On gaming.

I love playing video games, but they kind of come and go in shifts. There's times when I play games for hours a day every day of the week and then times when I won't touch any of my systems for months. Maybe it's that I get a little too into playing games and burn myself out.

Some people think that playing video games is super dorky or a waste of time or believe that it means the gamer doesn't have a life outside of games. Thankfully for me, I won't let that be true. While I do enjoy playing video games (my wife even plays World of Warcraft with me), I don't let it get into personal time or prevent us from doing something else. We'll happily drop the controller or keyboard to watch a show we enjoy on TV, take the dog out for a walk, go out to a nice dinner, or just head somewhere other than home to hang out. Playing video games is fun, but they have their time and place.

This time of year is when it gets even crazier. There's a ton of new games coming out that I want to play and I'm really tempted to buy them all at once and play through them whenever I find the time. I tried this last holiday season and it didn't work out so well. It seems like whenever I have a stack of games that haven't been opened and need to be played, it starts to feel like work and I never get around to playing them. I still have games from last year that I haven't played yet. I think I'm going to limit myself to buying one at a time and beating it before I get the next. Hopefully that will motivate me to play through a game so that I can get on to the next one. I'm really excited for Resistance 2 and Gears of War 2, and I think we're going to pick up Guitar Hero: World Tour when it comes out, too. There's other games that I want to play but I think I'll limit my buying to those for the time being.

While not playing console games, the wife and I casually play World of Warcraft all the time. There's sometimes days or weeks where we won't login to Azeroth, but with the Wrath of the Lich King expansion coming out so soon (less than a month!) we've been playing more often to get our characters ready. We attended BlizzCon both in 2007 and 2008 and really enjoy playing online with our friends.

I haven't touched my Wii in months. The last game I played on it was Mario Kart, and I had a great time. Unfortunately Nintendo's extremely lacking wireless gaming service is one of the things that keeps me from going back. It really sucks to not have some sort of global voice chat system (like Xbox Live) that you can use to trash talk everyone or just chat while racing. It really makes me feel like I'm back on the N64 racing computer players. I finally realize that I did waste the money on buying a Wii. I've said that in the past but then a really fun game would come out for it that would change my mind. That hasn't happened in a really long time now, and I don't see it happening again in the near future.

Hopefully this holiday season will be much nicer on my wallet and motivation to play through the games that I buy. I'd really hate to buy a bunch of great games like I did last year only to not finish them for months later. It's fun to be part of the hype and experience the newness of a game with everyone else.