Saturday, July 19, 2014

Back in April I started a new job. For a couple of weeks I worked both, then I left my old job and started working full time, 40 hour work weeks. That has unfortunately eaten up precious time that I could be playing video games. Or so I thought.

I use a program called Raptr to track my game playing time. I have no way of explaining why other than I just like to know what I've played and for how long. I rarely use Raptr for anything else honestly. One feature is I get a weekly email that tally's up my total time played and which games I spent that time playing.

When I saw this past week's summary, I was kind of blown away at how many hours I spent gaming.To be fair I had an extra day off this week thanks to having to work six days a week for the next month. Total time spent playing was 51 hours and 8 minutes. If you are wondering, yes, that is almost twenty more hours gaming then I spent at work.

I went back to the second week in April when I started work both jobs and was kind of surprised at how much time I have blown playing games. The past three weeks are not ordinary because I have had a couple of extra days off from work and I had this obsession with Dragon Age Origins. But after looking at all the numbers I would say my average game time falls somewhere between 20-25 hours a week.

Again, that is quite surprising. What that is telling me is that I am playing way too much on my days off when I probably could be doing something a bit more constructive, like working on the honey-do list. But, from this time forward I will not complain about having no time to play games, because it's obviously not been the case!

Friday, July 11, 2014

It's A Cornucopia of Games.

Holy cow, this working full time is kicking the crap out of me. I work all day, go home and play games, then when I have a couple of days off I do whatever chores I need to and try to play as much on the computer as I can before having to go back to work. I really don't know how those of you who have full time jobs have been able to live like this for so long.

But like I said, I have been playing games in the evening when I get home from work. For most of June it has been Marvel Heroes, not only at night but on days off as well. I am really loving that game! I love the combat, I love the loot, and most of all I love how different each hero plays from one another. That is unless you play Taskmaster who plays like four different heroes! Oh yeah, I also love that there are soooooo many different heroes to play.

Before my massive ingestion of Marvel Heroes I decided that I wanted to play Splinter Cell Blacklist, but before I do that I wanted to play Splinter Cell Conviction again, a game that I think is underrated and really quite good.

It's not like I needed to play Conviction again, I had already finished the game twice before. No, it was the fact that Blacklist, a game I bought during the winter holiday on sale for about twenty-five bucks, was now on sale for a mere ten bucks. TEN BUCKS!!!! The game sat on a virtual shelf for nearly seven months. So after a couple more rounds with Conviction I finally moved on to Blacklist.

What a frustrating game for the first couple of hours. I'm pretty sure the A.I. is broke for the first couple of missions. That and the change in controls from one game to another really gave Blacklist this difficulty spike that I was not enjoying. But, once I finally got a grasp on the controls and picked up a few gadgets the game turned out to be really good. Not only does it look good, the story and voice acting are quite good as well. But once I finished that it was back to Marvel Heroes for more one year anniversary goodness.

That is till this past weekend. With Dragon Age Inquisition coming in October I had this crazy thought that maybe I'd play through Dragon Age 1 &2 again, especially DA2 since I love that game! Honestly I didn't think I would actually play DAO again; I find the combat to be tedious, it doesn't look all that great, and it's way too freaking long.

Yet after about an hour of checking out mods I fired up a new Human Noble and now I can't stop playing. I feel that DA2 has better combat, looks better, better characters and interactions, but the story in DAO is really good. Add in a few mods that improves the combat and speeds it up a bit and now I'm hooked!

This weekend will be all Marvel Heroes thanks to an increase in XP event, but I am eager to get back into DAO, because Ferelden needs its Grey Warden hero!