All the buzz this month has been about all of the console games coming out. Besides the consoles there have been 3 expansions for MMOs coming out this month also. Everquest 2 released The Shadow Odyssey, Lord of the Rings Online release The Mines of Moria and World of Warcraft released The Lich King.  Luckily I only play two of these MMOs and I had to buy two copies of The Mines of Moria because my hubby plays it also.

So while I’ve had to make the hard choice of which games to buy for the consoles, I’ve also had to take into account the expansions. EQ2 and LotRO expansions had to be purchased, that was a no brainer. Though because of that I haven’t bought Dead Space or Left 4 Dead yet.

I get a little annoyed with having to buy 2 copies of an expansion just so me and hubby can play, but that’s a rant for another day. MMOs eat my money as much as the console games do so I have too many choices and just not enough money.

Oh woe is me. So many games and so little time.

Self-torture is not a new or shocking thing for me. As someone who occasionally listens to Meat Loaf, some would argue I am the world’s biggest sadist before even taking a look in my bedside cabinet. However, this is torture of a different kind, the kind that the American army would love to have in their arsenal. Lego. No, not walking on it, though we all know how painful that is… I mean seeing it every waking (and sleeping) moment, hearing it and even dreaming of it. As with most things, it is a purely self-inflicted condition that has no remedy other than the sweet embrace of time.

Before anyone thinks I may be a weird Lego-botherer, I shall elaborate. Lego Batman has gone where Lego Indiana Jones boldly went a few months ago and taken over my life. Though diverting and enjoyable enough including their repetitive and frustrating elements, it is the need to complete them and mop up the remaining and often faffy achievements that is the cause of my current woe. Collectibles and the need to regrind levels in order to find them are the main source of the problem. The click click click of assembling Lego items and vehicles starts to settle into my head and over the course of many hours gaming slowly wears a groove. Blinking a few times leaves a lingering trail of pink torpedo targeting arrows, and rubbing my eyes has the Riddler’s mind control beam flashing across my eyeballs.

They’re coming to get you…

After each gaming session, as levels were revisited for various achievements and collectibles, the groove deepened and the images began burning themselves into my mind. Once my eyes were too blurry to see, and the television was blissfully black, the scenes cruelly began to replay and closing my eyes only intensified them. Crawling into bed, they followed me. Click click click, bang. Ladders and canisters assembled themselves automatically in my head, the sound of dread in the dead of night is likened to that of a possessed doll dragging itself from beneath the bed with a kitchen knife.  Sinking into REM sleep did nothing to save me. Freddy Krueger may have tormented Elm Street’s teens, but The Joker’s cackle and Harley Quinn’s acrobatics haunted me as the characters infected all other dreams like a plague until everything was Lego and the game could continue. Click click click click click.

Manic cackle alert, move over Janet Street Porter

The completionist in me demanded I play on and I acquiesced. Nothing less than 100% would do, nothing less than 1000 gamer points would end it. What was the matter with me? Did I want my achievement list to look untidy? An unsightly odd number where the glorious thousand should be? Didn’t I want the burst of good feeling that comes with that sort of completion? Why was I whining? They can’t hurt me, the dominant part of my brain tells the cowering gibbering one… Lego Indiana Jones faded. And for a moment the green haze clears. For days I was hearing Lego build-its, chasing the ark, shooting Nazi (sorry, ‘bad guy’) Lego men and digging up glowing artifacts, until one day, they simply weren’t there anymore. As much as I listened, they had gone and the curse had been lifted by whatever game had washed in and slowly eroded the groove.

“Balls…”

So I played on with Lego Batman and endured and triumphed and with the worst over I can allow myself to sink into the colours and sounds of Albion in Fable 2’s capable arms. Someday soon, the images of cursed Lego will fade, my dreams will be mine again, and the sounds will go. I refuse to acknowledge that Lego Star Wars is laying un-played on my shelf, its siren song ignored for now. One day though I’ll decide it’s time to torture myself again and the click click click click – like all stalking horrors, will be back.

Obsessive. Compulsive. Dashboard.

It’s only been ten days since the New Xbox Experience was launched, and I’m hard pressed to remember the old dashboard. Okay, I’m not quite that hard-pressed, sure I can remember the old dash but by jiminy, the new one is good!

Almost everyone has had a chance, by now, to have a good old fiddle with it – crafting their avatars to look like whatever they want. In the case of a couple of my Xbox Live Friends the avatar is scarily lifelike, whereas Laura’s, for example, is completely different almost every time she logs in. When I crafted mine, I tried to make it look a bit like me and then stuck it in a brown suit so I could pretend I was Doctor Who look sophisticated!

So, NXE launched last Wednesday. I went to work on Thursday and asked my mate James what he thought of it.

“Awesome,” he said. “We spent all night burping. We don’t play games anymore. We just burp.”
I won’t lie. A portion of my brain was worrying that too much work had addled the poor lad’s brain. “You did what?”
“Press the right thumbstick, you’ll see…”

The end of the work day couldn’t have come quick enough for me. I raced home (well, as much as a bus can race) and immediately set to work burping. And yes, if you’re editing your avatar, a quick press of the right stick does yield a burp. Push the stick up as you click and you get a higher pitch, pushing it down and clicking results in a good deep belch. Genius.

At work the next day I was asked if I had burped. I had indeed. But I’d also made my little Geo dizzy, smiley and angry. The avatar rocks. Shake his head while you’re on your profile and he’ll show you that no means no! Nod, and he’s happy. Spin his head frantically and he looks a bit ill – complete with spinning eyeballs. More genius.

But the thing I like best about the new look is that I get to keep it tidy. I spent a good portion of the evening cleaning up my games list – deleting zero point games is a nice touch. So, it was goodbye Crazy Mouse (hurrah!), goodbye Hellboy and, at long last, goodbye OXM demo discs. Hurrah. It was also a time to curse that I managed to squeeze a couple of achievements out of Bomberman Zero, as that shall now blight my list for all time but, hey, you can’t have it all.

It was while I was flicking through my games that the OCD really kicked in. The New Xbox Experience has adopted the sliding bar approach that xbox.com and gamercard.net use for showing you how you’re doing with your achievements. Get all the achievements and your bar is full, get only a few and your bar is all but empty. For some reason, seeing the games represented like this has made me want to neaten them all up. It’s absolutely ludicrous.

Now I’m finding that getting an achievement has nothing to do with scorewhoring, it’s all about making my little green bars neat. If, for example, the gamerscore bar is longer or shorter than the achievements earned bar (as it is for most games – unless it’s 50 achievements at 20 points each) I find myself wanting to even them out so that it doesn’t look higgledy-piggledy. In a way, this is good because the easiest way to neaten everything up is to try and get all the achievements meaning that I am spending more time playing a game, but it also means that if I’m playing something crap and pick up an achievement, I’ll then have to endure it a little bit more to tidy up my bars.

I’m hoping that this bout of OCD will fade once the new car smell of the NXE fades, and that I can just go back to playing whatever and not really caring what my gamercard looks like at the end of it (although I will, of course, always delete Crazy Mouse every time I play it!) but for now I find myself a slave to the sliders.

Maybe I should change my avatar to look like Adrian Monk, the Obsessive Compulsive Detective from the TV show, “Monk.”

Yes, I know… it looks quite a bit like him already!!