until I saw my latest gift in my pack celebrating my third year in the game. This shouldn't have come as a complete surprise because it is, after all, my third such gift (a miniature character from the game that you can summon to follow you about for fun, much like pets in World of Warcraft) - I'd simply not thought about these gifts since the last time I logged in. So, surprise! Happy Belated "Birth"day to me!
Actually, there will be a surprise of sorts for me should I make more of a habit of playing GW this year. I don't know when my fourth GW birthday falls (I'm going to guess sometime this summer, as I vaguely recall starting sometime in the summer of 2005). It remains to be seen if I'll get that gift on my in-game birthday, or sometime next year when I login and am once again surprised by another birthday past.
blog entry tag reference
culture | gaming | mmorpg | online | people
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