I posted quite a while ago about my plans for my birthday and the week after it, being a camping trip down the river.  I also mused about the fact that I would be purposefully depriving myself of electronic gadgets for a week, which is well and truly outside my comfort zone.

The lack of updates weren’t because I went mad and became a hermit, but merely because real life got in the way of doing other things.  However I can update on how the river trip went.

It didn’t.  Well, sort of.  For the first time in four months, there was rain up in that area, and so I spent a sum total of two and a half days and one night in the “wilderness”.  Getting to my chosen camp site involved a few kilometers along clay tracks and then a drive along a sandbar, so when it started to rain constantly I took the choice to get out before I was stuck there for a week.

So, that would suggest a lack of evidence that I can stand being without electrical powered gadgets for a long period.  Hell, while I was back at my parents place waiting for the rain to subside I spent the hours watching Blu-Ray movies and playing the DS.  What I can tell you is that as soon as I have the chance to do it again, I’m going to pack up the tent and head down there.  Even for the brief period, I was relaxed.  Sitting on a sandbar in the sun, reading a book at watching fish jump in the river is fantastic, and greatly preferrable to sitting in an office all day.  Unfortunately it doesn’t pay the bills..

As has been a common theme in my writing recently, I’m soon to turn 30.  For me, this marks a time in life where I’m not seeing myself as young anymore and should probably stop spending my time sitting on my arse playing videogames and drinking beer.

Probably not going to happen.  However,  for the end of this trip around the sun I’ll be putting myself in an interesting situation and doing something I haven’t done for years. (more…)

As it’s the start of the new year, we’ve already all been through the “best games of 2008″ spiel and are moving forward with what is to come in the new year.  Seeing as I’m rapidly approaching 30, it’s also an appropriate time to look at where the bloody hell all that time went and what games are the main culprits for eroding my youth.

This list would probably look pretty familiar to a lot of people, being your lives were probably decimated by some of these as well.  Also, you’d probably notice the pretty heavy Nintendo bias as that was my poison of choice until I had enough cash to start buying every console.  After that stage, well, I did buy every console and in a lot of cases I put a lot of time into rather old consoles and games.  I’ve poured weeks into Gex on the 3DO and various fighters on the Neo Geo CD, and spent a very long time playing Super Metroid on SNES in my 20’s after having never played it while in my teens.

For this list I haven’t listed every “generation”, only ones where I poured an immense amount of time into them, often to the detriment of my sleep, studies and sanity.  For example, amongst the 16-bit handhelds (of which only the GBA counts with the PC Engine GT a possibility if you stretch it), I played the GBA an absolute tonne but all the games I have were played somewhat equally.

The generation namings are something I’ve included as taken directly from Wikipedia.  I’ve been used to referring to generations via the bit count (ie 8-bit and 16-bit) but that falls down once you go past the 32-bit generation of the PS1 and N64.  Wikipedia’s one is nice and so I’ve used it (even if bit-era gamers won’t recognise it straight away)

Soo.. The list.. (more…)