My Mea Culpa re: Dragon Age

So I'm only about an hour and a half into Dragon Age: Origins, for several reasons.

1. Tuesday evening (the day the game was available) saw me doing a lot of necessary housework to help my very pregnant wife. Instead of sitting down to play at 7pm or so, it turned out I was free to play around 9pm. That allowed me enough time to get my character (Raist, a human mage) to the point where he's been confronted with what (I think) is a very important decision. Since I don't do very well on not enough sleep, I decided to call it a night.

2. It was at this point I stopped playing and started thinking about how I would respond to the question. The gravity of the situation, and the apparent ramifications for both paths, seemed to be so weighty that I actually discussed them with my wife as we settled into sleep. I felt that her extensive experience with fantasy novels and the fantasy setting might lend to a different perspective on the decision. At this point, I think I've determined the path I'm going to choose, but it gives me no pleasure to make the choice.

3. While driving back from a jobsite and listening to a gaming podcast, the Borderlands conversation got me excited enough to jump back to Pandora for a while. Gaiden is now level 24 and has unlocked the New Haven area, with all of the quests and challenges to go along with it. After my latest adventure, it's clear that I need to get some Corrosive weaponry, because there are a lot of beasties with armored heads that love to charge me, and it would be nice to have something to weaken that.

4. My gaming ADD is kicking in even more, as I'm fighting the urge to buy Torchlight and load that onto my work PC. Since it can run on just about anything, it would be a great way to kill lunch hours.

All in all, it's not a bad thing, but there's some inherent guilt to not have more time invested in the game. Tonight is Friday night, so I'll try to stay up a bit later than usual to make some progress.

(If you're wondering why I feel guilty at all, it's because I like to try to keep up with the gaming community as a whole with some select releases, and it just so happens that all 3 of the game releases that I'm interested in this holiday season all fall within a 2-3 week span. There are worse problems to deal with.)