Last night I updated the Wii (15 minutes), the PS3 (20 Minutes), and the Wrath of the Lich King Beta (40 minutes). The night before, since I was on vacation when the patch was released, I updated the Actual World of Warcraft application (1 hour) and had a system update as well (15 minutes). I know that there's also newPSP firmwareout there, and that I'm going to have to buy and apply theRock Band 2 Export Patchpretty soon.

It is official: I now spend more time updating games than I do playing them.I'm not a Gamer anymore; I'm merely an Updater.

I wonder how many people, like me, are picking up Diablo II again in anticipation of the third one. Honestly I never finished it the first time around. They started throwing runes and jewels and Horadric Cube recipes at me and it seemed easier to learn the Actuarial Tables for Fiscal Year 2001 and Pi to the 1000th digit instead. "Combine the Wha, Teh and Fuh runes in the Cube to create a list of combinable runes..."

However I'm spoiled by World of Warcraft's user interface, especially when my marathon session to get to the Lower Kurast checkpoint ended abruptly. I hit escape and accidently clicked on "save and close", leaving both loot and charms on the ground and ensuring I would restart the game from about 2 hours behind through waves and waves of uninteresting but deadly demonic Fetish Dolls. Wait...isn't the reason I'm not playing WoW because of the repetitiveness?

OTOH isn't repetition one of the main tenets of modern video game design?

Remind me why I play games again...

At the Giants/White Sox game this past weekend, they played the typical organ tunes ("Charge!") and drum beats to get the croud cheering.And then suddenly I realized every time the drums beat:

Boom, Boom, Boom-Boom, Boom

I reflexively said:

Pon Pon Pata Pon.

"And in the bottom of the eighth, the Zigaton Crabs are down with three, the Eyeballs up with seven..."