Gaming

It all began september 2004 with a free 10 (or was it 14?) day trial for Star Wars: Galaxies. Starting in a time now called as PRE CU or post publish 10, my roommate, another RL friend and myself started playing the greatest saga ever told in a galaxy far far away, our own.

For close to one and a half year SW:G became like a second part of my life, I met dozens of new people from all across the world and add to that, that you got to know them twice, once IC or "in character" and once OOC, as in "out of character". I was a Master Squad Leader - Master Carbineer. I survived together with my guild the CU and we went on exploring each our own saga in the Star Wars universe.

Ingame, the game was rich, promising and fast but technically or game mechanic wise, it was more like a huge construction site where somebody with a great vision started to work but didn't get the time to finish it. Still with patience and time and maybe a bit more money, I was, as we all were, hopefull and having faith that the development one day would finish all these visions to their completion. At one point I even had to chance to contribute to it, by taking the chance to become a correspondent representing the carbineer profession on the official forums, gathering and forwarding issues and wishes from the community toward the developers, still hoping that they would take our input and ideas and implement them.

Then the NGE hit and there has been realy said enough about it. The server I played on - Ahazi - took a hard hit, but my guild managed to survive the loss on players. As correspondent, renamed to senator, but now without a task or a community to represent, I held on to the game to see and experience the new direction of the game.

They realy tried to fix the game, but they lost their vision and above all the changes totally forget to preserve the ingame achievements of all players and so I left.

In the time after the SW:G, all "normal" computer games became boring. I was used to play together with friends and so I tried Dark Age Of Camelot, though it felt to small on "just" a german server. I got a Dungeons and Dragons Online beta access but the box I call computer didn't run it. Then came Eve Online but the lack of player interaction I percieved made it boring. It felt like a single player game, there was no real motivation to interact with anybody or I must have done something completly wrong. Now I'm looking at Dark and Light and it's free prequel Settlers of Ganareth. A world bigger as all other MMO worlds, as they like to advertise it, and with that an immersion beyond anything I have seen so far. It looks very promising, but at the same time is that what you can see in SoG so far away from what DnL should be that you start to doubt the release in April.

"So what? No online game anymore so go out and play IRL!" you might say, but it's not the game I miss, it's all those people who I met during the time I played. Luckily I got hold of a lot of them but wherever we go, it will never be the same again.

Kicking off

So as a "short" starter and a reason why I start this blog:

Just a couple of weeks ago I sent an application to an interesting job offer. I have been looking for a job for a while and I was still being picky to where I sent an application but here the description of the offered position sounded very interesting to me. Also with my real life name being Handy I couldn't resist working at a company developing mobile phones (germans will understand the irony).

My 2x16=32 birthday has come and gone, on the sunday after my birthday party my mobile phone screamed for my attention which it so deserved, the call became an interview regarding my job offer, and this is where things started to roll. More or less with "this has been a very promising interview" the man on the other side said, that they would call me back.

And they did, right on monday came an invitation to a more formal interview at their office, and to keep it rolling the suggested date was wednesday. Naturally I said yes and on the wednesday that week I hijacked the next "available" car and drove it to their office, followed by about 50 cops. After a two and a half hour long interview, yepp that's a pretty long one IMHO and that's a long time to make "mistakes", we parted quite positive with a "you will hear from us, probably during this week".

And again they did. Right on thursday I got a phonecall with the offer to take the job. And that's what I did.

Of course that means I'll be leaving my current place and home, and with that a lot of friends who I use to see on a daily basis and that's where this blog will come in handy ;).

So to all of you who want to know what the "walking mobile" is doing or want to say hello but don't have the time to pass by, here is another way to see what's going on or to drop a note.

Hi !

I once had a homepage and well ... that didn't worked out to well for me.
Let's see how this turns out.