What I've been up to...

Been a while...

Looks like the last time I posted was January. A lot's happened since then. Finished my Ph.D. this summer and got a great job at a small college in Central Pennsylvania. I'm currently in my first semester here, and I'm really enjoying it. It's been a LOT of work, but teaching has long been my main professional interest and I'm very happy to have the opportunity to focus so heavily on it.

In order to get all of that accomplished--the Ph.D. finale was particularly demanding (exhausting?), especially while also teaching adjunct in the evenings--I largely had to drop all of my hobbies and put all my focus on RealLife(tm). And so I haven't really been doing much gaming this year, at least compared to prior years.

What little time I have had for gaming has mostly been devoted to playing Wii titles. But recently, I decided to give myself a belated graduation present and bought an Xbox 360. With that decision, I've pretty much decided to convert entirely over to console gaming. Several reasons for this:

1. Most of the games that I've been wanting to play--Mass Effect, Fallout 3, Fable 2, Final Fantasy, etc--are designed with a console in mind. I think only Dragon Age is clearly a PC game that is on my "looks interesting" list, and even then there's the possibility of a console version (how that will work, I have no idea) being released sometime in the future.

2. I get to play on our "big" 37" LCD in the living room. And I get to sit on my couch.

3. Consoles are cheap! And they're so much more powerful than they used to be, with a lot more crossover between PC and console titles. Today, I could buy all three of the console systems ($250 Wii, $400 PS3, $300 Xbox360 = $950) and still pay less than I would to buy a new PC rig. And they have a comparable lifespan. And I probably won't buy all three systems, at least not at the PS3's current price tag.

4. Along those lines, my job provides a laptop for my use. Ditto for my wife's job. Which means that the home PC is now strictly a gaming machine. $1200 (my typical machine cost) is just too much to pay for a gaming rig,

5. I don't have to worry about hardware compatibility any more. And I don't have to worry as much about updating drivers and maintaining my rig's condition. Games are designed specifically for the hardware I'm running. Now that I'm in console-land, I think this is a bigger deal than I realized when I was primarily into computers. Crashes are RARE.

6. It turns out that I really like racing games. And racing games on consoles are better, I think.

7. You can sell used versions of your game much more easily. I recently sold a bunch of gamecube games on ebay, and got $15-25 for each. In some cases, I got more than I paid for them, which is insane.

Anyway, that's enough for now. As I think about it, I have a lot of other things to talk about... reflections on (the few) games I've played this year, the reason I bought an xbox instead of a ps3, thoughts about the recent spat of releases, etc. But that'll have to wait for another day. :)

P.S. How is it possible that Mysteries of Westgate still has not been released?!?