So once upon a time, I found these really cool game companies that made games I REALLY liked. I spend thousands of hours in Never Winter Nights and it's children. I also loved me some Sam and Max + Monkey Island. But then somewhere along the way, I got Back to the Future and then Tales from Borderlands + Mass Effect Andromeda without a Quarian Arch. I am just starting to wonder if there is an expiration date on every game company I love because burn out is a thing.

I think the big issue is when the original team that made a studio great starts to leave, you tend to lose the soul of what made them great. Like Dragon Age Origins, great game. Dragon Age 2...not so much. And Dragon Age Inquisition is like Dragon Age Origins and Skyrim had a baby. Closing all those evil rifts do make better sense vs. something like settlements in Fallout 4 while you are desperately seeking your child. But it is not the tight narrative game I loved in the past from Bioware like Mass Effect 1 to 3. Then along came Andromeda, and I get why EA put Mass Effect on ice for while.

Somewhere along the line, that game lost its way, and while playable, it just does not have a tight compelling story I expect from the Mass Effect series. For a while there I was saying it was Dragon Age Inquisition with Spaceships but I have been replaying DAI. And when I do a beat by beat comparison, there is way more story to keep you playing. In MEA a settlement is pretty much the end goal on a planet and you are mostly done. In Dragon Age, that just triggers the other half of the quests on a map. Important quests like this town is starving because a dragon is blocking the main road in. And then for completing those quests, I get things like more merchants back at my stronghold. In MEA, I get to unlock colonists but there is little physical evidence that that does anything. Because outside of a handful of specific people you wake up for a quest, none of the people you wake up make a colony more populate or are anything other than a number on a screen.

I think is this is where Bioware stumbled, in a game about would building....where are the results of my efforts?

Now back to Telltale, I do know when they jumped the shark. Its when they announced the Jurassic Park game. The problem is big license cost money, and therefore you have to sell lots of games. However adventure games will always be a bit of niche market (half my friends do not like the Walking Dead series), so you end up maybe breaking even. Add to that the put more than one game in production at the same time, and I can see how it spiraled out of control.

I guess in the end I am just sad there is an expiration date on most of the game companies I love because sooner or later the people that make the content I like will move on.

Ok - I admit it, I am a bit of nerd when it comes to D&D.  I own most, if not all, of the licensed D&D video games, but somehow I missed ToEE.  The funny thing is I own a lot of Tokra games, so I don't know how I pulled that one off.
 
Anyway it went on sale for $6 over at GOG.com, so I went "Squee!" and grabbed it.  But alas it locks up on start, and it has been over a week since I heard anything from their tech support.  I did try every single one of their trouble shooting tips, including compatibility mode, re-installs, and tweaking my anti-virus.  Ah the joys of Windows 7 Pro 64bit.

Ok everybody that I know up till now that builds PCs plays video games.  NOBODY so far at my new job does!!!  I am blown away that nobody has heard of Myst (the point an click adventure), DOOM or Portal.  I was making a joke about how useful a portal gun would be to move computers in boxes around, and nobody got it.
 
Oh and for the background on my job, I tore apart and fixed 5 computers today.  3 of them had bad mother boards, 1 had a bad hard drive, and one....well its owner got pretty much a new PC due to the fact that sticky liquids and PCs don't play well together.  I replaced the hard drives, the RAM, the power supply, the mother board, and the DVD drive.

So I am settling in an finding my way around, and I have made this site my home page.  Take that GameSpot!!!
 
  I am working on hitting lvl 12 in 24 hours, and slowly adding my games list.  I should soooo post a picture of my PC games box.  It is about 18 inches long and is just DVDs + CDs double sided in sleeves.  So yes, I have a foot and a half of just PC games.
 
These are the movies I own:
http://darkwatersong.dvdaf.com/ 
 
Any live tracking of what I am playing with; sorry it's not X-rated:
  http://raptr.com/darkwatersong

Hello World....I just found you.
 
I was an out of work IT that love video games, and just got a job starting Tues.  Lets hope it pays my lovely super sized California rent, and lets me keep my Fallout New Vegas collectors edition pre-order.  And if you are wondering what the job it...its fixing laptops that the Geeksquad could not.