I'm baaaaaaaaaaaaack.

Well, there is much to report. For one thing, I was in a Day of Defeat: Source clan. That honeymoon lasted about two months and I moved on due to circumstances (more on that later), and I must say I met some interesting characters. The clan I was in was a part of a Realism community known as the United Warfare League (or UWFL for short). The clan was known as the 22nd Royal Regiment (we always just abbreviated it to the 22nd RR), the heritage taken from one of Canada's most elite military establishments. And we WERE the best (and I brought up the rear, I would say, though there were some relatively close to my level but just a smidge better than me). Our leader, who would not for the sake of realism claim a title higher than Lieutenant, was a man known only to us as Paulin. He was a pretty cool guy, as were most of the people I met while in that clan. If you're wondering how a person so horrible as me found his way into the best of the best, let's just say I'd met someone over Ventrilo that invited me one day. They were short a few people so they gladly accepted my application. Times came and went, and by the time I left (not bringing up the circumstances just yet), only a few of the members that were present from the start of my short stay in the unit remained. We all knew the reason why, though those reasons are rather personal and too deep to go into here. Suffice it to say that there were certain members not behaving themselves, some people wanted to move on to another unit anyway, and we had a lack of activity quite often. I did my best to keep active when I thought to do so, but usually the only person that noticed was Paulin or his second in command, Sisson (if you didn't notice the trend, we all went by our last names, with a few exceptions), who would join me for a bit of no-objective fun. Now for those of you who've played DOD:S you know that generally, the objective is to capture flags. In most realism games we were forbade from capturing those flags built into the map. Our goal was that of pure elimination, unless we were doing a force battle (more of a tactical CTF).

But enough on my experience in the virtual military. So after that, some old friends I knew from both Ventrilo and Chatango were putting together a little SA:MP server called San Fierro Role Play. It's currently a lame duck as our vigilant coder/leader DeLuca searches through 50,000+ lines of code for some simple error he must have made, at a rate of an hour or two a day. It'll be some time before we're ready to update, I reckon, so I'm currently attempting to fill the void with some roleplaying of a different kind. And DeLuca says we're now going to become a gaming community. Well, we'll see where that goes, but it WOULD potentially net us sponsorship and attention.

In the mean time, the role playing of a different sort is being done on two fronts: first off I'm finally getting around to playing The Last Remnant on my 360. With it freshly installed on the hard drive, most all of the lag issues have vanished, and it's turning out to be an interesting strategy/RPG hybrid. On the PC side of things hot off the press I have a game from the makers of the first two Diablo games, Torchlight, which I find extremely visceral, gorey (how did this thing get a teen rating?!), and amazing (and sometimes deep) experience. I acquired it for the bargain price of $20, and I have to say it's worth every penny, and they probably should've priced it closer to $30, because this game is worth far more than the asking price. It's in the style of Fate, but with skill trees like Diablo. Three characters, and each one is a blast to play with their own unique abilities.

In other news, time for the smaller stuff. I've decided that I may feed the pig just a little (but only on the cheap stuff, mostly, unless it's a DVD loaded with special features, or a CD set that's collectible). Most of the stuff I buy new from the industry is by the small fries anyway, they're really making minimal profit on a $5.00 album like Live at Budokan anyway. My wishlist grows yet longer as some great new games emerge for the console that I'll probably never play. Lately, my console staples have been Virtua Fighter 5, Forza 3, and The Last Remnant. I haven't played some of my old favorites in ages. Maybe I should boot up the 'ole N64 and play some Tony Hawk from back when Tony Hawk wasn't about money mongering and bullshit extras. I have 40 something PS2 titles and the only one I've even touched lately is Gran Turismo 4. Between the two, I have to say that Forza 3 is the better of them by far and away, but it's still fun to roar down Nurburgring in one of 721 cars, as of yet unrivaled in its scale.

Well, it's getting late, and I think I'll crash soon, but I may or may not finish the update on my life tomorrow. It all depends on how I feel about it.