Partner in Crime

Last night was a very good night, and one that I have needed for awhile. It had absolutely nothing to do with what I happened to be playing, which was of course Guild Wars 2, but instead the company I kept. I’ve talked about my friend Grace so many times over the years on this blog and quite honestly they are one of my favorite people on the planet. It used to be that we were pretty regularly on the same bandwidth when it came to games and were partners in crime… whatever that crime happened to be. Lately however we have fallen out of step and the crossover opportunities have been limited. Our fallback was always Diablo 3 and the coming of a brand new season roughly every three months. However we’ve both sworn off Blizzard titles for the moment until the situation there improves… which has been more painful than I can put into words because it has also cost us our regular decompression sessions.

The pandemic has been hard in wildly different ways for different people. Grace and I have managed to stay in contact and pretty much still talk every single day, but our long gaming sessions over voice chat have dwindled to non-existent. Last night however we opted to remedy that and while they spent the evening on a combination of the Switch and Knitting and I had a casual night of World Bosses in Guild Wars 2, we spent almost three hours just talking about whatever the conversation happened to bring up. We talked about parents, jobs, and they graciously listened to me go on at length about Guild Wars 2. I am not necessarily trying to sell Grace on the game but I certainly would love to have them try it, but also know that at least until Living World Season 1 has rolled out completely that is going to be a non-starter. I just have a problem with gushing about something when I am super into it, and Grace has been there for me as I gushed at length about other games that they were not interested in at all.

The sad thing as we were talking is that we realized we had not done one of these big lengthy catch up sessions… since probably last year sometime. That is way the hell too long honestly. Granted we hang out for the length of the AggroChat podcast, but that is a more directed conversation and less free form random word association. The next step however is we have to figure out some game we are both interested in playing at the same time. While I have missed the conversation, I have very much extremely missed the random nonsense that we often got up to when playing games together. Aging and adulthood sucks sometimes, because it often pulls you away from the sorts of interactions you need most. Part of it for me is that I have also not been as available as I once was given that I can only really hang on voice chat when I am upstairs due to the quirks of Parsec blocking microphones. Since I have been working remotely for the last three years… the upstairs is “Work” and when I get off I go downstairs to “Home”. Though last night was fine and I really need to try and sort out how to make a microphone work in spite of Parsec.

In other random news I am really enjoying the Halo series. I’ve said it before but I know next to nothing about Halo and I think it has helped my enjoyment. It does however make me want to go back and try and play the games again. I find it to be a really compelling setting and maybe it will act as a catalyst for me to actually get into the series in general. I know I had not played any of the Witcher games to the end until I watched the Netflix series, and that lead me to go on a deep dive and play everything Witcher related I could get my hands on. I technically own all of the Halo games, and even if I did not they are all available through Gamepass. At some point when I decide to get on a single player kick again, I should try and play through them all.