This summer has been an enlightening one for me in terms of my career as a gamer. (1337 gamer that I am.) For this summer, I started playing Planescape – Torment. Now I have trouble playing just about any other game. I blame it on WO’s quasi-experiment to determine what kind of gamer I am. [tag]Wizardry 8[/tag], which I’d been playing since last fall (dear god, that’s a long game!), seemed boring and annoying after Torment. Turn-based combat doesn’t appeal to me, and never has, although I endured that annoyance for the sake of the character development (and decent plot) of Wizardry 8. [tag]Diablo II[/tag]… well, honestly. WO and I…

Oh, look! For only 160 hours out of my life, I’ll do at least 19 more damage on every spell I cast. I just got two percent better. For 160 hours? That’s a month of full-time work. That’s an approximate economic value of $16,000 dollars at contractor’s wages. That’s 44 years of feeding a starving child somewhere in the world, every day of his life. (From The Sword of Courteous Debate‘s “I like gaming“, courtesy of Elf.) I wonder about this sort of thing every time I hear someone start talking about World of Warcraft, and particularly when the discussion lasts more than about 30 seconds. That’s the sign that…

So I mentioned on Tuesday that I’d finished Elite Force and was looking for something new to play. That night (or the next; the days blur), I installed Zork: Grand Inquisitor and Half-Life on my machine. Zork is a standard adventure game, in my mind, and it took me two tries to enjoy it enough to play more. I beat it on Saturday, and was impressed–much like I was with Elite Force–with how short the game was. There were a few places where the “trick” seemed to be something kind of arbitrary, but overall, the game was pretty fun and made me lust a little for some interactive fiction. Anyone…

I finished my first-ever first-person shooter (FPS) on Sunday. Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force is a shoot-em-up where you’re the second in command of a special task force formed on Voyager to handle problem situations (like, ya know, the ones they encounter in two out of three episodes). You run around with the awesomest of weapons and kill some sweet baddies, including Borg, Klingons, silly Humans, and some races not yet invented by Paramount. I love this game. This is the first FPS that I’ve been able to comfortably play since Doom II, especially control-wise. (I’m hoping that this will help me branch into other games that require jumping and…