Things this year haven't really been too gaming friendly for me. I quit World of Warcraft (for good this time... I hope). Then my laptop blew up. I don't have any rig I can still play stuff on and I mostly just doodle with my PSP nowadays. Too lazy to look up 360 hackings so I can pirate me some 360 games and there's little point since I don't have a hard drive for it or a second controller. I gave my NDS to a friend so he could cheat some exams but then he left on a voyage for what seems like ages now and I can't get it back. He also took the memory card from it so even if I would get it back, it'd be useless without another one.

Due in part to my former WoW addiction, which disabled my interest in everything else, and due to my laptop flocking up I really have no dedicated gaming rig. My emulation habits have all gone down hill. Then there's real life severely prohibiting me from playing much as well. Then there's boredom that kills whatever I want to do.

What I'm trying to say is, I really miss having a personal computer and playing crap on it. It's been hard, and it's not affecting just my gaming but also my manic downloading and music. Hopefully things will get better although I really doubt it, at least this year.

One of my biggest gaming issues was that due to the year and country I was born in ('88, Romania) I generally really missed out on all the great games of old, both PC and consoles. I first got a PC in '97 and back then internet was a dream for 90% of households at that time, and you could only get very expensive 56k dial-up connections.

At least in that period, due to lack of internets, I wasn't feeling so bad about all the games I was missing out on. Then came my first gaming magazines and the realization that I've really been behind on the gaming times hit me.

Throughout the years, things have really only worsened. crap started to get better in 2005 when I first got some reliable internet but then crap went really downhill because of World of Warcraft. Good internet was around in the major cities, but for the better part of my life, I've lived in a small secluded town far away from the bustling city. It affected my socializing too, as I could not go out to the city because I had no place to sleep.

I'm not saying I tried my best but it was still hard. Us folk had to rely on cheaply pirated CDs sold by gypsies in the most secluded of places, and back then when the habit of ripping games to shreds so they could fit more on a single disk was at an all time high, the gaming quality was really crappy.

For instance, I can't recall any single time I actually played Duke Nukem 3D. My parents very rarely bought games for me and they were often times bad. I had to contend with demos from gaming mag CDs or if managed to scrounge up the cash, the pirated disks above mentioned. Yes, they were sold, sure, the price was 1/10 of the original, but that money really mattered back then, especially for a kid like me. My most fun gaming days back then were when me and my friends hit the local gaming halls (by that I mean some small basement rooms filled with PCs that were mostly used for gaming, you went there, paid by the hour and played, they usually had all the nice, semi-latest games).

Not to mention the fact that due to my very bad academic achievements throughout the years, I rarely had access to my computer, and when I did, it was usually during the weekends.

To this day, this problem has never really left my mind and it bugs me on a daily basis. It's severely annoying and I wish I could just take a year off every god damn thing, be given enough money to do what I want with it, be given a place of my own with a really nice, high-end gaming rig and awesome internets and be left there. That would really be a dream come true.

Alas, that would never happen, and I've reached an age where I'm expected to sort my life out. I've already dropped out of one university, and my current one is going way downhill fast as well. I wish I knew what to do...