I have never smoked or done any drugs before. I stay away from coffee. I don't drink more than one can of soda a day. In general, I try to steer clear of addictions. So how can one game be so addicting?

My druid is up to level 26. General consensus is that the druid is the worst (or weakest) character in the game. Having briefly played a few other character types I can't say for sure who is weakest, but the druid has to be up there. The big advantage, shapeshifting, I only use for the cat form's ability to sneak. I get beat to crap using either form, so I always end up transforming back so I can use my healing spells. And since I do just as much damage in regular form AND I can use my spells, it's a no-brainer. I guess the alternate forms look neat though?

I have to say that, for the most part, the player community in WoW is very friendly and helpful. It's a rare occasion when I have a party request turned down, and most people are glad for the groups and support. The only thing I have noticed is that everybody is still REALLY grabby. Since the game is yet to reach a point of a diluted economy, money is still important and players grab for anything in sight to hawk off. The lone instance against this is when I was questing with a guy and he received some nice leather boots and without me asking he just gave them to me since he was a warrior and didn't need them. It just so happens that later in our travels I got a pair of bracers that he needed. So his generosity was paid back in kind. And it's those type of experiences that I really enjoy in the game.

And meanwhile, both the dog and the girlfriend have been hanging tough. Lately my girl has been sick, so tonight I'm going over to her house to cook her some soup and take care of her. As addicting as WoW is, it's always important to remember that it IS a game and there are still other things that are much more important.

My copy of World of Warcraft finally arrived on Friday. Four CDs is a painful installation process when you've been waiting for something for over a week. Then I had problems with the client patch program that took me a good hour to resolve and made me wonder if the game would even run for me. I finally got it up and running, selected my world, made four or five attempts at a name (damn you fools who name yourself Dragula!) and started playing.

Now it's Tuesday. My shoulders ache. My eyes hurt. I have 18 unfulfilled quests on my mind and I'm mentally preparing tonight's best route to solve a few of them. It has taken over.

In a brilliant stroke of luck there was an ice storm in Portland this weekend. No driving on the freeways without chains. So the delayed family Christmas thing that was supposed to happen on Saturday didn't (more gaming time) and I had a very real excuse to ignore the girlfriend in favor of the game. Of course by Sunday afternoon it was melted and I spent some time with Amber, which was both a nice break from the game and a refreshing reminder of why I like her so much. I took yesterday off (floating holiday, great timing) and spent more time with WoW.

So after four days I'm up to level 19, which is maybe a little low considering how much I played ... but I'm so used to Ultima that I took my leatherworking skill very seriously and worked for a long time to build it up only to realize that now I can't even wear the items I make. Whoops. Plus for the longest time I couldn't find any monsters above level 12 or 13 and I was level 15, so killing them didn't net me very much exp.

Anyway, blah blah blah. Overall, great game. I wish travel was maybe a LITTLE faster, but what can you do?

We are near completion of Week 1 of desperately wanting WoW and not having it. Going cheap-o on the shipping has to rate as one of my dumbest moves ever. I can't even remember the logic behind that move. I should take four dollar bills, frame them, and mount them somewhere noticable as a reminder to never be this cheap and stupid again.

Back in high school (early 90's) I wrote a program that stole usernames and passwords on our school LAN. Our computers at school didn't have hard drives, so you had to use a boot disk and all programs were run from the network. So I wrote a program in basic called login.exe that looked just like the normal prompt for a username and password, but then errored out as if the user had typed it incorrectly. Meanwhile their username and password were written to a file on the boot disk.

My reasons for doing so were decent enough. 1) I wanted to see if I could do it. 2) I wanted more network rights so I didn't have to bother the teacher every time I wanted to compile something. So while I was doing a "bad thing" it wasn't really with bad intentions. Anyway, my program worked flawlessly and within a week I had the superuser password and had given myself additional rights.

If you've ever hung around computer geeks long enough, you'll know we're a proud lot. There's a lot of one-upmanship that goes on about who can code what better and so on. How this relates to me is that I was so proud of my little program that I played games with it on other people and eventually I told my friends what I had done ... who no doubt told their friends ... and a week or two later I found myself alone with my teacher trying to explain why I had done what I had done.

The point of this story? You know that part where I had a great thing and I went and bragged it up to the point that I got caught? That was genius compared to my move of saving a lousy $4 on shipping.

Stupid.

I don't understand New Year's Resolutions. I live in a constant state of either trying to make myself better or accepting my faults. So when others decide that because it's a different year they're going to make a complete shift in their lifestyle, I find that laughable. And what's worse is that they never last. I don't have data to back me on this, but I'd bank on about 4% of New Year's Resolutions coming to fruition.

Last summer, in my efforts to better myself, I decided to start actually using my Bally's membership that I've had for a couple years. My naturally thin body was throwing on some pounds where pounds shouldn't be and I decided to do something about it. So twice a week for the past few months I have been running. I hate running. Back when I regularly played basketball I'd say it was a great sport, except for all the running. But for losing weight and improving physique running is tough to beat. So I run.

The past few gym trips I have noticed a dramatic spike in attendance and a lot of new faces. Some of these new faces are equipped with a personal trainer. A good personal trainer who teaches about proper diet and exercise is immensely important. The personal trainers at my Ballys, who tell jokes and ogle the females they're training, aren't doing anybody any good. And it's annoying when I'm trying to run and I'm doing my best to not stare at the hot chick anyway (don't want to be that guy). But when she's sitting there laughing her butt off every two minutes, I have to look. And I feel bad, because she is getting very minimal out of her current workout and I can guarantee that when personal training time runs out she won't be at the gym for more than a few weeks.

So she, along with the less obvious people who have made New Year's resolutions to hit the gym, are most likely wasting their time and money. Maybe a few will stick, but my money says that most won't. Maybe I'll see them again early next year.

I'd even settle for leveling my mains. :P I was unsuccessful in my Ebay attempt to win the auction from the local seller ($83 is too much for a $50 game, sorry). I was able to find a Buy It Now in Texas for $65, so I just went for that instead. I also cheaped out and didn't pop the extra $4 for priority shipping. Now I'm starting to wish that I had gone for that as my girlfriend is talking about hanging out with her friends all weekend and I have the perfect gaming opportunity ... but no game.

So for now I have to live vicariously through posts of others on how much fun they're having and what they're up to. I can't wait to get out there and start collecting minerals and herbs with you guys. Wait for me!!

Yesterday I complained about not being able to get World of Warcraft because it's sold out everywhere. Today I did something about it. Say what you will about Ebay ... but when you need something, absolutely NEED something, there's no better place to go (providing you have funds). I even found a local seller whose auction was ending in a few hours. So if the seller is cooperative, I can get my game tomorrow and save on the shipping. Bonus.

The only other time I have used Ebay was back in my Ultima Online days. One could argue that Ebay ruined UO. It's the same way that cheat codes ruin other games. People don't want to take the time to earn their possessions / stats / whatever through the normal course of gaming, so they cheat (or buy their items / characters through Ebay in the online world).

I have been on both sides. When I first quit UO there was just nothing else to do. My friends that I had played the game with were bored and had moved on. Origin had BF'd me too many times to count. I had my huge tower filled to the brim with all kinds of armor and weapons that I dare not use because I might lose them (such is the life of a non-PVPer in a PVP world) and I quite literally had nothing left to do. So I sold off all of my stuff through various methods (I sold my tower for game gold hoping that maybe somebody that had worked toward that purpose had actually earned it). But eventually everything except my accounts sold on Ebay for around $1,000. So even deducting my account fees I made money playing a game. Probably somewhere around 10 cents an hour, but let's not split hairs.

Well, a few years later I casually went to a UO forum to see what was going on. Bad idea. So many changes. So many cool new things. I couldn't take it, I had to go back. But you're crazy if you think I'm building all my stuff back up. That'd take me forever. So I bought an account and some money on Ebay and I was off. I built up enough gold and "stuff" in a few months ... made a HUGE house, and quit again a month later. See paragraph above. All the new stuff got old, and fast. Plus, even on new non-PVP worlds people still circumvented the system and found new ways to be rude.

So, that history given, here we go with WoW. Almost guaranteed to be the same experience. But, hey, for a month or two it will probably be really awesome. And that seems worth $60. Or $80. Or whatever I have to pay for it.

With the large list of hugely hyped games that were released late last year, I had to be very choosy about which ones I decided to play. With both a dog and a girlfriend, free time isn't as abundant as it used to be. Here were my thoughts on the games that I was considering:

Halo 2: *yawn* I might get it later, but I've had enough first-person shooter LAN parties that Halo doesn't do it for me. Sure it has a few more features than DOOM or Quake ... but it's actually lacking a few as well (can you say BOTS) and I have never understood the HALO hype. I played the first one and it was Quake on the XBOX. Whoopedy do.

GTA: San Andreas: This is the one I ended up getting, and I have loved (most) every minute of it. I don't really enjoy the linear gameplay and I wish it was a TAD more free-roaming like Vice City. I had to complete a buttload of missions before there was anything to do in Vegas, and even then there only seems to really be one line of missions there. This is supposed to be VEGAS! By the time I got this far, I expected more. Still, great game.

Star Wars KOTOR II: I really want to play this game. Like, REALLY. But between GTA and my new baseball simulation I just don't have the time. And as much as I enjoyed the original, this looks a little too much like it to be anything more than satisfying. Plus it employs what I see as the all-time role-playing faux pas. My character has a limit. That's crap. That's why I always enjoyed games like Diablo ... you never know you have the best of everything. Even if they impose a experience limit on your character (which, in Diablo, it's so high that it's not an issue for a VERY long time) there's the randomness of the items and, guaranteed, there's a chance of getting something better than what I have. I love that. At the end of the original KOTOR I had the best armor, weapon, etc as far as I could figure and it was still a marathon to beat Revan (or Malak ... I forget). Who says I can't keep training and beating enemies who drop random loot and get to the point where I can absolutely dominate Revan if I choose to? If I want to spend another 30 hours I should have that right.

World of Warcraft: I played Ultima Online for a good 3 or 4 years from the first day it came out, so this fell under the HALO category for me. Been there, done that. Plus MMOGs have the dirty little aspect of playing with other people. And if you played UO for any length of time you learned one thing: people are jerks. It may be the minority, but when the minority's goal is to ruin it for everybody they always seem to do an extremely good job. And even though it was Blizzard, my favorite gaming company of all time, I just couldn't see how WoW could be any different.

However, after reading the 2004 game reviews and seeing that WoW won Game of the Year I started doing more research on it. And all I can say is OOPS. Or maybe PHEW, since if I had ever gotten this game I wouldn't have seen the light of day over the holidays, both my girl and my dog would have left me, and the recycling would be filled with pizza boxes. The graphics look amazing, especially for somebody who is used to MMOG graphics Ultima-style (their 3-D was a joke). And the gameplay looks great. Everything I have read says it is more friendly to those of us who want to play single-player and not worry about gathering 80 "friends," although I'm sure that if I want to do the neat stuff I'll still have to do that. Actual quests. All kinds of cool stuff.

So I ran off to the store to admit my wrongdoing. They're out. Everywhere.

Crap.

It's December of 2004. I'm 27. It seems long overdue considering that I work with computers and websites for a living, but I have decided to start up a journal. Hopefully it doesn't become just another dusty corner of the Internet.

For my first journal entry I think I'll do a year in review, since it seems like as good of a starting spot as any before I talk about actual games and gaming topics. In February I got a puppy Jack Russell Terrier and named him Fenway. He had his first birthday party earlier this month and had his best doggie friends over. Hey, when you're single and don't have any kids pets play that role in your life.

In July I had my first threesome. A strange entry, but if I don't remember it 30 years down the road please shoot me. I had just broken up with a girl I was dating that was really cute but just not my type. Well, she still wanted to be "friends" and who am I to turn down free sex? So one night we went out with a mutual friend ...a girl that I had met over the Internet and became friends with a year before. Well, we have a few drinks, go back to my place ... one thing leads to another and before I know it I'm in bed with two girls. It's funny to be in moments like those, because while you're in them and they're live, you know you'll be flashing back on them for years to come.

My Red Sox won the World Series, coming back from the dead against the Yankees in the ALCS which is either the greatest comeback or greatest choke in sports history, depending on which side you were on. I've been a loyal Sox fan since I started following baseball in the late 90's, so it was great to see them win their first title in 86 years even though I was a fan for a relatively small portion of that.

Around August I met a girl named Amber and we have been boyfriend / girlfriend for a few months now. We're doing the full meal deal, Christmas with each other's families and everything. She's 6'3, and being 6'7 myself I really appreciate that. She's a really awesome person and will hopefully be in my life for a long time. She's not a gamer, but few women are....

So that's my year in review for 2004. I stumbled upon the Gamespot journals a few months ago and have been peeping in on people here and there ever since, so I figure it's only fair that I start a journal of my own.