a week of curb stomps...

Gah! It's been non-stop Gears of War for over a week now, and I'm still not sick of it. Tons of multiplayer and all three difficulty levels in the campaign (still need more to get the final Dom achievement). Forced myself to take a break from MP until I completed Insane, and almost wept with joy when I finally took down General RAAM all by my lonesome. Hopefully I'll get some MP time in during the next couple of days, since I've really missed the experience of playing with everyone here. Plus, I've felt bad about turning down so many game invites...

Looks like I'll be forced to take a longer break soon, though. My girlfriend wants to leave for St. Louis on Tuesday morning, which means I won't get any game time in until we get back to Chicago on Sunday... All is not lost, though: last year we had Thanksgiving dinner at her uncle's house, and he's a really great guy, a complete geek and an amateur inventor. After the meal, the whole family proceeded to drink a lot of wine and watch a James Bond marathon on cable. He and I got around to talking about what a great game GoldenEye was, and he mentioned he still had a N64 and a copy of the game (I was shocked since he's almost 50). We were too far gone at that point to dig it out and hook it up, but I made him promise that he'd have it ready next time.

Unfortunately, leaving Tuesday morning also means I might miss a call about a job that a friend is trying to help me land. It's at a REALLY big corporation, and I know those places can be slow in responding, but I'd really hate to jeopardize anything -- the job pays far too well to risk it. My resume is already in the pipeline, so now I just hope I can pass along my cell phone number to my contact (which she in turn would pass along to her boss) in case they need to contact me. And I REALLY hope they need to contact me.

So yeah, besides the potential GoldenEye, I'm not really looking forward to the trip. At least I have all of my This American Life podcasts for the car ride. I actually met Ira Glass at a friend's party last summer. Very nice guy, but I was quite drunk by the time I was introduced to him. Nothing more pathetic than a skinny, awkward, and inebriated NPR fanboy. Turns out I'm on a "friend of a friend" basis with a few obscure geek celebrities, but considering I usually drink heavily to mask my social anxiety, nothing will ever come of it. I have, though, decided to learn how to play poker, since a friend plays every week with Steve Albini. I realize that there's a good chance I'll just get really drunk and start gushing to him about how amazing Big Black was, and demand stories about when he produced In Utero (I've already heard that Kurt Cobain was a complete fuckwad the whole time)...

Posted by PhantomVI @ 7:49 pm EDT | Permalink | 0 Comments

It Will Be Mine...

So despite the current financial difficulties, I managed to scare up enough cash for Gears Of War today. Now it's just a waiting game...

I'm gong to be online A LOT with this next week, so if anyone reading this wants to, feel free to send me a Friends request on Live (also, I wouldn't mind joining a GOW clan, so if anyone has any info, please pass it along). I'll probably be playing a bit of GRAW this weekend, too. Which reminds me, in need to pick up a new Live card tomorrow morning, since I think my Gold subscription is about to expire if it hasn't already...

Ugg...why can't GameStop be open right now while I'm just sitting around waiting for Battlestar Galactica to download? There's one within walking distance of my apartment...

I suppose I should be doing something either more exciting or more productive with my Friday night, but my girlfriend is out ice skating at the moment and our roommate is in bed sick with a toothache. Kinda thinking about walking down the block and splurging on a six pack of some decent beer and having a one-man party in my music/geek/gamer room. But I should probably make sure to get to bed early tonight, or at least not too late -- I have a feeling my girlfriend is going to want a house cleaning day tomorrow, which should be tons o' fun...

Funny, I just noticed that I used ellipses at the end of all my paragraphs. I am fond of the ellipses...

Posted by PhantomVI @ 11:51 pm EDT | Permalink | 1 Comments

Adventures Of An Unemployed Gamer

First, some background information: I was laid off this summer after three years of managing a computer lab at an art college here in Chicago. The lay off was unexpected, but it wasn't exactly a shock, either. But it definitely threw a wrench in a lot of my plans, though, like a trip to Oregon to see my new niece and a little vacation to Las Vegas for the national roller derby convention.
In the beginning I wasn't too worried. As a matter of fact, in the preceding weeks I had been thinking about quitting and going back to temping for a while, which is what I had done for a year when I moved to the city. I was getting burned out for a variety of reasons and was quickly realizing that the job was pretty much a dead end. After my last day I had a lot of friends giving me tips on available jobs, but after a couple of weeks all of those trails went cold. I went back to my old temp agency since they always did a good job of keeping me busy and I had hopes that a temp assignment could lead to something permanent, which is how I got my job at the college. So far, though, I've spent two hellish weeks pushing papers for a lumber company and a few days here and there doing filing for corporations. And I have the paper cuts to prove it. The Chicago Board of Trade has contacted them about me twice for long term assignments, but have flaked out both times.
It's going on three weeks now without an assignment and things are getting grim. But besides the obvious financial difficulties, there's the problem of sheer boredom being at home all day. I spend a lot of time online sending out applications and resumes (I'm even applying for a job at EA's Chicago studio) but a big problem with that is that there's no way to make a follow-up call. So far all of hose emails have gone unanswered. With the rest of my free time I have my guitar and bass, the internet, and games. And television. I don't have cable, but we have this retro TV station which I guess would approximate TV Land. I've developed a fondness for Hawaii 5-O. Some of the 80s reruns are amusing in a bad way...and it's weird how many details I remember about some of them, like the Diff'rent Strokes episode where Dudley is molested by Gordon Jump, or the one where Arnold and Dudley meet Knight Rider at Universal studios (that was a two-parter, with the boys hiding in a car that's about to be blown up on the set as a cliffhanger)... Good stuff.
So how does this all tie into gaming? Well, despite the fact that I'm currently $75 short on my rent for this month, the main concern on my mind is how I'm going to get a copy of Gears Of War next week...

Posted by PhantomVI @ 6:24 pm EDT | Permalink | 1 Comments