Anticipation
Much of the Mass Effect embargo has been lifted, and there are all kinds of videos out there for people to look at. It's awesome to see people getting excited about it. Ironically, most of my friends who have 360s are already BioWare employees, so I'm not sure exactly who I'll be able to impress come release day. It seems pointlessly cruel to urge my mom to get a 360 just to play Mass Effect, especially given that Mom's gaming speed is a bit more Bookworm Adventures than BioShock.

(I'm playing BioShock, incidentally, and enjoying it a ton. I'd expected to despise the whole Rand-ian thing and the little-girl killing, but the option to save the girls instead of killing them is just what I needed... and the Rand-ian thing hasn't exactly turned out to be a stirring praise of Objectivism. Will talk more when I've finished it, which, given that I can't exactly immolate splicers in front of the kids, won't be for awhile.)

In any event, in just a couple months, I'll have a game credit, and a game out there with my name on it. It's a bit like getting into the SFWA (whose dues I really need to pay if I'm gonna, unless I want to take a stand against accidental copyright protection screwups and save sixty bucks a year) in that it probably won't change my life as much as I think it will, but it's still what I've been working towards since I got here a few years ago. The acknowledgment that the goal is a bit silly doesn't negate the importance of setting and working toward it. I don't know who said that. Possibly nobody. But I believe it nevertheless.

Maybe a few of my buddies will surprise me and pick up 360s. Who knows?

At the very least, in a couple of months, I'll finally be able to post that Mass Effect / Fruits Basket parody somewhere besides BioWare's spam folder.