01.27.2012

 It’s been kind of a weird couple of days this week – up and down, up and down.

Monday night I stayed up until midnight, anticipating the release of the new MW3 maps. I don’t know why I thought they’d be available right at midnight, but I stayed up to see. But, sadly, no new maps for me – yet.

I’ve turned into this little Xbox obsessive, so I think maybe I was a little too excited about it, but I’ve already gotten a little bit bored with the current maps, so some fresh new content is extra-welcomed!

Then when I got up Tuesday morning, there they were. I was delighted to see some of my fellow Premium Member Clanmates on to help me check out the maps.

Then later, Tuesday afternoon, we had this freaky pouring hail storm, which really surprised me because, you know, I live in the desert. These kinds of things don’t just pop up out of nowhere around here - we’re pretty aware of when moisture is coming – we watch for these things. It crazy poured hail – while the sun was shining on it – for about 10 minutes, then it stopped. Then it started pouring rain about 40 minutes later. Very nice surprise.

And then later that night, I was up late playing SR3, and I got disconnected from Xbox Live, which isn’t terribly unusual. Since I’m often up late, I’m used to getting booted – it’s when Microsoft likes to do its maintenance and what-not. I was busy in a firefight with a rival gang, so I didn’t bother trying to sign back on for 10, 15, minutes but when I tried to, it wouldn’t sign me back in – also not unusual. So I flip over to internet to make sure it’s running, and much to my surprise, service is down.

Now I’m freaking out that the achievements I’ve been working on all night are all moot, but, since there isn’t anything I can do about it, I save, shut down, and off to bed I go.

I wake up the next day, and the first thing I do is check to see if service has been restored, which it has, and then I log in to Xbox to see if my game progress is intact, which it seems to be.

Since I was “prematurely shut down”, I start going at it again, off and on, all day and night, until……

Late Wednesday evening, I start getting this weird vertigo thing while sitting down, that went on for almost two hours. I get vertigo a lot, but rarely when sitting, and never for more than a few seconds at a time. After extensive research, I have found out that it MAY be caused by 1 of 4 things, and therefore MAY be 1 of 3 maladies, and, since it’s difficult to diagnose any of them, there’s really nothing anyone can do, and after wasting many hours on this, I’m exactly where I was when I started researching it – confused, anxious, and dizzy! Thank You, World Wide Web!  <clap – clap – clap>

*Sigh*

The new maps are visually stunning. The artwork is really top-notch. And I think that each of the two maps provides something the current maps do not. The first map, Piazza, is like an Italian seaside villa area, with lots and lots of stairs…. Stairs up, and stairs down, stairs joining on to more stairs, so many stairs…. It makes my knees hurt just thinking about it… (Focusing) But the neat part about it, is that there’s no line of sight, i.e., no sniping. It’s definitely a short-range game on this map. The other map, Liberation, is supposed to be like Central Park, I think. It has some neat wide open spaces, and some terrific artistic details. It’s unfortunate, though, that they can only be played with other premium members.

Welp, I have more achievements to whore after, so it’s time to wrap it up.

This week’s shout-outs are going to Infinity Ward, and Volition Inc., for building the two wonderful games I’m playing the most right now.