mL's blog
2008-11-12 -- Video games on my mind
Well this is expansion number two for World of Warcraft; another historic night spent by hundreds of thousands of gamers at shopping malls across the land. The report from Kylos on the scene at our own Valley River Center Mall..?
"Lots of teenagers and smelly degenerates."
Haha... I lafs and feels better about not being there this time. ;-) Maybe I'll get the expansion some day when I have a little more time to play. I do miss gaming sometimes, when I have a moment to reflect on it.
I did play Oblivion and SimCity Societies for a while within the last year, but I ended up going back to SimCity 4... I think my inner child has OCD because there's something about that game that I just love. *Rubs hands together and giggles." In fact, just thinking about it makes me want to play. Luckily, my video card overheats when I play SC4, so I generally only get about 10 minutes of play time in before it's "game over" for the rest of the night. Yeah, my computer HATES SimCity 4 and refuses to boot for at least 20 minutes once it's tired of the game. However, I probably don't need to be playing that much anyway. There's too much else that needs doing.
I have a lot to thank for video games. Back in 1998 a video game was the final nail in the coffin for my old Mac. Creatures (an old, but still very awesome simulation game) was only available for Windows, so I ended up getting a PC, mostly just because of that.
Ah, haha... those were the days. Creatures was so cool. (My inner OCD child babbles incoherently.) You started with an egg in an incubator and it would eventually hatch out this tiny little creature called a "norn." Over time the norn would grow and learn to talk (simple sentences, much like a toddler... in fact, I really think that my two year old is a norn sometimes!) You could hatch multiple eggs and have multiple norns in the world. As they grew, they would become children, adolescents, and then adults when they could mate and lay their own eggs. Eventually, they would even grow old (or get sick) and die.
The norns came in several different "breeds" but each had it's own individual traits. Some traits were simply color variations, but there were tons of others. For instance I had one female that never grew sick and never died. Another talked constantly and others would talk very little at all. Some would not pay attention to the other norns or ran away from them. Some of them would refuse to eat or do nothing but sleep all of the time. Very, very interesting and somehow endlessly entertaining.
I haven't seen the like since, well... not since then! But I have high hopes for Spore. :-)
~mL