Five Things I'm Pretty Sure I Think

(Title is a modified version of the fantastic segment in every week's Monday Morning Quarterback column from SI's Peter King, who is one of the best, and most prolific, sportswriters I've ever seen).

Here are a few of the things I think about during the course of an average week. The subjects may vary, based on whatever is going on, but the common thread is this: if my brain were to devote as much time to useful pursuits as it does to useless knowledge, questions, fantasies, etc., maybe I would have contributed something useful to society by now. But, since I don't, you're stuck with this...

1. Listening to the Out of the Game podcast today, Jeff Green mentioned that World of Warcraft's gaudy subscriber number of 11 million. Is this number the number of paying customers of the service? Does this number include lapsed subscribers, such as myself? Does this number include the ridiculous number of trial accounts set up by people who never subscribed, or those accounts set up by gold farmers for the sole purpose of spamming ads for their services? Maybe that information exists somewhere, but I'm fairly certain it's not available for public consumption.

2. Is there such a thing as 'too many games coming out'? As a father of two, and soon to be three, there just aren't enough hours in the day to sleep, eat, work, spend time with the family, do chores, and experience all of the games that interest me. As an example, Braid is only $5 on Steam this weekend and I should buy it. It was one of the best games of 2008, and I still haven't tried it yet, which makes me sad. I like to think of myself as up on all things video games, but because of time constraints, I don't often get to experience what I listen to or read about firsthand.

3. I don't like first person shooters. There, I've said it. Now all I have to do is keep repeating it, so I don't convince myself that the Next Big Thing(TM) will be the one that I like. There are so many games I've bought and played, only because everyone in the gaming world was raving about them. Halo 3? Check. Played a little bit of multiplayer with coworkers, and sucked. Didn't get past the first mission in single-player. And yet I still feel guilty for some reason that I don't like it more. CoD4? Fortunately haven't spent the money on it yet. Left 4 Dead? Got it from Goozex a few weeks ago, thinking that I would play it with friends, and so far it hasn't found its way into my 360. It's time for me to realize that it's ok to not like the genre, and that it doesn't make me a bad person.

4. I may have screwed myself out of about 7 hours of progress in Final Fantasy. After releasing the earth crystal from the Lich, I immediately went to the Earthgift shrine, and currently have a save game (my only savegame for this adventure, sadly) on the deepest level of this dungeon. The problem with this scenario is that all of the exits appear to be guarded by boss creatures scaled for at least 10 levels higher than my current level (24). Does anyone know if I can leave this place, or am I stuck here and have to start over? If I have to start over, it probably will spell the end of my quest to complete this particular game, since I don't have the time or patience to go through all of this again.

5. As I'm sitting here writing this, I probably should be getting back to Arkham Asylum. Still haven't touched it since midweek last week. Also, I finally got Lost Odyssey in the mail from Goozex. When I played it the first time, it was on a whim from Gamefly, I enjoyed it enough to put it on my Goozex request list and send back the Gamefly copy. Now I can continue on with that story, which was entertaining enough for me to want to know what happens.

Well, that's all for now. Hopefully I'll get the chance to watch some football (it is the opening weekend, after all) or some Red Sox baseball (second game of a doubleheader vs. the Rays), but the wife is playing a mean round of 'Flip TV', so that may not happen. See you next time!