Addiction, addiction, and more Addiction.

I ended off last entry with a small quip about getting a 360. I know that isn't what most people were expecting, so I think I better fill it out further. This is all going somewhere, but we're going to take the long meandering path. I don't think I can even tell a story without taking the long way around anyways.

I quit smoking a little while ago. I can't remember exactly when, but lets call it a month and a half. Because I have been a smoker for a very long time, I guess you could say I have what you would call an addictive personality. I don't like to think that I do, but I have to face the facts here. I've been known to do some obsessing over silly things in my day, so why stop now? Once I get an idea planted into my head, it can be hard for me to let go sometimes, and this is where the 360 comes in. To plagiarize a little here, it’s the shiznit. It's a very unhealthy addiction. I have caught myself sitting at work pre-lunch posing the question to myself "What should I get to eat that will fill me up enough so I can skip dinner and keep playing NFS: Most Wanted". Damn thing, but it is all that and a bucket of chicken.

I am what you could call a video game connoisseur. Like most of my generation, I remember the Atari 2600 coming out and costing a few hundred dollars and the ensuing battle between them and the Intellivision. People never got into the intellivision because it had to many buttons to deal with. Shit. The 2600 had one button. How do you compete with that? Who would have thought that Street Fighter could have caught on with its six buttons. I remember playing the first Galaxian machine, seeing the birth of Ms. Pacman, and Centepede with it's funky ass rollerball. I can still remember and hum all of the super mario theme songs. I fed way too much of my money into Mortal Kombat just to see the violent deaths, etc, etc, etc. I could go on with this forever. It's a circular conversation. Any one who is a video game junkie is now thinking "I know all that shit", and the non-video game people are busy looking over and pointing exclaiming "Geek". This whole paragraph is just to show that the predisposition was there for the 360 to come marching in and dominate all of my spare time, and it has done that.

Being in the tech field for a decade now, outside all of the gaming I was doing growing up, I've become a bit jaded to the whole "new and improved" credo behind the launch of a new video game console. When they come out, I usually pick them up and do the "It's good, but could be improved here, and if they just did this..." critique as soon as I've got it fired up and running. The 360 was different. I am not a Microsoft supporter in anyway here folks, but hot damn, they've got it right this time. Most times the graphics/gameplay is just not quite good enough to suck me in and leave me completely immersed in the game. There have been very few times where I've had the whole feeling that I was in the game, but with the 360, I got sucked in quick. I fired up NFS: Most Wanted and was drawn right in. I actually got the vertigo when jumping over shit, and caught myself leaning to the side on my couch as I was turning around corners. It has been a very long time since I've been sucked in that deep. The holy grail of video games has always been to create a game so realistic that the player forgets they're playing a game. If they do it right the 360 is completely capable of that. I'm not saying it doesn't have it's flaws, but there are definite possibilities with this thing.

Wow, what a pointless entry. Just me geeking out to the world I suppose. Here, have a quote.

"Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment."
Buddha