A blatant disregard for Time Wasted

I suppose I should share some of what I've seen and/or heard over the last couple of weeks.
The first and foremost is this:



I ordered it on a whim to go with my purchase of Night Raider & The Resurrectionists by Crippled Black Phoenix, and I'm going to say now, it was worth every penny of the deliciously low price I got it at.

I'm still unceasingly amazed that I can import music off Amazon for cheaper than a lot of music at my local store. And the selection is far superior as well. Anyway. That's the sound of one slowpoke catching up with the times.

I've also been playing a lot of Halo 3: ODST on my Xbox. My Xbox had been out of service for a couple weeks due to the much-maligned red circle, and ODST has been the first game I've really gotten into since getting it back. At first, I was apprehensive, because Bungie and Microsoft let the Halo series get way out of control and it became less and less about whatever mediocre story they were telling and more and more about marketability and horseshit "epicness," a completely arbitrary means of measuring a game's worth based on nothing more than bloom effect, shiny explosions, and fucking fan service when characters arrive and do something rediculous and then leave.

Anyway, I digress. ODST was actually an incredibly solid game. The story, whilst still framed within a world that does me no favours, is well written and delivered in an excellent, bite-by-bite format. A second, sub story exists, which can be uncovered by visiting data terminals throughout the city the game takes place in. This "Sadie's Story," is actually the whole reason I kept playing as long as I did, and why it took me nearly 20 hours to beat the game on my first play through.

I'd sit, listening to these audio logs, whilst absently fending off the alien hordes. I don't know why, but audio story-telling is still awesome to me. Bioshock had it. System Shock 2 had it. And it enriched both games. Halo 3 (not ODST) came close with ancient logs left by the forerunners, but said logs were text logs that you had to take time out of your day to stop and read - and even then, you only had about five seconds to read them before they got scrambled and you got plopped to some less juicy correspondence.

Anyway. Long story short, ODST was good.

I've also been playing some Champions Online. I'm upset because it wouldn't let me play my free month until I gave them my credit card number, so I'm likely to start getting billed for a game, which by and large, has left me feeling rather ambivalent towards it. Yes, there's a lot of stuff in it that I like. Leaping around with superjump/rocket boots never gets old. However, the missions do. And regardless of all the cool stuff in the game, even WoW doesn't charge me 45 bucks every three months, and WoW offers droves of updates and material, rather than just menial updates, like oh, we finally fixed pets so they do more than hump the wall.

Truth be told, MMO's as a whole are wearing pretty thin on me. I'm thinking of just killing my subscription to all of them, including WoW, and just getting game cards when the mood strikes to play.

Honestly, I've never been a huge fan of being forced into social interactions in order to succeed at something. I can't very well box somebody's ears in an MMO for being a useless sack of shit, so any kind of leadership I can offer is heavily restricted by the notion of pseudo-anonymity.

I'm rambling anyway. And it's time for work.
Later gang.