Author: Luke M.

Luke Matthews is a writer, board gamer, beer drinker, and all-around geek. He currently lives in the Seattle area with his wife, two cats, and two German wirehaired pointers.
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An Excerpt from Construct

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Alright, here it is. At some point I had to develop the balls to put my writing out in front of people, and today is that day. Below, you will find the first chapter of the manuscript I’m working on right now, called Construct. Feel free to offer feedback, preferably in the form of a showering of unadulterated praise.

Please to enjoy Construct: Chapter 1.

          The images crashed into him, lifting him and roiling about him like the drag of storm-swelled surf, like memories but somehow not, somehow foreign. Too fast and confused to make sense of, and yet some few stood out from the others, splitting through the morass of pseudo-rememberances, plastering themselves against his waking mind.

• • • • • • • • •

          Cold eyes bore into his, close enough that he could see nothing else. Their color could have been grey or blue, but reflected a silver sheen in the dim light. The voice that came from beneath them was little more than a whisper, forming words laced with a killing trace of deep malice. “You made it too easy for us, canner. You’ve denied me my challenge, and I can’t abide boredom.”
          He felt fingers press into his chest, and coldness rushed into his core. His sight flooded with blue light which was extinguished as fast as it had come, leaving only darkness. The feeling of cold was being replaced by numbness, and even his hearing was beginning to falter. In his last moments he heard distant echoes of conversation somewhere above him.
          A second voice slinked into his hearing, chilling him even through the spreading numbness. “There’s too much. It’s too obvious, and we’re out of time here.”
          The voice with silver eyes replied. “Then burn it. Burn it to the ground.”

• • • • • • • • •

          Despite his efforts, he could not move. He lay on his side in the coagulating gore, unable to tear his eyes away from the grisly scene laid out before him. He didn’t know the woman’s name but he recognized her face from somewhere. Where had he seen her before? What had she looked like alive?
          He’d been here before, not long before, and had fled. What had drawn him back here? A noise drew his attention, someone at the front door. He knew he must leave, and tried again to move but his limbs would not function, and it was as though a great weight bore down on his chest.
          His fingers twitched. He was regaining his facilities, but he feared at too slow a pace. The knocks at the door became more insistent, the calls of the men outside unintelligible. One final push and he rolled, his arms and legs gaining mobility, but burdened with agonizing weakness. As he gained his feet, the knocks had transformed into crashes, and the door burst inward.
          He turned as the men rushed in, holding up his hands to protest his innocence, but his voice failed him. Something struck him on the shoulder, sending a shockwave through his body and weakening him further, driving him back to his knees. Fires of hatred burned bright in their eyes as they continued hitting him, each strike of their clubs carrying more than just impact, sapping his energy – his life – away.
          Falling prone to the floor, his face came to rest in a cool, sticky pool of drying blood. Once again he saw her face, her eyes still open as though pleading with him for help, just as she had in the last moments of her life. Another strike; everything was gone.

• • • • • • • • •

          The pleasant scent of wood fire drew him back to consciousness, reminding him of some far off place, of a distant memory he couldn’t quite grasp. When his vision returned he couldn’t focus – a confusing jumble of items blocked his immediate view. His head was turned to the left, and he was looking at what appeared to be a pile of wood. A pile of books… and a fallen bookshelf.
          He was lying on the floor. He tried to get his legs under him – they were heavier than he expected – and as his weight shifted he realized he was pinned. Maybe not pinned… but there was weight on his chest that was not his own, and his weakness was disorienting. His eyes slid downward, away from the rubble and to his own torso.
          An unmoving arm lay across his chest, whose length disappeared under heavy form of the downed bookshelf. The hand at its end was supple and young, but the fingers were scarred. Not the scars of cuts, but more of light burns, like someone who works with wax or molten glass. The hand’s two middle fingers bore silver rings, which together formed the image of two writhing winged serpents locked in mortal combat. No, not two rings… one, linking the two fingers just behind the first knuckle. Above the wrist was as tightly buttoned white cuff of a simple cotton tunic. Past the cuff the white cotton changed, sewn with a random pattern. No, not sewn… perhaps dyed?
          He turned his head to get a sense of his surroundings. The room was small and cluttered, tables and shelves filled to overflowing with books, parchment, glass phials, small dishes, and unrecognizable tools. The floor was littered with haphazard piles of random items, and one of the worktables across the room had been upturned, its contents a shattered mess on the floor beside it.
          The wood fire smell came to him again, stronger now and tinged with another bitter scent. His gaze moved upward along a bookcase whose contents lay in heaps before it, and whose top was obscured somehow as it connected with the room’s ceiling. The ceiling itself roiled as though insubstantial, more gaseous than solid, and bore with it a terrible realization:
          The building was on fire.
          But what building? he wondered. He had no idea where he was, and no memory of how he got there. The smoke was pouring down the walls now, beginning to descend toward him. He could hear the flames licking at the borders of the room, the incessant crickle-crackle of dry leaves crushed in calloused hands, and he sensed the heat. His vision dimmed and his head thumped heavily back to the wooden floor. A weakness overtook him, for only just a moment, and then his strength returned. I have to get out of here.
          He reached up to his chest; the dead hand upon him was nothing like his own, softer and more delicate, and bearing one more finger opposing its thumb than the three that adorned his. The differences between the two did not end there: his was covered in an orange-brown worked metal, like armor of copper or bronze, but still moved with a subtlety that an armored glove would not allow. His mind tried to reconcile the differences between the two, but he could not decide which was normal and which was out of place. Searching his mind for any memories that would help him discern not only where but who – or what – he was, he found only a yawning void. Prior to the moment where he awoke to the smell of smoke, there was just… nothing.
          He lifted the dead arm away from his chest, thinking to push himself out from under its owner. At this attempt he found his left arm and hand were useless, giving him no leverage to move, so he dropped the scarred hand to his side and rolled. It landed with a slap! as he shifted away, an unexpected sound on the wooden floor, and he saw over his shoulder a still-expanding pool of fresh blood seeping from under the bookcase. The pattern on the sleeve was not dye after all, and whatever happened to this person was a very recent memory.
          His hips carried him out from under the body and the bookcase, his shoulder smearing blood across the floor from the pool in which he lay. As he came upright, his useless arm thudded heavily against his body, swinging on a crippled shoulder joint, and he found that even his fingers wouldn’t move. He began his search for an escape, but wheeled back next to the pool of blood. Lifting the dead hand from the floor, he fumbled to removed the serpent-ring. It wouldn’t fit over his armored and oversized middle finger, so he hooked it around the smaller outside finger, thinking to carry it there until he could find a place to store it.
          As he searched the room for an exit, he found the only door to the room blocked by the fallen bookcase, and the rest of the room was in ruins. The floor and tables were littered with broken glass and unnamable liquids, parchment was strewn, books had been carelessly tossed from shelves and lay in heaps in the corners. He pulled his feet in and balanced above them, and could feel weakness in his stance. His movements were jerky and stiff, his joints creaked as like a warped door on rusty hinges.
          Hooking the fingers of his good hand under the fallen bookshelf, he widened his stance and pulled with every ounce of might he could gather. A subtle shift but nothing useful, more due to the relative softness of the support beneath than any result of his efforts. If this shelf would not move, the door behind it would not open, and flames from all sides would decide his fate. He tried the door anyway; as he suspected it opened inward.
          Damn this broken limb, he thought. With two good arms I could make a solid effort at it, but like this… He moved to the other end of the room, looking for anything that might help him gain some leverage against the debris. Everything in the room seemed delicate – all glass and spindles and parchment. The smoke hovered lower now, and he could see the heat radiate inwards from the door.
          He swooned again, his senses dulling. The floor floated and bucked beneath him and his balance failed, pitching him forward to his knees. Tipped onto his good right hand, his defective left thunked hard on the wooden floor as the serpent ring skittered away under the nearest table. He tried to shake free of the haze, but he could feel his consciousness being sapped, as though someone or something was draining his will. He crawled forward, fumbling for the dropped ring and willing himself to retrieve it, his bewildered mind clinging to the idea that it was somehow important.
          His mind came back to him and he surged forward, grasping the ring and powering himself back to his feet. His search became more frenzied, pulling more books from shelves and rooting through piles of flotsam trying to produce any idea or conclusion. His search revealed nothing of use, only more books, phials, oddly shaped tools, tubing of all sizes, parchment, some long rags, and a heavy cloak. The cloak, perhaps? Maybe I can wrap myself in it and when the flames weaken the wall, I can make a dash for it…
          A foolhardy plan, but it was all he could manage as he fumbled himself into the cloak, pulling it over his damaged shoulder. Inside it he found several small pockets, into one he dropped the serpent-ring. He reached up and donned the hood, clutching the cloak closed at the neck, and waited.
          The heat was stifling, and the air in the room would soon become dangerous. At the room’s periphery, papers curled and darkened, not burning yet but warping under the waves of heat. Leather bindings on ancient books shriveled and twisted, the pages shrinking inside their covers. Small stacks of parchment that had been laid atop rows of books on the shelves curled and fell, some bursting into random flames as they floated toward the floor. The inside of the room was beginning to burn in earnest.
          A tendril of the ever lowering smoke caught his attention, twisting down out of its cloud and slinking away between two of the bookcases at the rear of the room, opposite the door. He lunged for the corner, probing the fingers of his right hand between the shelves, looking for anything that would lead to the opening where the smoke was being pulled. When nothing obvious presented itself, he grabbed the edge of the corner bookcase and pulled.
          It moved.
          He pulled again, harder this time, and the bookcase swinging outward rather than falling over, but stopped against a jumble of books. He kicked away the pile and grabbed the shelf again, planted his foot against the neighboring support, and heaved. In spite of his languid effort, the bookcase hinged open, a space of only a foot or so, but enough that he could see (and possibly move) behind it.
          Behind the opening was a small chamber, no more a meter or so square, with a low angled ceiling and… no doors or windows. Confused, he searched the room for anything he could see, but the space was becoming obscured by smoke that was now billowing in. Over his shoulder, the door had caught fire, and hungry flames licked upward, sending tentacles of heat across the ceiling and down the opposing wall to consume the books on the top shelves. Soon, the entire opposite end of the room was on fire. The smell of woodfire was replaced by the sweet smell of burning flesh as the tumbled bookcase began to burn, and its prisoner along with it.
          Inside the chamber the smoke, no longer swirled and disturbed by his frantic search, began to settle but perhaps too far, drawn between the cracks in the chamber floor. Is there an opening underneath? He pushed his way inside, splintering the old wood on the backside of the bookcase with his shoulder, and dropped to his knees. His good hand searched every nook and crevice in the floor, his fingers failing to find purchase until he noticed that one board ended short of the rest. Inward from the board’s end he saw the glint of metal reflecting the firelight in a split in the wood. He dug his fingers into the split and pulled, and it hinged open to reveal a large iron ring beneath. A trap door!
          A loud crash startled him out of his bemusement. The room had begun to collapse, the walls and supports engulfed in ravenous flame. He lurched up and away, his feet just barely outside the small chamber and off of his glorious escape door. Grasping the iron ring, he gave as mighty a yank as he could muster and… nothing. Weakness had betrayed him and the iron ring held fast, the wood of the false floor barely creaking under the not-so-mighty pull.
          Hellfire and heat filled the space at his back, and everything in the room began to crumble. Shelves fell away to the floor as their supports burned, glass melted atop worktables that had turned to elevated pools of fire. Parchment flared and burst, and glowing embers of paper swirled in the superheated air of the oven-room. Flames touched at his face as the moving bookcase caught, and he bent again for one more try. One more try, he thought, because if it doesn’t open this time I’ll be charcoal.
          With his good hand he gripped the ring tight and crouched down, prepared to throw his entire body into the pull. His legs and back uncoiled and, with a creaking sigh, the trapdoor swung upward. He braced his hand on the underside of the door, pushing it back as he moved forward over the open space. The darkness beneath gave no hint to where he would end up, but it couldn’t possibly be worse than where he was.
          Even so he hesitated, looking one last time back into the burning room into which he had been born only moments before. He felt distant, spying the room through a looking-glass, and his thoughts fell away into a murky weariness. Slipping downward, the whole weight of him dropped into the darkness beneath the trap door, which slammed shut above as the room collapsed in a heap of flaming debris.

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Just Have Some F**king Fun

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When I was a game tester, I spent a lot of time talking with other geeks about movies. “A lot of time”, in this case, means well over 30 hours a week. It was a constant subject amongst a group of (sort-of-but-not-really) like-minded nerds, and something that never failed to generate lenghty debates and more than a few heated arguments. It was a sure fire way to ward off boredom during a 12-hour shift banging polygons together or checking every word of text in the latest Pokemon iteration.

I learned, over the course of these many “discussions”, that people are fucking idiots. In general, yes, but especially when it comes to movies and entertainment. It is genuinely offensive to the alpha nerd in the wild for another of his genus to have a differing opinion. Hey, jackass: I like different things than you. And I’m pretty sure that has ZERO effect on your ability to like and dislike the things that you do. So why, exactly, does one feel the burning need to leap out of their tiny cubicle two rows over, storm up to me at my own veal pen, and go on a tirade about how I’m a mouth-breathing moron for even hinting that I like The Chronicles of Riddick, and that I shouldn’t be allowed in the workforce until I’ve learned better judgment?

Yeah, that actually happened.

On another occasion, we were discussing our favorite zombie movies. I found out the hard way that there was a Romero Zealot at the table when I engaged in the following conversation:

Me: I really liked the remake of Dawn of the Dead. I thought it-
RZ: That movie is garbage.
Me: …
RZ: Zombies that run? Come on, that’s bullshit.
Me: Bullshit? Why?
RZ: It’s completely unrealistic!
Me: …
RZ: ::defiant stare::
Me: And the dead rising from their graves to consume living flesh is what? Documentary filmmaking?
RZ: Fast moving zombies are crap.
Me: I liked them fine in 28 Days Later.
RZ: Those aren’t zombies.
Me: What?
RZ: They’re not zombies.
Me: Um… Sure they are. They’re mindless, flesh-eating predators in the shells of once-living humans.
RZ: Not zombies.
Me: Yes, they are.
RZ: No, they’re not.
Me: …
RZ: Not zombies.

I got up and walked away without another word. I haven’t spoken to that douche-nozzle since, and that was 7 years ago.

It’s conversations like these that point me right at people who have forgotten how to JUST HAVE SOME FUCKING FUN. Who gives a flying baboon’s taint if Constantine was a shitty adaptation of Hellblazer? Why the shit do you care if Antonio Banderas plays an Arab? And why on God’s giant spinning disco fuckball should anyone care that A Knight’s Tale has a classic rock soundtrack!?!

What’s worse is lauding one piece of cheesy fun while panning another. Did you think Cutthroat Island was stupid, but enjoyed Pirates of the Caribbean? Watch them back to back and tell me how truly different they are. Plus, the undead pirates have a fucking dance number. Did you like The Mummy and hate Van Helsing? They’re the same damn movie.

You know what these movies are? FUN. Romps, if you will. Why the hell is “turn your brain off” used as a derisive term to describe movies? Maybe I actually want to do that every so often. Not every piece of entertainment needs to be thought provoking or intelligent. Sometimes it’s just escapism. You know, for enjoyment. And that is 100% okay.

So let it be okay. Turn your brain off every so often. ON PURPOSE. Don’t be a zealot about any subject, because you close yourself off to interpretations that might just entertain you. And don’t get up in someone’s face about liking something different from you. If we all liked the same shit this place would be really bland.

Engage in the escapism that’s being offered instead of dimestore-analyzing all of the merriment out of your whole goddamn life and maybe, instead of constantly arguing with the people who are supposed to be your contemporaries, you might actually find a smile on your face every so often.

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Nintendo Nostalgia

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nintendo_desk
See that desk right there? That’s where I spent my last two and a half years with Nintendo of America. That picture shows it on my very last day, after I’d already packed it up and was headed out the door, so that’s probably the cleanest that desk has been since it was empty.

I found myself feeling nostalgic about my job there yesterday – something I wouldn’t have expected for at least another few weeks. The feelings were triggered by a conversation I was having with some old co-workers at lunch. When the conversation invariably turned to matters of Nintendo, I found myself referring to the place as “we” and “our”, and forcibly corrected to say “them” and “theirs”.

This didn’t come as a surprise. I know that it will probably take months – if not years – for me to stop referring to Nintendo in the first person. What surprised me is how much that moment made me miss my job and my former co-workers. The job itself was pretty standard corporate fare, except that I was working with indie developers on a day-to-day basis which I really enjoyed. Working for Nintendo is really no different than working for any other large corporation, with one major exception: The people.

Most of the people I worked with were geeks, just like me, even (and maybe especially) my boss. That’s what made the job unique, was that I actually had something in common with the people there, which I know I wouldn’t if I worked at any other random corporation. I could talk to my co-workers about comic books or board games or sci-fi, and man could we talk about video games. I spent every day surrounded by people with whom I have now developed (hopefully) lasting friendships because we had so much in common, rather than just a conglomeration of random people with whom I had nothing to talk about.

I might be able to replace the day to day duties with creative projects, and I might not miss my specific job (or what it was morphing into), but damn I’m going to miss the people there. Bye, Nintendo.
nintendo_exterior

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My First Week Of Un(SELF)employment

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In the last week, I’ve posted to my blog about how hard self motivation is, and how poker has taught me discipline in many areas of my life. Over the course of that same week, I’ve proven one point (the former), and completely shot the other (the latter) to hell.

Self-motivation is tempered – or eviscerated – by distraction, but it’s even worse when there doesn’t feel like there are enough hours in the day to complete the tasks set before oneself. I’m not yet understanding how I can eliminate a job that took up 10 to 15 hours of my day and only add an hour or so of blogging to my plate, and yet still feel like I’m short on time every day I’m home. Couple that with a decent, if not robust, social life and now the demands on my time are oddly overwhelming.

Yeah, yeah, priorties, blah, blah sacrifice, neh. I get it. I’m not posting this to complain, it’s merely an observation. My brain knows what I’m supposed to do, but developing the understanding of how to do it will take a little more effort than I thought. I have two goals for the month of February: finish the first draft of my novel and write one blog post per day. Both are goals I’m going to complete, but this weekend proved a significant obstacle when I didn’t write anything on the novel for three days, and I’ve so far missed two blog posts.

On top of all of that, I still haven’t had a chance to engage in anything really leisurely outside of the planned events of the weekend. Everyone that I worked with said how jealous they were that I’d just get to play video games all day. The thought always brought a smile to my face, because it’s something I’ve never been able to do. That smile is still on my face, because oh what a fantasy that thought is.

No matter how much time we seem to have available to us, we always seem to fill it. When I had a full time job, I still managed to maintain a website, produce two podcasts, and write (somewhat) consistently, as well as maintaining a regular poker game, gaming with friends, and playing video games. Quitting my job was the bomb-blast that shattered the structure into which I’ve molded my life for the last nine years, scattering all of my responsibilities to the four winds. It’s time for me to reign them in.

I promise, with only a couple of crossed fingers, that this will be the last observation I post about my time-management skills. It just happens to be a topic in the forefront of my mind.

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My Journey With Poker

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I completely missed my blog post yesterday. I’ll see what I can do about getting two out today, but I make no claims or promises.

Yesterday my house was a mess, and I had people coming over for my weekly poker game. It may seem like a trivial thing to prioritize over my book or my blog, but poker is an extremely important part of my life, and one that I treat with a lot of respect. I try to make my poker room the best environment for the game as possible because I take pride in the fact that people enjoy playing at my place, which is what took up the time that I should have spent writing.

I know a lot of people see poker as nothing more than gambling. That’s unfortunate because, while it has an element of risk to it, the amount of skill involved in poker can far outweigh the luck. That’s an argument I could spend an entire blog post making, but I’m going to set that aside right now so I can talk about the topic of today’s post: the effect poker has had on my life.

Many years ago, I had a temper problem. A pretty bad one. Not to the degree of being violent toward other people (at least not physically), but mostly toward inanimate objects. Trivial things would get under my skin, and send me flying off the handle at the dumbest times. My previous relationship (prior to my marriage) exacerbated that situation ten-fold, because my ex-girlfriend knew exactly what buttons to push to set me off, and kept her thumbs firmly planted on them. There were a number of emergency door replacements and strategically placed pictures in our old apartment in the aftermath of my frustration.

Unfortunately, this trend continued even after I was in a wildly better relationship. Rather than identify the problem and work on setting it aside, I had reoriented my mindset around what was acceptable for me to destroy – a place no human thought process should ever go, mind you – so I was no longer punching holes in doors, but frequently breaking things that I owned or, in one case, bending the shit out of the steering wheel of my car.

In 2004, I was introduced to poker. A friend of mine who had been into the game for quite some time taught me how to play at a 4th of July picnic that year and, being a pretty hardcore gamer all of my life, I took to it immediately. I had a decent eye for the strategy of the game, but it would be quite a while before I developed the temperament for it.

My first few years as a player my temper translated right into my play, and I was a complete tiltbox. I had spent an inordinate amount of time learning the intricacies of poker strategy, but one bad beat would throw it all out the window and send me spiraling into a spitting, cursing oblivion. One night, about a year after I started playing, I was heads up with the guy who ran our weekly poker night. To say that this guy was bad at poker would be like me writing an entire blog post explaining the reasons why humans should breathe. You know, air. This heads up match lasted almost an hour and a half (a long time with our structure back then), and on eight separate occasions I had him all-in and had the best hand, and all eight times he sucked out on me and put me out in second place.

My brain exploded. There are very few times in my life that I’ve ever been so angry about something so insignificant. I came very close to flipping his poker table over, and stormed out of his house, slamming his door behind me so hard I almost knocked his entryway windows out of their frames. And that was only the beginning of a tirade that lasted the rest of the night.

It was that night – coupled with a very serious conversation with my wife the next day – that honestly changed my life forever. What I didn’t explain earlier was that my temper, having been ignited by my ex-girlfriend, should have been extinguished – or at least dampened – once that relationship was over. I can very specifically trace my temper issues back to that one woman (mixed with a high volume of my own immaturity), but once she was out of my life, I either couldn’t or simply didn’t work on a way to bring it into check.

And I came closer than ever to losing my wife because of it.

That night was the trigger for an interesting type of soul-searching mission. I was desperately trying to find a way to get my temper in check without the use of drugs or a therapist. So I buried myself in poker.

Does that sound odd? It shouldn’t. The disciplines involved in being a good poker player include strategy, odds, reading players, and understanding your place at the table. Underpinning all of that, though, is self-discipline. The most important aspects of being a great poker player are not rooted in understanding the mechanics of the game, but instead understanding yourself and being able to remain in control at all times.

During this delve into the game, I read more poker books than I can count. I studied strategy on online sites, talked poker with friends constantly, and was playing some form of poker literally every single day of my life. If I wasn’t playing a home game, I was making trips to a local card room or playing online. And during this entire process I was learning two very important skills: how to objectively identify flaws in my own gameplay (including strategic errors AND mental and emotional lapses), and how to control my emotions.

Poker is a roller coaster of a game. Playing against terrible players is the best way to make money, but it’s also the most frustrating thing in the world. Bad players spend most of their time making the wrong moves, but that little bit of luck sometimes brings them out on top. You can do everything right, and still get screwed for it. In the long run it all evens out, but in the moment it’s fuck-all aggravating. The good players – the truly good players – are the ones who can let it slide off their back and not affect their play.

I’ve played against a lot of bad players. At that time, when I was playing daily, it was pretty much constant. There is no better immersion course in emotional control than playing $10 sit-and-go’s online, or sitting down at a $2/$4 table at a shitty local cardroom. Over the next year, I focused so hard on learning how to not let bad beats and crappy suck-outs affect my game, that I was simultaneously teaching myself how to let other things roll off my back, and keep my emotions check away from the poker table. And it wasn’t always a conscious effort. Sometimes I’d find myself starting to get frustrated by something, and feel myself putting it aside and telling myself not to let it bother me, and it was only in a moment of clarity that I identified what I was doing and where it had come from.

Never in my life have I found a better lesson in prioritizing the things that affect me on a day-to-day basis. Learning how to set aside stupidity I could not control in a poker game shined a spotlight on all of the things that I was letting under my skin outside the game, and taught me how to diminish their importance and learn what truly mattered. In the process, I was also learning how to identify my own faults and determine courses of action to fix them – starting with my temper.

It took a long, long time. Years, in fact. Along the way, I made some pretty big mistakes. Unlike the years before, though, I knew now how to see those mistakes for what they were, and admit to myself that a solution was needed. Admitting my faults to myself allowed me also to admit them out loud, which went a long way in saving quite a few of my friendships. And all along, I was chipping away at the foundations of my shitty temper until it finally fell away.

I’m not perfect; I still get pissed off about things. Only now, it usually doesn’t last very long, and it slides out of my consciousness rather quickly. For me, anger was a destructive force that cost me friends and almost destroyed my marriage. The disciplines I’ve learned from playing poker – both strategic and emotional – have translated into almost every aspect of my everyday life. Every skill I’ve taken away from poker has had a quantifiable impact on my life, but none so significant as allowing me to live without having childish temper tantrums.

It may sound sappy or cliche, but poker saved my marriage, and changed my life.

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Useless Multitasking

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Over the last year or so, I’ve discovered that I’ve become incapable of certain types of multitasking. I phrase it that way because I don’t feel like it was always this way.

The thing that triggered me to notice is my wife’s ability to play handheld video games and watch a movie or a TV show at the same time. She can solve 4 puzzles in Picross 3D in record time and immediately tell you the entire plot of the episode of Supernatural that was playing while she was doing it.

I used to be able to do exactly that. I was even able to put something on I’d never seen before and play a brand new game and follow both of them just fine. Now, though, my brain has to sacrifice one or the other. I either turn into the world’s worst gamer (a title I’m not far off from owning anyway), or I’m that annoying guy who’s constantly asking what the fuck just happened on the the TV. We’ve tried to play board games or card games while watching TV, and I spend half the time asking for a recap of whatever it was she just did in the game.

Now look, I’m not entirely sure this is any kind of marketable skill, but damned if I don’t miss it. I got a lot of leisurely activity crammed into a couple hours with that skill, and now I feel like an asylum inmate doped up on meds, staring vacantly at the boob tube. It’s even starting to creep into other parts of my life. I absolutely can not, for example, listen to any music with lyrics while I’m writing. My creative brain just completely shuts down the moment I hear Dave Grohl’s voice. Well, maybe that’s not unique to me, but you get the point.

This, like any other odd and useless skill, makes me feel old to have lost it. Like a parent who scoffs at a video game controller or can’t program a VCR.

Fuck, I just made a VCR reference.

My point made, I guess I’m going to bed. At 9pm.

Get off my lawn.

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On Self Motivation

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I’ve been “unemployed” for 2 1/2 days, officially. I’m already seeing issues with my self-motivation in the face of distraction and multiple tasks.

We built up our new house to be a place we felt like we’d never need to leave. In anticipation of a significant drop in income, we filled our house with toys while we still had the money to do so. We were already gamers, so we had the PS3’s (yeah, multiple). My wife and I both have 3DS’s, and I have a PSVita. We’ve got iPads and Kindles. We have four classic arcade cabinets in the house, and a pool table. We’ve got shelves full D&D books and a giant bookshelf loaded with board and card games, and a beautiful Geek Chic gaming table to go along with it. There are comic books and regular books. There’s even a poker room.

This house is one giant fucking distraction.

Couple that with the sudden lack of external motivation, and I’ve got a bit of a problem on my hands. I have a book to finish. A blog to maintain. Two podcasts to produce. A comic book script, two short stories, and a couple of game designs in the works.

And yet, Ni No Kuni caaaaalllllsss toooooo meeeeeeee…

This is an interesting shift in mentality that I haven’t really dealt with before, at least not to this extreme. I’ve spent most of my life with external stimuli from school or work setting me on task. Sitting in a cubicle with the looming threat of being fired over your head is a simple way to make sure you stay focused (most of the time). Without that motivation, I’m forced to pull from inside to make shit happen.

Some people might think that’s easy enough. I mean, my wife may very well strangle me in my sleep if I quit my job just to fuck off on the internet all day, right? I wish it were that simple.

See, my brain is still in “WOOHOO!!” mode. I wake up in the morning and FUCK YEAH I DON’T HAVE TO GO TO WORK AND I CAN PLAY ALL THE SLY COOPER 4 I WANT AND THEN READ COMICS AND SURF TWITTER AND shut the hell up, brain. I’m still trying to figure out what kind of stimulus I need to bury that thought process and get back into wake-up-sit-at-desk-do-work mode, because damn I have a lot of work to do.

And yeah, it is definitely work. Sitting at a computer for several hours writing isn’t an easy task, especially writing fiction. These blog posts are straightforward because they’re my stream of consciousness; my thought process pushed to the keyboard in real time. Fiction requires invention. I’m creating a world from whole cloth and populating it with people that no one but me has ever met, and after a few hours of writing I’m actually pretty drained.

Trying to finish this book is one of the hardest things I’ve ever tried to accomplish. Although I loved my job, it wasn’t very challenging. I knew the tasks at hand by rote and was very good at what I did. All of that knowledge is useless to me now, though, and I need to push it aside and make room in my mind for the stories I want to tell. I need to convince the subconscious part of me that has held onto all of that “work knowledge” for so long that it’s no longer important, and that there’s a new sheriff in town.

Amongst all of that, Persona 4 Golden is singing it’s sweet, lilting siren song from the table in the other room, and the new issue of Colder is waiting for me at my comic shop. Never in my life have I needed to kill the procrastinator in me more than I do right now.

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A Post A Day?

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Here’s where I try it. I’m going to put this out there:

I’m going to write a new blog post every day.

It might be shit. I could spend half an hour to an hour a day vomiting useless crap into this blog until it’s filled with the sort of trite garbage that the internets will eventually call the reason for society’s downfall. Or, I could put something profound into the world that, upon reading, genuinely changes the course of just one person’s life.

It’ll likely be the former.

But, I’m going to do it anyway. I am a writer, after all. At least, that’s what I call myself now to keep from curling up in a heap in the corner, sucking my thumb, and weeping over my terrible decisions. The posts in my blog will, as most blogs do, run toward my interests. You’ll see updates about my novel or other stories I’m writing, one of the traditional game designs I’m working on, or any of my wide and varied geek interests: traditional gaming (board/card/role-playing), video games, comic books, movies, sci-fi & fantasy books, etc., etc. I also enjoy reviewing things, so sometimes you’ll see more “official” style reviews of the things I mention above. Sometimes, you might just see my stream of consciousness played out in words.

To add a bit of purpose to this particular post, I’ll let you all know what I’m up to this month: I’ve made it a goal to finish the first draft of my first novel by the end of February. I’m in the final stages of the final act, so it shouldn’t take a hell of a lot more, but the ending is proving harder for me to construct than I originally though. As I write, I’ll be posting updates here as well as word-count updates on Twitter (where you should follow me @GeekElite).

My second goal for February is to keep up the daily blog posts. Hopefully the things I write here will be interesting, and I’ll try not to make them as long as the dissertation from yesterday. If you enjoy the things I say, feel free to drop me a line via Twitter or leave comments on my blog. I can’t guarantee that I’ll answer you, but I’ll try when I have time.

Thanks for listening. Uh… reading.

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Lifey Life, And Changes Thereof

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Last week, I finally followed through on the largest single life decision since my marriage: I quit my job.

For the last 9 years I’ve worked in varying capacities at Nintendo of America, a place I somehow simultaneously loved with all of my heart and hated to the core of my soul. There was never any middle ground with me and Nintendo – it was never just “meh” to me.

The job came to me at a time in my life when I really had no idea where I was headed or where I even wanted to be headed. In 1998 I had received a degree in Computer Animation which I promptly forgot about when I scored an internship-turned-job at Wizards of the Coast. This was a huge coup for me at age 20, since I was (am, have always been) a humongous geek and loved almost everything Wizards made.

Over my four years at WotC, I went from an internship in their fledgling (and ultimately defunct) Digital Media department to answering rules questions for befuddled Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons players to ultimately running their internal games library, playtesting M:TG sets, and doing any number of catch-all tasks within their R&D department. I loved my time at Wizards and, even to this day, can say that it was the best job (or set of jobs) I’ve ever had. Which is why it made me not just ignore, but practically erase from my memory my time in college and the degree that it generated.

When I was laid off from WotC at age 24, I was devastated. I had semi-consciously decided, in my early twenties, to shift the focus of my life away from the degree that had burned me out on animating while dumping me into an animation world that had a glut of unemployed talent and onto a burgeoning career at a company that I (mostly) loved and made products that I could really get behind. Even Pokemon. This was the third round of layoffs WotC had ever engaged in so, while more frequent than perhaps necessary, the WotC layoff routine had not yet become a joke worthy of immortalizing in Dork Tower.

For the next year I was basically unemployed. I got a small paycheck doing ultimately mediocre freelance layout work on a controversial D20 RPG supplement called The Book of Erotic Fantasy, did a few other very minor freelance jobs, and collected state unemployment. When that ran out, I did a few boring temp jobs at small companies and Microsoft. Blech.

At this point in my life I was completely directionless. I was lucky enough to have a wife with a steady income (she also worked at WotC and had managed to survive the layoffs) so we weren’t out on the street, but that year of unemployment was rougher on both of us than we could’ve thought. So, after the last stint as a temp at the big M, I took up my friend’s offer to join up with the big N.

As it turned out, getting help to get into Nintendo wasn’t entirely necessary. Their testing department did – and still does – generally have a waiting list of several hundred eager gaming newbs, all waiting in the wings of one of Nintendo’s several temp agencies for the standard ramp-up to test the holiday game releases. I got in fairly easily, found that I had an aptitude for breaking shit, and I was off to the races.

At first, my intention was to use this as a stop-gap solution until I figured “things” out. I’m sure, at some point in everyone’s life, we’ve worked a job that was “just for the income until I get my acting/writing/drawing/prostitution/meth-ring off the ground”, and that’s all Nintendo was. The problem was that I lacked the motivation to figure out exactly what the fuck I was supposed to be doing at home when I wasn’t working. In all honesty, it was just nice to have steady income again, right up until the point WotC laid off my wife.

Well, shit.

For the next year, it was my wife’s turn to float. She had temp jobs here and there, worked for a startup for a while but didn’t really jive with whatever vision they had, and eventually landed at Amazon. For a while we were both technically temps, but we were steady temps. When she got hired full-time, I did a little dance of joy. My brain, however, had switched gears from “let’s get this creative shit going” to “how can I get hired and thus increase our income?”. My path at Nintendo was unintentionally set.

Four years. I spent four years as a temp at Nintendo, well longer than any human being should live in self-imposed pseudo-stability. Every 10 months I’d be forced to take a three-month break due to Washington’s temp hiring laws, and I’d squander the time off by screwing around rather than putting my efforts toward anything creative or useful. Then, I’d go back to Nintendo and settle right back into the routine.

In 2005, the worst possible thing for my creative juices happened: I got a job that was WAY worse than temping at Nintendo. During one of my mandatory breaks, my temp agency placed me into a customer service position at Cingular, who had only just acquired AT&T Wireless. I spent five full weeks in training and was (luckily) placed in their business services division, doing tech support for Cingular’s corporate account billing software.

If it sounds terrible, that’s because it was. Not only was I supporting billing for large-scale corporate accounts, the things I was supporting didn’t work right. Simultaneous backend and software upgrades caused their systems to shit the bed, and I was receiving angry calls from corporate accounts who were reporting $75,000 discrepancies in their bills. (Yes, that’s a comma, and yes, that’s the right number of zeroes.) I woke up every morning dreading my job, and left work every evening pissed off and stressed out. I hung on long enough for them to offer me a full time position, and laughed in their faces when they offered me $7 an hour lower than industry standard, and only $1 an hour more than I was making testing games at Nintendo.

How, you may be asking, was this bad for my creative side? It showed me how bad things could be, and at the time my only barometer for comparison was game testing at Nintendo. So, I went back there, and started pouring my efforts into applying for permanent positions and increasing my income rather than using it as I had originally intended – throw away work while I did creative things on the side.

The next year was rough on my psyche. I had applied for and failed to get four different positions at Nintendo, and was at my wits end. I was on the verge of quitting in disgust when a friend in another department talked me into changing jobs, and I moved from doing debug testing (breaking games and reporting bugs) to Lotcheck testing (certification of finished games prior to pressing). This was either the best or worst thing that could have happened to me – I can’t quite tell which just yet; I’ll need another couple of years of hindsight – because it drove me forward and forced me to parlay that change into a full-time position in only 6 months. LEVELED THE FUCK UP. Now, my wife had a full time job at Amazon, I was a perm a Nintendo, we both had benefits, and we were making more money than we’d ever seen before. It took a good two years before the luster of that started flaking off.

See, the creative side of me was creeping back in. I had started designing a couple of games and randomly begun writing a book. I had started a new website and created a podcast (eventually I’d be hosting two), and it was re-introducing me to what it felt like to birth an idea into the world rather than simply execute on someone else’s. It made me start to question some of the bullshit I was putting up with at my job, and I began to see the greener grass. Unfortunately, my brain was still in need-income-or-world-implodes panic mode, so I couldn’t figure out a way to break free.

I decided that the best thing would be a change of scenery. Maybe that would refresh my senses and put me in a position to look at my work/life balance – which was severely fucked at this stage – with fresh eyes. I began applying for internal positions outside my department again. At the same time, my current work situation just kept getting worse. Between arguments with my boss, changes in my responsibilities (read: stripping me of responsibilities), and some of the dumbest departmental decision-making I’d seen at the company yet, I was reaching my last straw.

It was PAX 2010 where, yet again, the thing that happened was either the best or worst thing for me. On Saturday afternoon my wife and I were sitting down to lunch at the Cheesecake Factory across from the Seattle Convention Center. I had wandered the show floor all of Friday and part of Saturday. I had recorded a podcast Friday evening talking about all the cool things I’d seen, and I realized that I needed to start creating something. I had reached a point where I not only hated, but resented my job.

In a moment of the most amazing timing in my life – seriously, if I made this up I don’t think you’d believe me – I was in the midst of telling my wife that if I didn’t get the job I was applying for at Nintendo, I was going to just quit outright. Just as she was starting to respond, my phone rang, and they offered me the new position. The waves of relief with which I was overcome washed away most of my coherent thought about my creative efforts. Luckily, this time, they found something to hold onto.

Over the course of two and a half years at my new job, it carried an entirely different form of frustration with it. In my previous position, my frustrations were personal – low level decisions that were directly impacting my job and my work environment. I absolutely loved my new job – and continued to the entire time I was in it – but then watched the corporation around me make so many higher-level decisions that I felt were either ill-informed or downright stupid.

As a long-time hard core gamer, that was hard for me to watch. I’ve been a Nintendo fan since the early ’80’s, and have been playing their games most of my life. As a gamer, I love Nintendo franchises. Some of the best gaming experiences I’ve ever had have been at the hands of Nintendo. So, seeing them make boneheaded decisions – and not necessarily the ones the public sees – actually hurt. Over my time there, I found it increasingly difficult to divorce my love of Nintendo as a gaming franchise from my job at the Nintendo corporate office, and that frustration started creeping back in.

This time, however, that little creative spark had grown to a flame, and my wife and I had been discussing me quitting for a while. This wasn’t specifically related to my job, at all – like I said, I really loved it – but we were finally at a point in our lives where we could absorb some of the risk involved. We didn’t have kids, we had bought a house and our payments were awesome, her job was getting better and her income was enough that we could afford to take the hit.

So I quit. And it’s turned out to be one of the best decisions of my entire life. After I put in notice (and I gave four weeks so as to screw my co-workers as little as possible), I felt… changed. I was expecting to be stressed and nervous, and to have to force myself to push through those feeling in order to get on with my goals. Instead, I had a perpetual stupid grin on my face, and I was walking around in practically a euphoric haze.

Rarely in my life have my decisions come with so little apprehension. This was one of the biggest decisions of my life, and it was accompanied by almost no doubt. Today, I figured out why: It’s the first time since being laid off from Wizards where any decision about my career was grounded in a decisive direction. The decision came with a plan, and a forward-thinking idea. So many of my career moves over the last 10 years have been based either on unexpected upheaval or the desire to exit my current situation rather than enter into a new one. I made this decision knowing full well that I loved my job and could continue to enjoy it, but that it wasn’t right for me.

So now, we’ll see where it leads. My wife has been unnaturally supportive, as have all of my friends. I know plenty of creative people who have been telling me for a while that when you make decisions based on your happiness, good things happen, but I haven’t really believed them until now. Of course, I only left my job on Friday, so I don’t really know if good things are coming or not.

But it sure as hell feels like they are.

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Playstation Vita Review

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When you hold Sony’s new Playstation Vita, it leaves no room to question its purpose: this is a gaming machine. Everything about the design flows toward providing the best possible portable gaming experience, and in that arena Sony has succeeded brilliantly.

At first glance, the Vita looks alot like a PSP. It takes the elements of the PSP’s shape and design that worked – the large central screen, the high button and d-pad placement, the comfortable-to-hold curved outer edges – and retains them in a design that’s not as much larger than the original PSP as you might expect. That, however, is where the similarities end.

Everything in the PSVita’s design not only improves on its predecessor, but puts it to shame. The face buttons are nicely spaced and feel just right, and the d-pad is the best ever put on a Sony device. Gone is the 4-piece directional pad of the DualShock, replaced by one that – although aesthetically similar – is much more reminiscent of the pad from a Super NES controller, in all the best ways.

And let’s not forget the dual analog sticks. Discussions rage about the size and responsiveness of these two gorgeous little inputs, but all of them become moot about 5 minutes into a game of Super Stardust Delta. DualShock sticks they are not, and the nature of their miniaturization means that they come with a necessary adjustment period. Once that few minutes is over, though… wow. Springy, responsive, and accurate – these portable analog sticks have it all. I’ll admit that, at times, they can be a little touchy, but I haven’t encountered anything outrageous, or even frequent enough to be annoying.

And, for good measure, Sony slapped multitouch panels on both the front and rear of the device as well as tilt sensors. The front touchscreen is stellar, responding to the lightest touch (sometimes it responds even before I feel like I’ve touched it) and operating as smoothly as any iDevice. The rear touch panel feels like an afterthought, but what the hell – it’s there and it offers developers more choice, so more power to Sony. While the rear touchpad offers loads of potential, I haven’t encountered a really spectacular or necessary use for it yet. It works fine for zooming the sniper-rifle in Uncharted and for knocking around obstacles in Escape Plan, but I’ll be interested to see if anyone really makes it click.

The user interface is a departure for Sony, who chose to diverge from the last 7 or so years of the XMB into something much more touchscreen friendly. Sony’s new UI, much like their analog sticks, takes only a moment of adjustment before it all just makes sense. Imagine the iOS turned on its side: bubble-like application icons are arranged in three offset horizontal rows, and pages of apps scroll vertically rather than horizontally.

Multiple apps can be open simultaneously, and any that aren’t immediately in use are shifted to the side and suspended for easy retrieval. This is where horizontal scrolling comes in: a small row of icons at the top of the screen indicate how many apps are open, and a sideways swipe will take you to each one in order. If you have a lot open and just want to find a single one, a click of the PS button will arrange them all into slots on-screen, looking very similar to the old Xbox “blades”. Tap a “blade”, and you’re off to that app.

Tapping on any icon doesn’t immediately start the app, instead taking the user to what Sony calls the “Live Area”, an intermediate – and mildly ingenious – page containing a start button for the title surrounded, potentially, by all kinds of dynamically updateable content. The Live Area for each app or game has a few standard icons, including links to the manual and software updates. It can also contain web-links, trophy lists, deep links directly to in-game features, leaderboards, or virtually anything else the developer can think of. Closing a suspended app is as simple as touching the upper-right corner of the Live Area and “peeling” the page away to the lower-left.

The interface is slick, offering a wealth of information in a relatively logical and easy-to-navigate layout. Like any new OS it’ll take time to learn the syntax, but it really is a great design for the device, and simple enough to be inviting for new users. I’m especially fond of the Live Area, and the potential it presents. Imagine popping into the Live Area for a multiplayer title and seeing a list of games your friends currently have open, each one a deep link taking you straight there rather than navigating in-game menus. Or links to daily events or downloads of new content.

You encounter all of these bells and whistles the moment you pick up the Vita. You can muck around in the main menu all day, emitting little “hmm”s and “oooh”s as you go, but it’s not until you start up a game that the Vita shows it’s true colors. And what beautiful colors they are.

Gaming on the Vita feels like what portable gaming has always aspired to be. I’m not talking solely about console-quality gaming on-the-go, but that’s where I’ll start. We’ve had current-gen console-quality handhelds ever since the Sega Nomad and the TurboXpress, but the gaming experience on the Vita is like no other device on the market. Near current-gen quality graphics (which will only improve as devs learn the ins and outs of the system), more control interfaces than you can shake an analog stick at, and the most gorgeous screen ever put on a handheld gaming device, all adding up to as engrossing a gaming experience as you’ll ever find.

And that’s what’s really important: drawing the player in and making them ignore the world around them. Put in a pair of decent headphones, and you’ll quickly forget that you’re playing a handheld device. The Vita’s high-res 5-inch OLED screen is crisp and bright, and looks as good – if not better – than the screen on an iPad (although, admittedly, not as good as the iPhone 4’s retina display – but it’s damned close). Holding the Vita about a foot from your face (like most people will) results in an image equivalent to watching a 65-inch HDTV from about 12 feet – or about the length of most living rooms.

Yesterday, I sat on my couch and started playing a game of Uncharted: Golden Abyss at around noon, and didn’t stop playing until almost 2am. I’ve never been able to do that on any other handheld. Either my hands would cramp or my eyes would hurt or I’d just get bored. With the Vita, I felt just like I was playing Uncharted on the PS3, and only wanted to stop when I was too tired to play anymore – the device on which I was playing had faded into the background.

You’re probably wondering how I managed 14 hours of gaming on the Vita’s battery… Well, I didn’t – I was on my couch, so I was plugged in for that whole time. In my own personal experience over the last few days, I’ve been averaging around 4 hours of gaming per charge before I have to plug in, with the screen at about 75% brightness and Bluetooth turned off (although I wouldn’t be using it anyway). Wi-fi was on, and I’d access my trophies and friends lists amongst that time. 4 hours isn’t the best, but it’s not bad – and it’s about the same amount of gaming I get out of my 3DS with 3D turned on, so it doesn’t really phase me.

The price of Sony’s proprietary memory cards might be a challenge, especially if you want to download every game you buy like me. Different bundles can net you a memory card alongside the system (like the 3G Launch Bundle), but buying them standalone will cost you a minimum of $19.99 for 4GB, all the way up to $99.99 for 32. Yeah, that price is pretty outrageous, especially when the target audience for the Vita knows better; A 32 GB Micro SD card can be obtained for less than $1 per gigabyte. Your choice of memory card will be based entirely on your budget, and on how you intend to purchase games.

I went for the $99, 32 GB card because it’s my intention to never buy a single physical game for this system. I’ve heard the arguments: in order to recoup the cost of the memory card I’ll have to download at least 20 games which, on average, run about $5 cheaper than their physical counterpart. But the other thing I’m saving is space. I don’t need to keep boxes on a shelf (and yes, I understand the arguments of those who want the boxes, but that’s not me) and I don’t have to figure out extra storage space for cards. I can have a case that slips around just my Vita, and I’m good to go with my entire library. Besides – reaching 20 games isn’t going to be hard. I’ve already got seven.

When you move away from gaming on the device is where it shows its flaws, primarily with the preinstalled non-game related apps, which are almost universally rubbish. The web browser is awful, the music and video players are only adequate, and the photo app is hindered by mediocre on-board cameras. The worst miss of the lot, though, is Near, Sony’s pseudo-GPS fueled social app that supposedly has functions similar to Nintendo’s Streetpass, but good luck finding out how they work. The app is nearly (ha ha) incomprehensible, with a needlessly obtuse interface that could have been so much nicer if it had just been simple.

Some will be concerned about the price. Starting at $250, it’s getting up there for the average gamer. It’s a tad more expensive than other handheld devices, but it doesn’t come nearly up to the price category of devices like the iPad. But let’s remember: When that $250 price point was announced, against the then-$250 3DS, the gaming community was singing Sony’s praises. Only when the 3DS’s price was radically slashed did the attitudes of gamers and journos alike seem to backpedal. And keep in mind, it’s not $250 for a dumbed down or half-assed version of something better. The only question becomes: do you get your money’s worth?

Absolutely.

In a tech industry that is moving toward tablet devices that can do almost anything a casual user would want, gamers have been screaming about the dilution of their favorite pastime and the lost of the control mechanics that make more hardcore games unique. The Vita brings this all into sharp focus, giving us a device that’s built for gaming. It’s not a casual social tool, it’s not a tablet PC built for on-the-go word processing, it’s not a hyped-up e-reader, and it’s not a phone.

What it does offer is the potential to be all things to all gamers: a place where the hardcore can cut a dual-analog path of destruction through a South American jungle in search of fortune and glory, where fighting game fans can revel in a clicky and responsive d-pad to pummel opponents online, or where casual gamers can touch-screen their way through a backyard full of zombies or a field glittering jewels. While the PSVita has its flaws they are few and minor, and it triumphs at what is clearly the focus: gaming. Want classic games from a bygone era? It can do that (not yet, but it can, damnit). PSP games? Sure, why not. Touchscreen titles that you love from tablets or the iPhone? Yeah, it can do that, too. Oh, and full-fledged, cutting edge modern gaming titles with no compromises? Sure, the Vita’s got you covered. Online play, PSP games, trophies, and full PSN support including your friend list are all in there too.

The PSVita is close to ousting the Game Boy Advance SP Bright as my favorite portable gaming system of all time – and I’ve only had mine for five days. The launch lineup is brilliant (at least, for an American audience) showing off a little bit of everything the PSVita can offer. What’s really got me hooked is the PSVita’s potential, though: With a screen, UI, and controls that require no compromises, the system is capable of playing host to anything gamers want from the past and present, and offer developers worlds of possibilities for the future.