In light of the news here, I began to get curious. Most people often wonder what it would be like to take a ****about gaming, but I want to know what kind of course would you teach about gaming?

Do you consider yourself an expert on a specific game, genre, or feature? Are you a fan of exposition, the evolution of fps games from Doom to F.E.A.R., or the revolution of MMOs??

The one caveat is that you must teach it professionally. This means math, elements of literature, comparisons to great works from other media, etc.

As for myself, I would pick "Planetside," the MMOFPS that I followed from alpha to present time (almost 6 years post-launch). Topics would include weapon and armor loadouts, one-on-one dueling, tactics against a small group, squad, and platoon, Command Rank leadership and its social food-chain, map strategy, assaults, defenses, tactical retreats, vehicle tactics, anti-vehicle tactics, etc.

"Baddest of the Bands."

It was pretty good. The puzzles were a little less logical than the previous episode, but overall this series continues to improve, make me laugh, and entertain me.

So, I finally got around my new-DVD-drive-or-old-DVD-drives-won't-read-ONLY-the-"Tiberian Sun"-portion-of-my-DVD problem. :evil:

I downloaded (something that I never advocate, but I was staring at my paid-for liscense code, so I'll let it go and be a hypocrite this once) the game and used my (again, paid-for) liscense code to install the game on my hard drive. :oops:

Then, it was decision time. As I've mentioned before, I'm a big advocate of playing games on "easy" when you're only trying to soak in the storyline or experience (like with prequals that I missed the first time around). Last time, I had played up until the last battle. So, do I set the game at medium and beat it, or do I tell myself that I've already accomplished this, set the game to easy, and blow through the game quickly.

I chose the latter.

Since then, I've put in about 1-3 hours per night. I'm currently on mission 11 of 12, and should be finished by the end of the week.

Man, the **** that I go through for PC gaming sometimes. :?

Ok, so recently I formatted my hard drive for a clean install. Being all wise, *cough* I made sure that I had a backup of all of my saved games. Yeah.....

Well, I went to re-install "Command & Conquer: The First Decade," because I had my saved games all ready, and I was itching to finish "Tiberian Sun." That's when I discovered my installation DVD was missing (thanks alot, Samantha). So, I use a backup DVD that was burned, and pop it in. It should work, I mean, I have all of the installation codes on my manual. WRONG.

For some reason, my DVD isn't reading properly in my new optical drive (NOT from Lite-On). Every game in the compilation works perfectly, EXCEPT for the one game that I want. For some reason, the DVD reader slows to a crawl whenever I install, unistall, or try to play "Tiberian Sun."

More than likely, those particular files weren't burned properly when I made the DVD.

Balls

I'm pissed, but that pales in contrast to how livid I was last night.

Rewind a week ago: My computer had just finished its latest weekly virus/spyware scan and defragmentation (keeps things fresh and speedy), when my backup/media hard drive failed. The ironic thing is that this particular hard dive contained my backups and my paging file (which is pretty essential to Windows).

Once I received my replacement drive (I love Western Digital for their warranty policies), I decided that I might as well reinstall Windows, as it has been almost a year since I have done so (again, this keeps things fresh and speedy). So I reinstall WinXP Home, neccessitating a call to New Dehli to get my activation confirmation code, spend a few days replacing my lost recent backup material with older backup material found on DVDs, and then a few more days tweaking the innards to get WinXP more secure and customized.

Fast forward to last night: I've spent a good day ripping my gargantuan amount of media (movies and music) to my NEW backup/media hard drive, when my CD-drive stops reading disks. Yikes. "I'll deal with it later," I thought; I have another optical drive I can use. Granted, this second optical drive hasn't been working too well lately either, but it'll do. Ten minutes later, it dies too.

Differential Diagnosis: either my IDE driver has pooped, or both of my optical drives have gone belly-up. After some troubleshooting, it turns out that both of my optical drives died in one night. It also turns out that both of these drives are made by Lite-On. Never again.

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So I have the upcoming week (2/16-2/22) off from work. I don't plan on spending the entire time gaming (I wish), but I do have a bunch of time that I can use to relax and enjoy my favorite hobby.

I've already begun "Giants - Citizen Kabuto," and am about 30% of the way through the game. It's pretty good so far, but has left me a little disappointed after hearing how incredible it was for so long.

I've also begun "Crysis," and am still about 40% of the way through that game too. It's a great game, but I felt like I needed to take a break from the FPS genre; hence, me starting "Giants."

On the 360, I've begun "Assassin's Creed," and am enjoying the game with trepidation. After all, the game did get slammed for being repetitive in many reviews. I could also go back into Rock Band to practice my way up to "Expert" on the drums.

On the Wii/Gamecube side, I'm about 35% of the way through Resident Evil 2.

Lastly, I could spend some time in a MMO - "Tabula Rasa" before it shuts down at the end of the month, "Lord of the Rings Online", or "Planetside."

Any advice?

On Friday, I decided that I needed to celebrate the return of our Xbox 360 with a single player game... or at least, something other than "Rock Band." I've been curious about jumping into Assassin's Creed, with the mixed reviews that it received.

Whatever. After an hour of playing on Friday, and then another two to three hours playing this afternoon, I started to really dig this game. It's a collector's dream. Normally, I'm not that much of an Achievement Points whore, but I love to get those tied with collecting items. While in the recent "Tomb Raider" games this meant picking up little 5-8 statues per map, this game has me picking up 20 flags in my first map and 100 in the second. Add that to the achievement for climbing every large tower in the game's world (which is just plain cool to do on its own), and I'm starting to salivate.

Then I moved to the first game of the series "Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People," or SBCG4AP as it is sometimes called. I think I began this game about 3-4 weeks ago and enjoyed it, but never really felt like I was in the right mood for a humorous adventure game until tonight. After my wife went to bed, I fired this puppy up, and completed it within about 3 hours.

I'm currently downloading episode 2 through STEAM (already purchased post-Christmas as a gift), and will probably start that within the next week. Then again, with my recent gaming ADD, who knows.

Days before the (potential) shut-down of Hellgate: London, I beat the game. That's right, my character stepped up the the rift between London and Hell, found the demon responsible, and kicked the **** out of him. I didn't die, nor did I get close. Yeah... birthday present from last November, completed.

In six more days, Hellgate: London's multiplayer servers will be closing for good. I've been racing to finish the game before this date, and it looks like I may just be able to do it in time. In the meantime, I've also kept my eyes on the Korean Publishers (and now IP owners) of Hellgate, as they are continuing development, and claiming that they'll have an English-language client available. In case that doesn't work out, I might be able to bribe my genius-coder friend to create a single player .exe file that would contain all of the updates that the multiplayer game received but singleplaer did not.

City of Heroes is also having a double experience point weekend, and after joining a group, my controller levelled up twice. That game is fun in short bursts, but too repetitive in its missions to keep me on for more than about an hour at a time.