Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Somebody That I Used to Know


I just saw a clip of Matthew Bomer (Bomer plays Neal Caffrey on White Collar) singing Gotyes’ “Somebody that I used to know”. A song that I love, not the least because it reminds me of the second series of a show called Misfits. I could explain it, but maybe if I write all mysterious more people will watch it. It’s a great show, at the very least, for the first two seasons. Anyways my mind wanders from that to FFXIV; A game I played for a few months last year. It was free while they were cleaning up the train wreck it was, in hopes of it becoming the something great that it could be.

If I'm going to write about Final Fantasy XIV though, then I have to start at the beginning. The beginning starts at FFXI, but really it should start before that. I hadn't really given much thought of Squaresoft's, as the company was known back then, FFXI. I was caught up in WoW and EQ2, the bright new shiny MMO's on the horizon. My PC at the time could only handle WoW so even though the Warcraft universe meant little to me that was going to be the game I played. I don't remember exactly when I started reading it but somewhere along the way I fell in love with the FFXI I read about in James 'Milkman' Mielke's blog about the adventures of Gyogi and Milkman and his friends the Roundabouts. Somewhere in a MMO only a mother could love I found something extraordinary, and I had to see myself if it was truly as magical as he described. So I bought the game for the 360. Loaded it up and I was off. A year later, hundreds of hours poorer I hung up my spurs with a smile. When I loved it, when I hated it, FFXI had won me over.

Which of course brought me to FFXIV; I wasn’t going to wait years for this one I was going to start at the ground floor. By ground floor, I mean to say I waited a few months for it to become free and fix some obvious bugs. I might be young, but I wasn’t stupid. Even FFXI had started its era with no fast travel, and if you know anything about games that is a long time to be running from place to place. I wanted to love FFXIV. It was a beautiful game and it had all the makings of an excellent game. There was just one thing, there was nothing to do. It was like being in bed with a beautiful woman and not having anything to talk about; nobody falls in love with Michelangelo’s David. For months I played it and tried to find something to love, but in the end I put it on the bookshelf and never looked back. By the end of this fall it should be a whole different game; a better and more fun game. I liked it before; maybe I’ll finally love it then.

So I suppose in the end this is both a tribute to fond memories and a promise to the future. Once upon a time someone made a game I would have never played worth playing and I was the better for it.

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