Gabriel has a unique... "relationship" I guess you would call it with a certain Spider-man. I'm just saying it's a touchy subject. So, if for example you are Kirsten Dunst, who plays Mary Jane, and you let fly in some interview that you think Spider-Man should die and and be replaced by the bulbous "spider-baby" fruit of your mutant union, it's not going to go over well.

Being one of the people that actually bought into the whole Uru Live concept, I grabbed Uru: Path Of The Shell on Tuesday and prepared to lament the loss of their strange, multiplayer puzzle universe. For those of you that don't know what I mean or believed something else about it, there was to be an ongoing series of premium content drops you could get as a subscriber to Uru Live, and the puzzles themselves allowed for multiple people to be in them and work together in what we'd think of as a series of "instanced" worlds. As I've asserted on numerous occasions, I'm prepared for episodic content. So, while Uru made severe missteps with their adoption of third-person, platform bullshit which has no place in their game, the rest of it - the odd, beautiful worlds, the intimate journals, and the idea that I could visit quirky new realms at interval seized me.

So when they cancelled it, either due to technical problems, lack of sufficient consumer interest, or some amalgam thereof, it was a blow but I was happy to focus on the very significant single player portion, especially since there would be one free expansion - To D'ni - and one pay expansion, at least that we knew of, called The Path Of The Shell. I will admit to you now that I bought their world one-hundred percent. I said once in some post that I don't try to dismantle and analyze the games I play, at least not while I'm actively engaged in them. That's simply not the way I do it, though I have friends who incorporate those methods. With Myst, I'm almost ashamed to tell you how completely consumed I was. When I was down in Tejas, I enunciated this concept more fully: essentially, I am a willing participant in the simulation and I have an investment in its ability to produce amusement. I want it to work.

To make a long story short, after installing Path Of The Shell the game takes so long to start I assumed it had crashed. All of my work from the first game was lost. If I had a more intellectual, analytical approach to this kind of thing, this wouldn't be such a big deal. I would go and read the threads where people first discovered there might be an issue, maybe try to track down some kind of FAQ, try to see if maybe some industrious fan had done the work of the developer again and tried to cook up an unauthorized patch. That's if I had a more intellectual, analytical approach.

That's the trouble with my method. It allows for a sort of electronic communion, that's true enough. But the careless transposition of some mathematically inconsequential variable had the effect of wiping out not my data, but negating my entire experience from the first game. Entering my customizable private age, or Relto - Jesus, I can't even describe this without using their made up, nonsense words - going into this place I had tailored to my specifications, all the evidence of my noble activities had been eradicated. Instead of losing my save and getting mad, their intricate universe had put me into this sort of trance where I felt genuine longing.

(CW)TB out.

kiss my ass goodbye