Since I continue to be an awful correspondent and some of you may be interested.

Well, this is my third week at work. The job site is about a mile from my house, which is nice, but the guys here don't really have that much for me to do, so basically I'm getting paid $10/hour to play computer games and occasionally file something. It's pretty nice, although I feel vaguely guilty about getting paid to be useless. They hired me in the first place because they have an arrangement with the mayor's office to hire a graduating high school intern for the summer, not because they actually have anything for me to do, so that's the deal. I will be buying a nice iPod in the near future and saving the rest of my money for school, since I'm rather fond of eating and would like to continue in the future.

I also sprained my ankle a couple days ago. It was pretty rough! I was fighting off a pack of wild lions and gave one a Chuck Norris roundhouse kick to the skull as it lunged at my throat, gooey ropes of saliva dripping from its foot-long fangs and all, and the blow was so powerful it just about knocked my foot off! Crutches are a pain in the ass, though. It sucks.

In other news, Oblivion has taken over my life. I seriously can't stop myself from playing it whenever I have a free moment! It's rough around the edges--it has balance issues with the spellmaking/enchanting system, is really glitchy, and the level-up system is retarded in that it is impossible to get good stat gains if you pick your major skills logically--but it's really addictive anyway. I've clocked 90 hours in a depressingly short time, and I've barely touched the main plot. Also, as of last night, I'd saved, uh, about 730 times, I think. I save a lot, it seems. But yeah, I'm an altmer caster, L20 right now, custom class, vampire as of late, and I like to kick ass with some custom 2HKO spells that add elemental and magicka weakness 100% for like 3 sec on strike. Also have a nice custom enchanted dagger that absorbs magicka when I'm running low, plus fire shield boots/gauntlets to compensate for my horrible fire weakness and actually give me some AC at the same time. (Body armor is for sissies when you can wear a badass robe.) I have decent blade skill and am thinking about enchanting up a glass short sword with something nifty just because I can--seriously, what else am I going to do with 15 black soul gems? which I filled by slaughtering necromancers, haha irony--but I probably won't use it much.

I've done the Mages Guild, Thieves Guild, and Arena (which is, by the way, totally pathetic if you jump up on the pillar next to the door and use ranged/summons), and I think I'm going to leave it at that, because being the head of five guilds is pretty silly. (Honestly, I would've preferred that the game just leave you as a high-ranking member instead of the head of the freaking guild, which strained my credulity pretty seriously in some cases, but whatever.) I'll do the Dark Brotherhood and Fighters Guild on a replay sometime. Like EmP, I started the game a while ago, played for a few hours, went "bleh, overrated" and wandered off, then came back only to get hooked and sink 90 hours in without noticing.

Oh yeah, and my free laptop is being retarded. The H key keeps falling off, and the spacebar screwed up recently, and I broke off one of the brackets for the retainer when I was trying to fix it. Yippee, now I get to get it repaired! Oh, last night it also decided that it didn't like the power cord, so now it's dead and I can't charge it. I kept getting some error about the AC adapter not providing a high enough voltage or something, don't remember now. I hope it's the power cord, anyway, not the laptop. Get what you pay for, I guess!

Some time ago, a small company called Spiderweb Software made a game called Exile. This game was pretty awesome for many reasons, among them its unique milieu: a vast, sprawling network of underground caverns, known only as Exile, in which the surface-ruling Empire dumped its criminals and misfits. And this game did pretty well, so Spiderweb made some more, and the relationship between the Empire and its rejects grew more complex as Exile won its freedom and various shenanigans ensued.

In this game, there is only one winner. Cooperation disintegrates, and the game devolves into a savage contest of every man for himself. LAUNCH DETECTED flashes across the map again and again as enemies open fire and allies backstab each other. Every act of aggression leaves you wide open to retaliation; silos and submarines are helpless in launch mode, and their location is broadcast to the entire world when they fire ballistic missiles. But the primary goal of DEFCON isn’t to sur...

There’s a saying in the NetHack community that the DevTeam thinks of everything, and it’s true. The game is so deep and fully realized that it’s impossible to put down. Once you’re hooked, you keep coming back no matter how frustrating it gets sometimes, because NetHack isn’t just a game. It’s an addiction.

We’ve come to expect three things from the Xenosaga RPGs: a deep, epic plot, an insane number of amazingly well-done cutscenes, and terrible gameplay. Xenosaga Episode III: Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, for those unfamiliar with Nietzsche) is the long-awaited finale to the series, bringing the series-spanning storyline to a conclusion, and it meets about half of these expectations. This is both good and bad.

Among the desert weeds and radiation of post-apocalyptic California live the last remnants of humanity. Jaded and cynical, they wallow in poverty, their run-down settlements small outposts of civilization in the midst of the all-encompassing nuclear wasteland – but underneath the dirt and grime lies a devilish brand of humor and the utter freedom to make whatever you want of yourself and the world. This is the premise of Fallout and Fallout 2, two incredible CRPGs that have enchant...

Sigil is the City of Doors. It lies at the nexus of the multiverse; its portals touch countless worlds, and those with the correct keys can reach anywhere from Sigil. To the rest, it’s a prison. It floats above the infinitely tall Spire in the center of the Outlands, a neutral zone between the Outer Planes of good and evil, law and chaos. It’s indifferent to outside conflicts, its impartiality guarded by the Lady of Pain, an enigmatic sorceress who wears a bladed mask.

The first time I played Star Ocean: The Second Story, I was duly impressed by the large number of spaceships (I quite like them) in the title screen cinematic. Intrigued, I started a game.

At a glance, Disgaea: Hour of Darkness looks like your standard strategy RPG: turn-based battles on a grid, a variety of weapons and classes, a small amount of customization. But from the first time you meet the main character, you know that you’re in for a very unusual trip.

World War III nearly destroyed all life on Earth. No one bothers to remember the specifics now; they’re trivialities, unimportant details.

Castle of the Winds is an archetypal Rogue-like dungeon-crawler, a forgotten relic of the bygone shareware days. Charmingly straightforward like other games of its ilk, it dispenses with trivialities like a convoluted plot, rich milieu, and stunning visuals. Briefly put, it’s about killing things.