I made a mistake.

I got excited for a game prior to release.

Okay, so that's not the whole story. That on it's own doesn't always end badly. And there are a few other games that I'm still pretty excited for that have yet to come out; the upcoming Zelda game and Persona 5, among others.

But I got excited for a free game this time, meaning I could download it the moment it came out without worrying about my finances. It was exciting, thinking I might be able to play a game I was looking forward to the moment it came out!

The game in question is Fire Emblem Heroes, which officially came out in the United States... about 45 minutes ago. It's about 4:45 PM in my neck of the woods, meaning that the game didn't come out until about 16 hours after midnight.

The thing is, they didn't give any real ETA beyond the date, so I stayed up late last night waiting for it to come out. Really late. I was hoping it would drop at midnight EST. It didn't. So then I hoped it would drop at midnight HST, the farthest-behind time in the US (Hawaii). The time difference is 5 hours. It was 3 AM where I'm at when that milestone passed me by.

I mean, 3 AM isn't a big deal. My sleep schedule is the most insane thing in the world. I find myself up way later than that pretty regularly. So I figured it might hit at 9 AM Eastern. I stayed up until about 6 before my frustration reached a climax. It had come out in other regions. I was seeing people post screenshots, and talk about the game. It was killing me. So I took my sleeping meds and went to bed. I checked one last time at 7 before falling asleep.

And I woke up at 1:30 PM. I know. I must be a real mess if I can say that nonchalantly. You're 100% right, but that's beside the point, here. I checked the Google Play store upon waking, knowing it would be out by then, because it'd be crazy if it wasn't.

It wasn't.

Now, as the clock approaches 5, I'm fighting through server issues to download a patch. The server problems themselves aren't bothering me. I expected these. The Pokemon Go launch was a nightmare, though I wasn't playing it at launch and didn't experience it myself. Server problems on day one of a major release, especially one that is ostensibly free, aren't a surprise at this point. I mean, that's not to say it doesn't suck, or that people shouldn't be fighting to address these issues, but I had resigned myself to this process before the release.

The reason I wanted to get started on it so soon was so that I could get it all downloaded, even if it was going to take hours and hours. I was hoping to have the worst parts of the server problems behind me, so that I would only have to put up with connection issues during play after that. I had really hoped to be able to put some time into it today, almost as a reward for being so on-the-ball and getting it started the moment it came out. Now I'm sitting here, on the back half of the day, looking at a download progress bar stay at 89%.

I will probably make the mistake of getting excited for something to this degree again. I won't be able to help it. And I'll convince myself that it'll be different this time, or I'll be able to push through any issues because I'm so dedicated to it. And it'll probably go a similar direction. I'm writing this mostly to complain, but also to remind myself to take it easy next time. Playing the game a day or two late isn't the end of the world if I don't make it the end of the world. This experience was an ordeal, but it's an ordeal that was entirely my own fault. Maybe next time I can sidestep this a little bit, knowing how it turned out this time.