The Healing Begins

So my poor waffle-based place of employment has been shut down since last Sunday, when the ceiling bubbled and proceeded to spill lots of dirty rain/snow water down in the kitchen. According to the owner (who's also my old professor - I enjoy having connections, even if they're just to the waffle industry), they'll probably be closed down for another month. Which isn't the best news for my bank account, though it does give me even more free time, not that I need it. Ah well. Every massive water leak has a silver lining. Or at least it does if its not your main source of income, and you're not financially invested in it. Unless that silvery color is mercury...hmm. Though mercury IS the sweetest of the transition metals.

But I digress. My life is largely unexciting, at least from a blogging perspective...I can only chill with Hillary and my friends and enjoy living quietly up here so much before it fails to be interesting to read about. For instance, I think it failed to be interesting to read about before I even started this post. So without further ado, I turn to probably the only interesting thing in this blog, my staple content....hard core nudity! By which I of course mean talking about games.

I can see in myself the signs of getting over the MMO syndrome, at least a little. I've recently beaten C&C3 which, while good, left me wanting more (which may be forthcoming with Tiberium), and I've started Gears of War and re-started (for probably the fourth time) Homeworld: Cataclysm, the only member of the Homeworld series so far that I haven't glomped onto with a child-like glee at first go. Each time I get about half a dozen missions in and then lose all my steam for some reason.

Part of me wants to blame the fact that it wasn't developed by Relic, the geniuses behind Homeworld, Homeworld 2, and Dawn of War. Then again, Barking Dog is apparently what turned into Rockstar Vancouver, the "respectable" arm of the company responsible for all the GTA nonsense. Additionally, it sounds like at least part of the Barking Dog crew is behind Sins of a Solar Empire, which has me even more excited than Homeworld 2. Cinematic capital ship battles with individual maps spanning across multiple star systems? Yes please (I just hope I can run it at any decent level of settings). So in any case, I'm giving Cataclysm another try. It's certainly aged pretty darn well from a visual standpoint, considering it's seven and a half years old at this point.

Can you tell I've been reading a lot of games' and developers' Wikipedia entries lately?

But it seems like the general lesson of the last couple weeks of getting out of a gaming funk is that lots of smaller, more easily accessible free games are the salve for my otherwise neurotic gamer at the moment. As Todd pointed out, the "problem" I may have with non-MMOs is that they end and then there's not anything ostensibly to show for it. As such, I'm a little leery of even starting them. So I've been playing old games and finishing off some ones I was in the middle of to show myself that I can still get enjoyment out of them. In terms of storyline this is amazingly true, especially with Okami. But I'm still a little reluctant to start into all the new content I've found.

But with the help of the good folks over at the Great Games Experiment and an absurd amount of time poring through pages of freeware, I've downloaded or bookmarked a good two dozen free games, or browser games, and a couple more sites that seem to want to be the Facebook for games. I've been able to delve into these a lot more readily since I have absolutely no investment in them, especially if a single round of play takes five or ten minutes. At the very least, they're free (which is always good).

So in the coming posts, I shall share with you the fruits of my free time! At the very least I can point you guys towards some good games, and maybe reviewing them will be an impetus to play more and get even further out of this funk, such as it is.