Why is October the Tenth Month?

Doesn't "oct" mean 8? That's always bothered me.

So I've been playing Fallout 3 mostly with small doses of MvsC2 and Monkey Island. I've gone through two play sessions of LOTRO now, both of which being multi-hour affairs. The second one I actually played with a friend. He had some characters on other servers but not the one I was playing on. You can't switch servers without paying a fee so he didn't want to do that. I didn't want to start over and play through the "intro" levels a week after playing though them the first time. I convinced him to play a new character on my server. So in actuality our time together was spent IMing while he went through the bullshit opening stuff and I walked around doing fetch quests. I never actually saw his character. Wheee.

These are the kind of multiplayer online hassles that I like to avoid by... well... not playing with other people. I remember as a youth a group of us doing a kind of gymnastics just to get a one on one game of Star Craft going. This was the time of dial-up so there was lots of hanging up and reconnecting and then disconnecting to use the phone to call the other guy to try to figure out why it wasn't working. These experiments always degraded into one volunteer running back and forth between houses to relay messages like some WW2 soldier running cable under enemy fire. It's amazing to think about all the physical activity and in-person social interaction that those early online games created.

Now we have a much more advanced infrastructure on which to place our virtual meetings. The games however seem to have a level of complexity that requires just as much work to create a satisfying online experience as it did back then. I'm not saying that I've never had fun online; I have, even with strangers. It's just that these experiences have never measured up to the feeling of playing in the same room with someone else. Over the years I've had tremendous fun playing "same couch" with people, even games that aren't multiplayer. I have particularly fond memories of tag-teaming RPGs like Final Fantasy 3 or Earth Bound, one person controlling and the other drawing maps, or taking notes, or flipping through guides, or just being there! How about four-player Goldeneye in a dark basement all summer, or hot-seating Soul Caliber 2 between 6 rowdy drunks until the early mourning hours? What about three friends buying Guitar Hero 2 and deciding not to sleep until they had played through it? You just can't get that from online play.

So I guess I'm whining. Online play does have its merits, particularly the ability to get large groups together in a short about of time... provided it's a popular game. This topic is timely because a good gamer friend of mine is moving back into the area and I'm looking forward to a return to the long sessions of beer and slaughter we used to indulge in.

Oh, and LOTRO isn't half bad really.