I did get some of the latter done, I admit, but it was pretty lightweight.  I started BioShock up in Easy mode — evidently I’ve not played BioShock under my XBOX360 profile (I played it at Girl’s house under a different profile, and I own a PC copy that I never got very far in).  I’m not feeling very invested in it — I certainly know the coming reveal already, but every time I play BioShock, it makes me miss SHODAN.

I have an embarrassment of riches here, on the PC.  I spent around $80 over Christmas on the Steam Sale, and have somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 games (some of which were purchased over the past year), none of which I’ve gotten very far in.  I have several big RPGs: Fallout 3, Dragon Age:Origins, Morrowind:GOTY (my third(?) purchase of that game!), Eschalon:Book 1, Mr. Robot, Witcher:Enhanced Edition, Sacred 2, Torchlight, Hinterlands, and StarWars:KOTOR.  I also picked up a NWM2 module on someone else’s sale, I’m not even sure I can install Neverwinter Nights at this point (I have my keys, but do I remember any of the other DRMific info?).  And that, my friends, is just the list of RPG or strong RPG-elements games.  I bought the Indie pack, I’ve got some FPSs, I’ve got some RTSs, and a pleasant handful of Adventures (Loom!, the Space Quest collection!)

Now I hate it when games do that thing where they give me too many choices.  It’s one reason I only play Final Fantasy games with a guidebook in my lap. I’m given too many choices without any idea what the consequences of my choices are.  Several times in the past week, I’ve sat down at my computer looked over my list of games (over half are installed) and ponder what I’m going to play.  Then I go over to FaceBook and play TikiFarm for a few minutes, then hit Kongregate up for a Tower Defense game.  It’s just easier than deciding.

Given that the much-vaunted first quarter releases have few things I care about, I’d hoped to write some about the games from Steam, but I’m just not playing them.  It’s kind of funny, really. I have enough games to keep me busy for a year, and I can’t focus enough to play one.  I’ll admit I’m trying very hard with Dragon Age, but I’ll write a bit about that tomorrow.  It’s still instructive, though, even if things are occasionally frustrating.

Now, since it got lost along with everything else, it’s hard to know how well I did, but I remember the big points. One of the items was to migrate Sarah, and while that was accomplished, it didn’t happen the way I wanted, obviously, but it did happen. Mail is now handled by Google, and the website by Powweb, so outages should largely be a thing of the past.  Ones I’m responsible for, anyway.  This year, I’d like to finish the recovery process, or triage it and call it done.  I’ve got the old hard drives that need recovery, and if that doesn’t work, I’ve got to manually fix the blog’s theme and a few other small things.

The other items were a bit more successful.

I wanted to go to a convention — AGDC at the time I wrote it, but I wound up going to PAX and really enjoying it. I also got to meet a ton of people that I knew, and as that was my real purpose, I can mark that a success.   Tam and I are planning to go to PAX East this year (and it would be cool to see some of Boston when we go)  I’d like to get out west again in the fall, maybe to Portland.  Girl and I are planning on going to Origins again this year, if only for the merchants.  I’d be happy to meet up with people there, if they want to come to Columbus.

I wrote a novel, and while the first draft is a stinker, it got finished.  I’ve done NaNoWriMo, and “finished” it, but the novel wasn’t done.  Now I’ve written a whole novel, and learned a lot on the process. The rewrite/second drafts should go easier.  Rewriting that novel is on my list for this year, but I also want to do some more postable writing, but don’t have a specific goal yet. So, I need to have a goal or plan for this by March or drop it.

I wanted to have a game published and out last year, and I did a lot of work on one for the AIF micro-comp (NSFW), it didn’t get finished. Finishing that game is my first major personal goal for the year. I’d also like to do a flash game of some kind this year. That’s getting easier and easier as time goes by.  It can be short, and probably should be. Right now, I’m thinking about a race/tower defense game based on the Tortoise and the Hare.  But I reserve the right to change my mind.  Again, much like last year, I’d like to move from the talking about to the doing, regarding games.

I really want to do some more Pen and Paper gaming this year. We’re using Google Wave (need an invite? let me know!) to do some of this, but I miss the social aspect of having people in my home, feeding them and doing all the bs and chatter that goes along with it.  Like many poly families, we have a decent-sized social group to pull from, and like many poly folk we’re almost all gamers of one kind or another.  So we’re going to try to do it with them.

Right now I’m working on a world called Amaranth, which is loosely based on Zelda.  The dungeon and quest design will be as well, thinking of things in bite-sized pieces with clear short term goals that all feed into a long term plan.  I love world design, and feel free to comment or make suggestions on our wiki.

In terms of web-based gaming, I’m working on a My Life With Master game that I run, and am playing in one of Corvus’s HCE games.  I’m also thinking of launching a slow but steady Lexicon game, but that’s going to depend on how much writing time is taken up by MLWM and the HCE game.

Finally, I had a work goal, which was to start my big project this year. I add it here as any big programming project is a creative drain that takes away from the writing and game programming.  I did get it started last year, but it was a bit of a false start. I only get points for technicality here.  We’re moving our offices downstairs to be closer to people, and I hope that one of the benefits of that is that this project will be easier to get started and running this year. I’d like to get designs done by budget time, so that I can work on them as things gear down in the last half of 2010.

That may seem slow, but part of this is about setting realistic goals so that I can say I did them, as opposed to over-ambitious goals, so that I can have the energy from the pressure. I used to do that in college, each semester started with huge goals and project that usually got narrowed down to just one by the end.  This seems to have worked last year, putting the priorities in my mind so that I could make them happen.  I just need that little bit of focus to pick from the many things that interest me.