Fitz's Game Journal - Game Mania

I’ve been really excited about games lately. There are so many video games on my shelf that I really want to play to completion. I’ve also been cruising around Amazon.com and noticing a lot of slightly-older games that I must have missed when they came out. Since the last update (regrettably a while ago), I’ve picked up Mass Effect, Call of Duty 4, Rock Band, Super Smash Bros Brawl, Virtua Fighter 5, Furu Furu Park, and the new Halo 3 maps. I must say I’m enjoying all of them, and would love to spend more time enjoying them. In addition to all those delightful games, I’ve picked up a wife.
I’ve been married for a month and it’s been the happiest month of my life. The new Mrs. Fitz is the singer for our Rock Band band, The $5 Shakes, with Dave on guitar and me on the drums. We’ve all been playing on medium so far, but the game does a good job of encouraging you to increase the difficulty when you get accustomed to it. I tried to plug the xbox 360 headset into the drumset and wasn’t able to talk to anyone on live. Has anyone else had this problem? I’ve purchased a few extra songs, if for no other reason than to dilute the number of times “Black Hole Sun” and “Mississippi Queen” come up. One bit of DLC I would seriously splooge over would be Weezer’s Blue Album. Imagine, if you will, playing from “My Name is Jonas” all the way through to “Only in Dreams”! I’d play it every day! Alas, Harmonix has not yet picked up on that.
After beating Mass Effect earlier this year, I occasionally feel the urge to return to it and play through more of the side-quests. Last night I did just that. Unfortunately (depending on your point of view), I was so swept up in the story of Mass Effect the first time through that I took the main quest’s urgency at face value, racing to complete it. I mean, on the one hand there’s a quest where you go to Earth’s Moon and disable some Virtual Intelligence or something because someone was dumb; on the other hand I have to find something before the entire universe is destroyed. I wonder what I’m gonna do. The second play-through is not how I expected; I thought I would be able to continue from the end of the game and go through the open-universe completing all the quests I missed. Instead, I was forced to return to the beginning: talking to the same people as if I’d never met them, asking about things they’ve told me about, and collecting quests I’ve already completed. For a game that takes quite a few hours of game-play to get really fun, replaying the intro is a strong deterrent to return players.
All that said, I must return to work without talking about the other games. Suffice it to say I’ll be playing a lot and talking about it excitedly, so come back soon!