So I was about to pull some photos off of my phone so I could show you all the awesome things that Christina and I have been up to the past month or so to explain why I haven’t been posting, but as it turns out my phone ate most of them. So instead this post is going to be me complaining about my phone.

I have the HTC Droid Incredible and it’s a piece of garbage. It worked really well for the first few months, but since then it’s just been a constant pain in the ass. Things started going downhill about a half year after we got them (Christina and I both got one at the same time) when our phones starting giving notifications that the memory was full when it, in fact, wasn’t even close. The only solution? Reboot the phone to factory settings. So, yeah. That was fun.

THEN it started doing a thing where after you took a picture, you could only look at it right after you took it. Otherwise loading the Gallery showed nothing. Plugging the phone into the PC and reading the SD card showed they were still there, so it was a mild inconvenience. It sucked, for sure, but not enough to make me curse the device.

Now, the photos from one of the most amazing stretches of my life are half gone. I don’t know if it’s HTC or the Android platform but to be safe I’m boycotting both.

I’ll scrape together what photos I can and try to write something tomorrow, but tonight I’m just too devastated to even bother.

I was thinking about the future of video games, as I often do, and where they will fit in my life as time goes on. Video games will always be an important part of my life, so don’t worry, this isn’t one of my semi-regular emo posts again. I’ve just been thinking a lot about how I “consume” video games and what’s the best way for me to continue enjoying them.

Right now I write for three gaming sites – Nintendo Life, Push Square and KINECTaku – which each focus on one member of the “Big Three” gaming companies. For two console generations now I’ve owned all three major consoles and purchased games with steadily increasing frequency. Christina, however, was always a one-console-at-a-time gal, owning only a Wii until I moved in with my shiny Xbox 360. A few years down the line a new Bleach video game was announced, cementing a PlayStation 3 purchase for us.

So I’ve spent the past week and a half furiously making my way through Mass Effect 2, wondering why the hell it took me so long to get into it. I love the game; in fact, I’d be so bold as to claim it’s one of the finest I’ve ever played. So why am I desperately trying to finish it with less than two weeks until the sequel drops?

The same thing happened to me with the first Mass Effect, actually. I picked it up simply because of the BioWare name due to my profound love for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. I worked for GameStop at the time and was enrolled in a SUPER SEKRIT program Microsoft had for retail employees where you could take online quizzes on their products to earn points which could be redeemed for free games. I had the points, I heard the game was good, so I ordered it.

I played it for a couple of hours before being bored and giving up. I think I just wanted it to be KotOR, which it wasn’t. So it sat on my shelf while I went and did other things. Fast forward a couple of years and Mass Effect 2 is on the horizion, hype train barreling forward full speed ahead. I decide to dust off the first game and give it another shot.

I immediately fall in love and kick myself for not playing through it earlier.

So Mass Effect 2 drops and I snatch it up. My original save clocked in at around 8 hours or so before I stopped. I don’t remember why; I think it was around the same time I was playing Final Fantasy XIII (another game I abandoned) so I think juggling two RPGs just got to be too much and I moved on to other things. I tried again a few months later, this time getting about 25 hours in before stopping for some unknown reason. I had loved the game since the start so I honestly have no clue why I keep dropping it.

So here I am again, twelve days out from Mass Effect 3, kicking myself for not playing Mass Effect 2 sooner. For a series that’s so fantastic I’m sure making it hard for myself to get the most out of it.

Don’t you hate it when one simple design choice ruins an entire game?

As a 3DS Ambassador, I got 10 free Game Boy Advance games via download, including Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones. I haven’t played much Fire Emblem despite owning both Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn, but James, editor at Nintendo Life, asked me if I’d review it as my first Nintendo Life assignment. I agreed.

I’m not super into strategy RPGs, but I do love me some Shining Force and Final Fantasy Tactics, and I’d always wanted to really get into Fire Emblem. I liked the look of it and the “rock-paper-scissors” weapon balance was super fun. The writing was good and I loved the character designs. Things were looking good!

I read the Star Wars: The Old Republic boards pretty regularly, as I’m obsessed with the game and have more free time at work than I should. A lot of it is just people discussing the game, getting opinions on character classes and generally just passing the time until launch.

I’m mostly on the board for the Sith Warrior class, as it’s the class I’ll be playing and I like to see what other people are saying about it and keep on top of any new information. When I made the decision to play an Imperial character so I could play with friends I knew I’d be in for more than my fair share of immaturity from teenagers who are all about being GRIMDARK and listening to songs that make their mom mad, but sometimes what’s said on the boards is simply appalling.

That headline is indicating that this post is about my gaming backlog.

I’ve never really thought that I had a backlog; I just played what I want when I wanted. As I was trying to plan out the games I was going to buy for the rest of the year, I realized that a lot of games I wanted weren’t “must-plays,” there were just games I wanted. I decided I was going to limit myself to three new games between now and Christmas: Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3, Super Mario 3D Land, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

I decided to use the time instead to go back and finish (or start) older games that fell by the wayside for whatever reason. I started my list while I was at work, and without even having my game collection in front of me it was over 20 games. It’s much more than that now since I’ve been home. Christina and I have over 850 games AT LEAST (this is what happens when two lifelong gamers get married) so going through our game closet brought a lot of games I had forgotten back into the front of my mind.

I’ve been thinking a lot about video games lately (cue “OH FOR EFF’S SAKE JOE NOT ANOTHER ONE OF THESE POSTS”, but hey, it’s not what you think!), specifically about if having access to each system is a good thing or a bad thing.

Right now I’ve got a Wii, a DSi, a 3DS, an Xbox 360, a PSP, a PlayStation 3 and a pretty solid gaming PC. There’s NOTHING I can’t play right now (my PC even runs Crysis pretty good!). It’s a good feeling, knowing that if a game that I’m interested in comes along I’m not going to miss out on it because I don’t have the hardware to play it on. Unfortunately, this comes with a whole new problem: I have TOO MANY games to play.

Lately I’ve found myself getting bored playing video games and doing the same old thing. That’s typically a sign that I need to start being more creative, so I’m going to start on a couple of projects that I’ve been wanting to do for a while. I don’t really know if anything will come of them, but they’ll be fun to work on.

The first is a piece of fiction that I’ve had kicking around my head since I was a junior in high school. I’ve always had a loose concept for it, but I could never really think of the right hook for it, the right pieces to make it a story actually worth telling. A couple of weeks ago I thought of one change to the foundation and everything clicked, and since then I’ve had ideas coming to me every day. I’m not terribly good at writing fiction, but I do enjoy it, and it’ll be nice to finally start working on something that I’ve had in my head for ten years.

I’m a huge Dragon Ball fan, and I have been for 17 years. You probably don’t know this because I’ve never talked about it. I haven’t talked about it because I don’t know how to do so without sounding like an elitist prick.

You see, Dragon Ball was something that I discovered in 1994, right after I had graduated from fourth grade. My best friend lived across the street from me and he had a teenage older brother. One of his friends brought over a tape once that he had gotten of some Japanese cartoon called Dragon Ball Z. We watched it, not knowing what was going on since it was all in Japanese with no subtitles. There was some guy with yellow hair fighting some big green bug-looking guy. We were hooked.

We watched whatever tapes he could get his hands on, which meant episodes were never in order. My friend imported a Dragon Ball video game for his SNES from one of those mail-order places from the backs of old video game magazines (the game turned out to be Dragon Ball Z Super Butôden 2, which I still enjoy playing to this day). They later went on a trip to Hawaii and came back with all kinds of awesome Dragon Ball stuff.

If you follow me on Twitter or are a member of the forums, you’ve probably figured out by now that I am no longer a writer for Bits ‘n’ Bytes Gaming. I left a couple of weeks ago for a variety of reasons, but it wasn’t a decision I came to easily.

I liked being part of the BnB staff but it just got to be too much. I’m a married guy who works full-time, so when I’d come home each day and have extra responsibilities, it just got to be a bit much for me to handle. My phone was always going off with email alerts and there was always something to do. That’s not inherently bad in and of itself (in fact, were I a few years younger, I would have relished it), but it got to the point where I didn’t even have time to play the games I was writing about and I wasn’t spending nearly enough time with my wife.

Another aspect of it was I realized just how apathetic I am towards the “industry” side of video gaming. I don’t care what this company’s financials are, I don’t care what this CEO said, I just don’t care. I like playing video games, and even then there’s a specific group of video games that I like, and I just didn’t have the interest to keep going into things that were just irrelevant to me. I thought I wanted to be a games writer, and I don’t think that’s true anymore. I certainly enjoy writing about video games, but only the way I do on this blog… typically tongue-in-cheek, informal articles written by a guy who just likes video games.