Jorge Luis Borges is quoted as saying or writing the following: “A writer – and, I believe, generally all persons – must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”

I experienced something new recently that I sometimes find myself feeling at odds with. I’m currently waiting for the results of an email interview I sent to the folks at OffGamers regarding their practices and what they do – they’re a third party RMT and game service site – besides selling game codes, game time cards, and virtual services.

During the wait, I found out that EA had redzoned my country as well to an extent I didn’t expect. Our local game shop has connections to EA, and even they got redzoned and wouldn’t be getting copies of SWTOR.

I felt left out of the Twitter circle, and I missed playing SWTOR after the beta. I didn’t know what to do, and eventually, I ended up running to OffGamers and purchasing a game code. A day later, my account with them had the key from the game, and thirty minutes after getting the key from the game, I found myself purchasing and acquiring a 60-day time code because EA wouldn’t accept my credit card.

The feeling of doing something you never thought you’d do is kind of painful. For a person like myself, who doesn’t drink alcoholic beverages to avoid the possibility of getting drunk, it felt like I had taken that first step into dealing with illicit RMT. I felt that uneasiness, even if OffGamers has perfectly legitimate services and connections to various F2P game companies across Asia and offers users of the site a means to purchase a game company’s currency of choice for their extra services.

I find myself wondering if I did a bad thing or a value neutral thing. At the very least, I cannot think of an RMT user anymore in the old ways I used to. I invested money to acquire a return on time. Instead of illicit RMT where I purchase power-leveling or in-game currency, I paid money to get access to a game I would not see for months to come… and at the same time, I did it for the same reason some people would engage in illicit RMT to begin with: to have fun with friends at the same level and capabilities they have.

Honestly, I have to think about it more. There are so many facets to this idea I haven’t even considered, but I know I’m lucky to even be in a position to enjoy games, when other people are worse off. But I just needed to get it off my chest or I’d feel bad till the end of the year.

Without the mask my budding Sith Lord looks a lot like Dexter, heh.

So I’ve been on a bit of a Star Wars gaming binge lately thanks to the big Star Wars package recently offered on Steam. I’ve played through Knights of the Old Republic, some of the Jedi Knight series, and have even been giving Star Wars Galaxies a try. I’m definitely starting to feel more than a little burned out though, not on Star Wars mind you, rather I’m getting tired of lackluster games and frustrating bugs. I’ll say it right now, the ports for some of these games, especially for the Jedi Knight games, have been pretty abysmal.

But let’s start with the good: KotOR. This game well deserves its sterling reputation, it is just an enjoyable experience through and through. Oh sure, it’s not perfect, but it does a great job of capturing that Star Wars feel that so many other games have failed at. This was not my first playthrough of this classic RPG, though it was the first time I went full on Dark Side. I have tried to go through KotOR as a Dark Jedi many times in the past but I always ran into a host of technical issues that impeded my progress, fortunately I was able to get through the entire game this time though my experience was hardly bug free.

Now, many people complain about good and evil systems in games today with the chief complaint being that you just don’t feel evil at all, you feel more like a complete sociopathic asshole as opposed to some terrifying villain. I will say this for KotOR’s alignment system though, it’s damn fun being bad. More than once I found myself letting out an evil cackle as events found themselves transpiring against those around me. It really makes me interested in seeing how Bioware handles alignment in their upcoming MMO.

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