recent pastimes

I may have unleashed a monster onto the world, or at least into Jon’s living room. A couple months back, when Starcraft II first came out, Jon was on the fence about whether he’d buy it or not. I convinced him that surely he’d enjoy playing it since he enjoyed the first one so much, and that he ought to just go ahead and get it even if it was $60 (which seems overly expensive for any video game). He bought it at GameStop* the same day I bought Dragon Age: Origins. We both went crazy with our new games, playing them constantly. This summer was the summer of Dragon Age for me, definitely.

Thing is, while I’ve completed Dragon Age a couple of times, played every class, beat the expansion, and played through numerous DLCs for it, thus ending my long run for the time being, Jon is still ramping up with Starcraft II. He beat the campaign some time ago and has been going up the ranks in 1v1 online play. This wouldn’t concern me if not for the fact that his desktop PC is badass, especially compared to mine, and I’ve been playing The Sims 3 more recently, which runs crazy-better on his machine than mine. So I want to play The Sims 3, but I don’t want to play it on my PC because 1) it’s at my apartment, not his and 2) the experience would be much degraded from what I’ve gotten used to on Jon’s machine. Where’s a Duplicator when you need one? His monitor is bigger, he has more RAM, his hard drives are faster and larger, his video card is better… (Is it just me, or did that sentence read more like innuendo than an assessment of computer parts?) About the only component where our computers are equal is they’re both running the same operating system.

He’s been pretty nice about letting me on to play The Sims 3 for hours at a time, but I do feel bad for taking up his machine. Fortunately I’ve been reading through the Harry Potter series again; I’m on the sixth book currently. After this, I’m to start the Outlander series, thanks to Carly’s recommendation. It doesn’t really sound up my ally—historical Scottish romance??—but she assures me it’s really good. She described it as the perfect mix of serious, interesting plot and cheesy romance. I got it from Amazon a couple weeks ago, or at least I think I did—I haven’t actually opened the Amazon box to make sure they didn’t send me some other random book-shaped object.

* I read the rants of gamers everywhere, i.e., mostly on Reddit, hating on GameStop. I’ve yet to have a problem with the local GameStops, however, because their employees seem generally informed and aren’t pushy. I’ve had good chats with them about the different games I’ve bought from them, too. So, I keep going there. I don’t even think I have the choice of shopping local when it comes to video games. There’s pretty much Best Buy, GameStop, or one of the big stores a la Wal-mart around here.