I don't have a solution for your shelving problem. About the best suggestion I could offer would be to get a better entertainment center and some signal splitters, but that can be costly.

What I really replied to say though, is about the second paragraph. What you're describing is a healthy lifestyle. I love gaming. It's been part of my whole life and I'm 42 now. Started playing when I was around 5 and except when I was going through my divorce, I never quit playing video games. But having other interests is the way it's suppose to be. Being interested in games but also the other things you listed is good. But worrying if friends will shame you about it is not. Be proud of all your hobbies, and if you get guff for it then tell those people to go suck a rock.

End of rant. Sorry, but gaming is not an outlier hobby anymore. Don't be some closeted gamer, wear it on your sleeve and let the world deal with it. And if they can't, well, while I never like to swear without good reason I'm just gonna say it: **** 'em.

What you'd say is: I was self employed from 20xx through 20xx. If asked for type of business: Multimedia/Entertainment.

And if asked during an interview, one would say: While it was a valuable learning experience, sadly the opportunities in that field dried up and therefore we are reevaluating our position. While the market for such services finds its footing, my team and I (even if it was just you) are looking for more stable opportunities. See even if it were a bad idea that hemorrhaged money, you're making it the mistake of the industry rather than your own. "The market cooled" rather than "wow, I pulled a boner".

Fair enough.

But I could barely play New Vegas having bought it on launch day. Bugs and glitches severely lessened the experience of what should have been my favorite game of that year. Instead it was the most frustrating game of the season because half the time I didn't know if a quest giver would be there when I got back or if my efforts would be in vain as the game bugged out and locked up.

That hasn't happened to me in South Park. Although I did hear a few grumblings around the web of people who had an occasional lockup. But for Obsidian, that's progress. They always make interesting and fun games with great ideas, they just don't always execute as well as you'd hope.

I bought it on day one. Love South Park's sense of humor so it was really no question whether it'd be worth it. So long as it was functional, I was going to get my money's worth out of it for the script alone.

While on the short side for a game called an RPG, ultimately I think it gets the job done well and doesn't overstay it's welcome. Funny from start to finish, cleverly written as anyone who likes South Park would expect, and probably the most stable game Obsidian has ever made.

Jim Sterling's Escapist Review if anyone is interested.

"Bottom Line: The best in the series to date, inFAMOUS: Second Son tells an amazing story and gives players a ton of relishable power to play with. It's held back by some outdated and formulaic ideas, but overall it'll keep players happy."

Never having cared much for MMOs, I was hopeful that SW:TOR would be the one that finally got me interested. I love sci-fi, I'm a Star Wars fan, and KotOR was one of my favorite games of that generation.

Sadly, it was not meant to be. But it did show me that it's just pointless to try anymore MMOs. If that one couldn't keep me interested, none of them are likely to.

Sweet! Thanks for the heads up. :)

@royalclown_1: Not knowing you, it'd be difficult to ascertain whether or not Fallout is a game you'd enjoy. I would say that while it's well regarded, it's obviously not for everyone.

As for my personal opinion on the game, it's in my top 3 of the entire Xbox 360/PS3 generation. I had never had much exposure to Fallout as a franchise prior to getting Fallout 3 as a birthday gift in 2009. And while I wish I could say that it grabbed me instantly and I loved it from the word "go", the honest truth is I didn't care much for it at first. I didn't really "get it". I mean it was kinda fun, but I had been playing Halo 3 and Gears of War and right before Fallout 3 I played Fable 2. Those games were all more exciting on the surface. And while Fallout 3 has a lot to offer, I wasn't expecting a game that looked so much like a shooter to play so much like an RPG so I almost quit playing it not long after the tutorial and opening bits.

If it weren't for a friend of mine coming over and playing it, showing me some of the finer points of how the game worked and how different your character build could transfer to gameplay, I might have missed it altogether in favor of something else. I'm glad he came over. Shortly after him giving me some pointers, I fell head over heels for Fallout 3. I ended up playing it 8 times from start to finish. I wrote detailed history for many of my characters, I played heros and villains and moderates, I role played a character who was bipolar and a bit schizophrenic so they would flip back and forth between hero and villain depending on the time of day. I even based one character off a woman I used to date. Made her pure evil (natch) and she wandered the Capital Wasteland being a big jerk to any and everyone she came across.

And luckily, I didn't come across any of the performance problems with the DLC that so many people have reported. That's not to say there weren't problems, but after the initial patch released by Bethesda, everything always worked fine for me (I played on Xbox). So yes, I highly recommend Fallout 3 and the GotY edition specifically. It is one of my all time favorite video games.

Man oh man did I love the Oddworld games.

You can count me among the DAY ONE crowd on this one for sure. I'll hope it's cross-buy, I'd like to have it for my PS4 and my Vita.

EA owning the Command & Conquer brand is what seems to have happened. Instead of trying to make a great experience, like they did all the way up through CnC3 and RA3, now they just want to get in on that lucrative MOBA F2P model that LoL and DotA2 are using.

As is the norm for EA, they seem to be dead set on a flawed way of thinking. They seem to think that you can copy success by following the leader. CoD makes a ton of money, lets to that with Battlefield. LoL comes along, let's shoehorn that into our existing RTS brands even though it could alienate those who supported it for years. Rather than do something interesting and fill a niche, they want to follow the leader and pick up the scraps while wrecking everything that made their brands good in the first place.

But I digress. This thread isn't about EA bashing.

StarCraft 2 is a lone beacon in the night, keeping the classic tried and true RTS formula out there. And the folks who used to make up Westwood studios just announced that game Grey Goo, which hopefully will be in the mold of classic RTS games rather than yet another LoL chasing MOBA. So there is some possible good stuff on the horizon.

But man, I just don't like MOBA games. It's like an RTS with all the things I enjoyed about RTS games surgically removed. No bases, no real armies, no resource management or whatever. Just your hero character and a bunch of map monsters on a small wagon wheel. No offense to fans of the MOBAs of course. They have as much right to dig those games as I have to dislike them. But they are very unappealing to me personally. Even the DC Comics MOBA, which should in theory be a game I would adore since i'm such a nerd for comic book stuff, but even Infinite Crisis was just plain boring to me. Despite it's pretty graphics, interesting character models, fun powers to use; even with all of that it just ended up leaving me bored and eager to move on. So I did. I just fired up Command and Conquer 3 and played that instead.