My brain is a strange thing. I am compelled to focus on one project intensively for a while...and by intensively I mean, well...the second I wake up I think about the project, all through my work day I think about it, all evening I work on it, then I lie in bed having a hard time going to sleep while I mull over it...then I wake up again and do it again.

For a while...at some point, something snaps and I tend to drop a project and move on to the next, unable to focus on the previous one much. This tends to result in a cycle in which I play some games, then get interested in making games, then end up reading for a while, then working on BYOND admin tools, then playing games, then...

Much annoys me about this cycle, as it's hard to control. While I'm in the midst of a project it feels like this is what I'll be doing forever, then one day I simply can't do it anymore.

On the other hand there are benefits. In the past year I read a bunch of books, created the BYOND admin tool, played a bunch of World of Warcraft, designed and did the initial implementation of this here BYOND Member site, did the coding for Last Robot Standing, and now it seems to be time to play some games.

I won't give up LRS, and I'll try to be healthy about it...the popularity and interest helps even things out a bit. But instead of updates every night, it's more likely to be once a week or so.

So now it's a question of what games to play. I happened to come across Kohan II for cheap, and having read much good about the game, I picked it up. I've played a bunch of it recently, and because multiple reviews said that the single-player campaign is super-easy (while skirmish mode was apparently a challenge), I set the campaign to Hard...and it kicked my ass, repeatedly. Eventually I realized that either I'm a worse game player than even I think, or the significant patches done since release have fixed the problems mentioned in the reviews.

In either case, it took me a bit to get the game, as it's different than other RTS games. It has some Warcraft/Age of Empires in it, and some Rise of Nations, and some unique things. But now that I've caught onto it, it's damn fun, and the campaign is challenging. Challenging in the "replay this scenario over and over until I figure out a strategy that works" way, but one that I haven't found frustrating yet. And it's really something to get completely swamped your first three times, then come up with an approach that has you crushing the enemy mercilessly by the end. A real thrill.

So I'm playing through that, but I also have an urge to get through one of the long, deep games I so often never finish...never finished the Baldur's Gate games (though I think I've given up on those), never finished KOTOR, barely got into Morrowind, etc.

But just like there are big deep books I want to get through some day, I want to get through some of these deep games. So I keep coming back to them.

Discussion on another blog has reawakened my interest in Morrowind. I have always heard hugely good things about it, but I found it boring on trying...but I did buy the collector's pack with all the expansions, so what the heck, I'll try again. It was that or KOTOR, and it was a close toss-up.

So Morrowind is sitting here booted up, and I'm gonna give it a couple of hours and see what happens. And as is my habit these days for such games, I'm gonna see if I can do it sans walk-throughs. Games are just never the same with those, and I find myself using them all too often.

So cover me, I'm going in!