Thoughts of what will happen to this blog are there, but not in the forefront. I can spend quality time with her and play games. If I can get her to enjoy Oblivion, it's like synergy. All the time, a warning is ringing through my ears that she won't like it, but I don't listen to it. 'Apparently,' I add, as she looks at me suspiciously. It takes place in an entirely new part of Tamriel and your character is unconnected with the past plots.' 'And you don't need to play the first games to understand the fourth. 'The first two aren't available on the X-box and you wouldn't like them anyway,' I say quickly. 'But I guess it's a sequel, so maybe we should play the others first.' 'It's supposed to be really good,' she says. 'I didn't get very far.' (She won't want to buy it if she knows I've won it three or four times.) 'I think I played it once a few years ago,' I say, teetering on the verge of an outright lie and then finally going over the edge.

Then, a few days later, she's reading X-box 360 game reviews online and says, 'Have you ever heard of this Oblivion game?' So we stop playing games for a few days and watch all the seasons of The Guild (great show I should do a special topics posting on it later). She likes Lost Odyssey a little better, but I don't. We get back, and sure enough she soon gets tired of it when she realizes there are no dialog options. I try to tell her that the Star Wars game isn't going to be like KOTOR, but she doesn't listen. We pop over to Gamestop (yes, I'm that square) and pick up the console and two games she likes the look of: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and Lost Odyssey. I tried to show her Morrowind on the old X-box, but she was bored to tears with it. This is great, because I like these games too, but frankly once you get past them there aren't many like them. But she only likes a small subset of games: cinematic, fairly linear, plot-heavy CRPGs with lots of dialog options, like Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire. Now, you hardcore gamers are thinking that I have the perfect wife, and I admit she can be pretty cool. Actually, to clarify: she likes watching me play games while she shouts helpful suggestions and looks up hints online.

She had read that you can get Netflix Instant Play on it, as well as stuff from Zune*, and anyway she likes games. Five or six weeks ago, Irene (my wife) and I were looking for something to do on a Wednesday night, and she suggested that we go buy an X-box 360, having never upgraded our original X-box. (Unless you've been eagerly awaiting my next Demon's Winter posting, or my next Bard's Tale III posting, or my next any posting that re-establishes some kind of regularity and order to my blog.) Here it is: my CRPG addiction has been my CRPG addiction. The answer to the question 'Where the hell have you been for the last week?' is a funny one.

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