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I met my best friend, Kevin Mahoney, on the Internet in 1998, back when it was weird to meet people on the Internet. This is because many such acquaintances, like ours, began on IRC—internet chat before internet chat and instant messaging were common, inescapable aspects of a digital lifestyle. We bullshat infrequently for about six months before we discovered, to our mutual shock and surprise, that we lived not just in the same town, but within a few miles of one another. Our first in-person meet-up started with an exchange of then hard-to-obtain game soundtracks—his Final Fantasy VI for my Chrono Trigger—and ended with an opening-night viewing of The Matrix. This was, I believe, the nerd equivalent of becoming blood brothers.
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I lucked out on my flight yesterday, snagging a free first-class upgrade for the first leg of my trip to London, from Seattle to Atlanta. I decided to celebrate by spending some time with Terry Cavanagh’s VVVVVV on my 3DS. I can’t imagine that my thunderous guttural roar of ffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccck was the first such utterance of that most hallowed Word of Power in business class, but it was definitely my first. That’s right, fellow passengers—don’t mess with me. I’m on “Doing Things the Hard Way”.
Some stray observations from The Old Republic, my first deep-dive MMO experience since EVE Online:
I hate it much less than most MMOs. Most of this is thanks to the conversation system, which makes the game feel like a single-player BioWare experience that happens to feature other folks running around. When I’m engaged in a quest, when the camera zooms in and I get a one-on-one dialogue scene with a clutch character, fully voiced — and that’s a really important part of this — I feel like I’m actually an important part of the story.
