Staying Behind the Curve
Well, the move to the new house is pretty much done, although there’s lots of boxes left over at the in-laws houses that are slowly being moved over on a daily basis. This is made much easier by the fact they’re only 6 miles away, which is close enough if we need them, but far enough that we get our own space.
The biggest trouble we’ve had with the move is fitting everything that used to fit into 1600 square feet into 1100 square feet, along with a new baby. We’re having to carefully go through everything that we own and decide whether it comes with us, stays at the in-laws, gets sold, gets donated, or gets trashed. For many items, this decision is hard. For all gaming-related stuff, that’s an easy decision.
We’ve brought our laptops as well as the kid’s desktop, which is nested inside the corner desk unit that takes up a fair bit of space in the living room. We’re back to video gaming with our 54" projection television that’s managed to make it through 9 years so far with only one major repair needed within the first three years. Connected to it are the Wii, the PS2 and the Xbox. Having a new baby means changing a lot of things to compensate, and one change we’re making is going with wireless controllers, particularly after the kids almost pulled the PS2 off the shelf via the cables. All of our games are in bulk game cases, but as we keep adding more games to our collection we’re starting to run out of space for those and will be looking at revamping that. My PC game collection is in two large tubs, mostly alphabetized and in order, although there are some stragglers.
We found that we had a little extra cash and we’ve been looking at upgrading the kids’ computer and making it the family gaming computer. I specced out putting in a 3.0 Ghz dual core processor, 8Gb RAM, 1 TB HDD space and at least an GeForce 8800GT. This would pretty much make the computer game-friendly for the next five years. When I told my daughter, she simply shrugged and then said that she doesn’t need the computer upgraded as she has the Wii, and that she’d rather have her own laptop. She’s nine years old. She’s obviously been replaced with a pod person.
In that same vein, I looked at whether or not I should get an XBox 360. The money that was being put aside to upgrade the computer would mean I could get the Elite, a few extra wireless controllers, and a bunch of games to start me off. It would also mean I could retire the XBox. However, looking at my family/work/study schedule for the next three years I’ve already got plenty of games to play and not enough time to play them as it is. Buying an XBox 360 would just mean spending money that I couldn’t appreciate for some time. At least upgrading the family computer would be useful, although it pretty much is capable of running most of the games the kids need right now.
So, I think I’ll be staying behind the curve for the next couple of years. I’ve got a ton of games here at home that I can play and review on this site, and there’s a lot of gems in there, some of which I’m playing right now and will post about soon. There are also a lot of awesome free games that are available online today that either play in your browser, or can be downloaded. On top of that, there’s a lot of casual games that are available as that market segment grows and those really are the types of games that I tend to be playing right now as it’s hard for me to get more than an hour at a time to sit down and play a game without interruptions. Without having to keep this site updated on a set schedule, I’ll be able to post as I come across all manner of coolness. At least, that’s the plan.
Thanks for hanging around so far, and thanks for sticking with the site.
