Struggling With Eve

Not the game itself. I'm struggling with finding time to play Eve. The fact is I have little time given a new time-sink in my life and a lack of motivation is not helping. The motivation stems from that every man and his dog in my TZ appears to be farming ISK in faction war like its going out of fashion (well technially it is, in just over 7 weeks until the ISK facet is turned off) and not PvPing. This means I'm not really motivated to make time to chase speed-tanking Incursus and cloaky Merlins all over Black Rise. I understand, GMT+4 has never been Eve Prime Time, but now people are using this "quiet" time to do their farming. Remember the run up to Inferno? It was total war! It was pure PvP all day, everyday. Now we have the run up to Retribution and it is farming all day, everyday. Although I did log on once over the weekend....

On Friday night we had a scheduled op. I had to set my alarm on my phone so that I would remember to log into Eve and fleet up!

In the end it was rather uneventful. We killed a few POCOs and blapped a couple of neutrals that decided to warp to the POCO to see what was going on. Pro tip guys. If half of local is GCC and you have twenty or more tier three battlecruisers on scan towards a POCO, DON'T warp to that POCO.

We did get a bit worried when a Probe landed, one of the most popular 'throw away' cyno ships. But he died. Horribly.

Not the greatest Eve reading is it? Well have some screen shots which make boring Eve look slightly more interesting Eve, as that is the most I can offer today I'm afraid.

 So that was my only Eve over the weekend. In fact one of my alt's skill queue dries up in 1 hour and 24 minutes looking at Aura on my phone and I've just got into work! Doh!

I've technically got availabilities to play the game, that is not the issue. The issue is, suddenly, this mid-30's gamer has been transported back in time. I'm back a whole decade before Eve was even released. I've gone back 20 years. I'm 17 again. No, not out most nights drinking vodka until I throw up, then washing my mouth out (with vodka) and going to a club to pull some easy college tart. I meant I'm 17 again in a gaming sense  I'm talking about something that was brought into the world on the last day of 1993.

The year George Bush Snr and Borris Yeltsin signed the 2nd second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.
The year that DS9 started.
The year Bill Clinton moved his cigar box into the White House.
The year Windows NT1 was released.
The year that gave us Doom by id Software.
And, on the 31st December of that year, we were gifted XCOM:Enemy Unknown.

I LOVED the original XCOM. I had that, Doom (the grandfather of FPS), Dune II (the grandfather of RTS) and Wing Commander (THE grandfather of many genres) on my MS-DOS based, x80286 PC at the time. Seriously, who reading this blog remembers when you had to type 'win' to start Windows at the c:\ prompt?!?! 1.44mb 3.5" floppy disks? No CD-ROM? 4mb of memory? 25mhz processor? 15mb (yes MEGAbyte) HDD? 14.4kb/sec modems?

Thursday night I let my PC over night to take advantage of the free internet between midnight and 3am to pre-load the remake of XCOM from Steam. I slipped out of bed early Friday morning not to wake the wife (remember Fridays are the weekend here) and nearly twenty years after I did it for the first time, I was back commanding XCOM against the invading alien menace.

2k Games have done a fantastic reboot. Same "OH YEAH!" feeling as your guy guns down an ET that was about to do something nasty. The "hanging during missions" bug has hit me a couple of times and is REALLY annoying as there is no autosave. Pro tip - save often unless you want to throw two hours of your life down the pan!

I'll be back on Eve soon. Just one more hour on XCOM........ Oh hell, its morning!!!!