I have left the office later than 4AM in the morning exactly twice in my career with this company.

The first was on May 6th, 2005, when Kingdom of Heaven debuted in the States. I remember this because when I flew home that night I met up with my friend Cris to see that movie. I had pulled an all-nighter to finish writing test scripts and pool together defect metrics and milestones for our project, and left the building at 5:36AM. I took a picture with my old cell phone to commemorate the moment; if I ever leave this company and start to have doubts before calling it quits, I'll always have this picture to remind me that it's probably ok to bounce.

The second was today, February 5th, 2009. With our deadline not having been met before yesterday (February 4th), two coworkers and I poured in 20 hours spanning from 8AM on yesterday to 4:30 AM this morning (30 minutes for lunch). We claimed 5 hours of sleep, rolled into the office at 11:30, and sleepwalked through the day. This, after working until 10PM both on Monday and Tuesday beforehand.

The subtext of this is that of course the podcast has not been finished -- deal with it -- but the most significant thing about this in the context of this, a blog about my videogame misadventures, is that I did not have a spare moment to even touch a videogame except for the 10 minute gap during which I played some Dragon Quest IV as I waited for my train out of Harrisburg into New York. (I slept on the train instead of continuing to level-up. Like a baby.) What sucked is that when I turned on Dragon Quest IV, I realized that I was at a point in the game where I had to grind in order to earn money to buy decent equipment. That 10-minute span of playing DQIV saw me thinking of it as work because, well, at that point it was.

I really wish there existed another solution to grinding. I don't mind it when battle systems are interesting, but as nostalgic as Dragon Quest IV is, its battle system is really just old and archaic. It's for that same reason that I'm taking so long to get through Final Fantasy III on DS. At the risk of sounding snooty, I'm finding myself getting impatient with any RPG that either doesn't have a gimmick to the battle system or forces you to play in a truly turn-based manner, i.e. no Active Time Battle as found in Final Fantasy IV and beyond. Is DQIV a good game? Hell yeah, when I don't have to grind extensively. But I have way too little time and way too much of a desire to actually play through varied gameplay these days to be satisfied with grinding. Note to those making remakes: Find a way to update grind-happy games. NOW. Nostalgia be damned.

I'm going to bed.