Crimson is back!

It's been well over 6 months since I last posted here on the blog. I will explain why, but the short answer is that time constraints caused me to have a lifestyle change.

Just after Christmas (now 6 months ago) my girlfriend and I moved in with her parents to save money for a our own house. This threw a bit of a spanner into the works of my daily gaming routine. My gf's parents house is located 1.5 hrs travel time away from both mine and my gf's work. Essentially my gf and I were getting up at 5:30am for work and getting home around 7:30pm. Once dinner was cooked I'd get about an hour and a half of gaming in before I needed to be asleep ready for the next day. Shortly after starting this routine, my gf decided that she wanted to start doing a TV writing course after work. The downside to this, is that we catch the train home. Her classes wouldn't finish until 9pm at night, which meant she would have to catch the late train home. Unfortunately our train line has some shady characters around and it gets even worse the later you catch it. So of course I had to wait around and catch the train with her to ensure her safety. This meant that I had a gap between 5:30pm and 9pm after work where I would do nothing. I couldn't play games because my gaming rig was 1.5 hrs away. What was I to do? On our second late train home of this routine, we encountered a rather aggressive young fellow who was insistent on smoking a joint on the train while punching windows randomly (seriously wtf?). Anyway it scared the crap out of both of us and I decided that if we would continue this routine, I would need to learn some self defense. So I signed up to a Karate class after work which filled the void nicely. So for the last 6 months or so I've been training Kyokushin Karate four days of the week, as well as going to the gym. You can imagine the change in fitness/body shape going from a regular gaming geek who does very little exercise to a full fledged killing machine...

Let's just say, I don't worry about the crazy people on our train line any more.

With all this going on, I started to lose touch with gaming and the blog-o-sphere in general. Oddly I didn't actually tell anyone about it either. Poor Melf was probably wondering where the hell I disappeared to. Cheers Melf for keeping the blog going btw.

Unfortunately there is a downside to doing anything excessively, and that's 'burnout' (yes it happens in the real world too!). All the exercise was becoming physically taxing and it lead to some minor injuries. Mostly neck and back problems. I knew there would need to be another change in my lifestyle or else I would hammer myself into a wall. So a middle ground was found. I now do karate two nights of the week and gaming on the other nights. My gf has also adjusted her night classes to fit this schedule. She's so awesome :)

So what game did I start playing again once I started getting back into gaming? Guild Wars. All this talk about GW2 has me excited about MMO gaming again. Plus I still think Guild Wars is the best MMO available at the moment. It was weird firing it back up after over a year of inactivity. A couple of weeks back into it, I organized a 3 day LAN with Melf, his gf and the brother of my gf. I started a Mesmer and relived the good times of starting a character from scratch. GW is so awesome, and it's great fun gaming with friends! You can expect some more posting on Guild Wars to come, but for now, lets just say:

It's good to be back!