Mood: Excellent..
Music: About Her, Malcolm McLaren
Game: A Tale In The Desert 3, World of Warcraft (Barely), Uno, Marble Blast, Gauntlet
Book: Nothing. Need a new book....
Watching: Nothing yet.
Weather: 68, a bit grey.
Today is the first day of summer. Was a bit chilly in the morning, grey...got warmer and sunnier. I'm really enjoying my job, still. I really, really like the people I work with.
Tonight, I played some XBox Live! with a bunch of friends. Adam, Pete, Dave, George...or as the world knows them: Giant Octopus, Keg O War, Mr. Silverblood, and BoosterMPS. We started out playing Uno...and frankly, spent about an hour in absolute tears from laughing so hard. When Adam left, George jumped in. When Dave left, we were left with 3 people, and decided to play Gauntlet. We played that for 15 minutes, cursing each other, and decided to bounce to Marble Blast, whereupon the three of us spent another hour laughing and cursing at each other.
The fact that Adam and Dave live in Boston, Keg lives in Philly, and Booster lives in DC didn't keep us from having a great time. Adam works in Advertising, like me...although he's ridiculously creative, and I just make schedules. Booster is a former NASA flight controller for the space shuttle. (Yes...THE Space Shuttle.) Adam and I knew each other in real life before we started gaming together...but the rest of the fellas...none of us had met before we started playing online together. At this point, we've been gaming for literally years...literally since the day Live! came out. And, in fact, some of us were beta testers for Live! and played together BEFORE Live was launched.
In any case, the five of us spent what effectively amounts to two and a half hours playing online...not unusual. What IS unusual is that, all night, we played only XBox Live Arcade games. Fully downloadable games that cost us about eight bucks apiece for each game.
In a world where games regularly run from forty to sixty bucks apiece, to have played all night for less than half that, and having three games to show for it...well, that's not such a bad thing.
The truth is that I do play the 360 quite a bit solo...Oblivion and Tomb Raider my games of choice, as well as a few XBox Live Arcade games of the puzzle variety. But when I play Live!...I'm pretty much a Live! Arcade junkie.
The games are simple...yet fully engaging. They let the gameplay and personalities of the players shine. We're not buried in huge worlds, or overwhelmed by sensory input, or staring at phenomenal graphics. We're playing games that were fabulous 20 years ago...in the arcades, on the card tables, on old game systems...but the rivalries, the humor, the comradery shines through even better than a top of the line racing game or a state of the art first person shooter.
The simplicity of the vehicle puts the player front and center...and when you like the people you play with as much as I do, there's nothing more enjoyable.
As more and more Live! Arcade games come out, I find myself immersed more and more into the simple play of casual games. Going back to my roots, I suppose. Yes, I enjoy brand new versions of Tomb Raider, and other new games...but those games are very few and far between. I've been enjoying a new game or two every month, for eight bucks a game...and I often get a lot more play from the casual games than I did from, say, Full Auto, which was fun for a few days...but did I get sixty bucks of gameplay out of it? Probably not.
Did I get eight bucks of enjoyment out of Uno? Tonight, I got sixty bucks worth. And that's just tonight. Ask me again next Wednesday.
Posted by Glenn at June 21, 2006 09:55 PMHi,
Congratulations on the job. Sounds great! Fabulous that everything is coming together. Keep on movin' up!
Marianne.
Posted by: marianne at June 22, 2006 09:47 AM