It has been a long while since I mentioned anything about gaming (or anything at all to be quite honest).

Been stepping away from WoW recently, as it has gone back into the ‘not enjoying the monotany of the game’ portion of the pendullem. I don’t know if it will swing back to full enjoyment again, and I am not pushing it.

Several of the other folks I play with are in the same boat, so we have decided to try and re-kindle game night while playing some other games.

First up is League of Legends. This is a free to play game that is based of the Heroes of Norath Mod of the popular Warcraft 3 RTS. It has heroes, and purchaseable items and leveling, all while trying to destroy the base of your opponent. It can handle up to 5 players per team and it can realistically be played in 30-45 minutes. There is a decent amount of strategy involved, and the multiple (76) heroes all have unique abilities, strengths and weaknesses. A highly entertaining game, with low overhead.

OUr other choice for group gaming required a permit, as we had to rev up the ‘Way Back Machine’. Diablo 2 was our game of choice. We decided to play this decade old game as a way prep for the eventual release of Diablo 3 and also for the sake of nostalgia. Surprisingly, even though the graphics and gameplay are heavily dated, the game itself still runs well…even on the new piece of hardware I procured for myself.

And that leads me to a quick description of my new toy. I posted some pictures on the Twitter, the Tumblr, and the FB. About 2 weeks ago, I became the proud owner of a Dell Studio XPS 9100. A new desktop that has an Intel i7 2.8GHz processor, 9GB DDR 3 RAM, ATI Radeon 6670 1GB Video Card, and a 2TB 7200 RPM hard drive. It is a sweet machine. And WoW looks gorgeous running on it, which is a shame that I am not playing it as much now.

Fear not that I might have begun to forsake the video game, as there are bright spots on the horizon! The aforementioned Diablo 3 looks to be going into Beta in the coming weeks (press tours have begun) and there is also the second stroyline of the recently release Starcrat 2 coming in early 2012. There has been talk of some Halo Reach on the Xbox 360 for some FPS action as well. Although the Xbox thing might not work out for my upcoming work schedule. Something I’ll probably talk about in an upcoming post.

And one final note, the current proxy server I am stuck behind blocks 99% of gaming related websites, so I cannot add links to the post currently. I will try to add them at a later date.