It’s been many months since I’ve stayed up long enough to see the sunrise.

Heh, note the time of this post, and add 3 hrs to it (the server resides in KL, but I wanted to retain the Malaysian flavour to my blog, hence I kept the local time there). I was nearly dead tired like 7 hours ago and half falling asleep. Right now, I’m beyond dead tired, and I don’t even know if there is a state beyond that, but I absolutely must get this post in.

Gaming is bad for you. It’s just like how they say that tasty, yummy food is never good for health, like junk food, fast food and all the delectable sweets that water in your mouth. Gaming is just the same, it’s time consuming, does not add value to everday life, and utterly entertaining.

It’s rare that I can sit down doing the same thing over a period of more than 2 or 3 hours. Web designing yes, on occasion, if I have a spark of an idea. Watching anime definitely, I recall cramming 100 episodes of Naruto in less than 72 hours (it’s at 20 minutes each episode, so go figure) not so distant a past ago. For gaming, yes as well, while I was in my more youthful days. Gunbound maxes out its pleasurable status for around 2 to 3 hours. After that, the processing power required to process the angles and power needed to make a hit become difficult on the brain.

My friend just recently discovered this new game called Maple Story, which reminds me of the colourful 2D platform games like Mario Brothers but with quest structures likened to games like Blizzard’s Diablo and Squaresoft’s Final Fantasy series. The game is termed as a RPG (role playing game) and you can create a character, choose a class (currently there are four to choose from) and level up the character to insane standards (on a side note, I’ve actually clocked enough hours in Final Fantasy X to unlock most of the hidden quests and my group of characters could consistently deal 99,999 damage, which is the upper limit of the maximum amount of damage you could deal. I only stopped at the last of the very last boss, which had 10 million hit points, and wasn’t eager to spend over an hour in a SINGLE battle just to kill it. As a comparison to what’s adequate to complete the game, dealing 3 to 4k damage is adequate to get you by comfortably through the game).

Maple Story has similarities to FFX in the sense that in order to achieve that uber status of your characters, you need to spend insane amounts of time levelling up your characters to deal insane amount of damage. There is also the optional (but usually necessary) need to get weapons that enhance that damage. So off we go on quests, like a shopping spree, collecting 100 mushroom heads, 50 of such and such etc. etc. etc. just to create ONE uber item that probably doesn’t add that much significance to your puny character’s stats.

Truth is, these kinds of games are repetitive and can become mundane at times. I just don’t know why I have that curiousity to see how well my character will perform just one level higher (which is also similar to other games I’ve spent hours on, like Heroes of Might and Magic II, where you are tired, have school in the morning, and you just want to conquer one more city. There’s always one more city, or one more resouce pile to collect before you’re happy). Heck, I’m a sucker for these games.

Alas, time constraints and the things I’ve set out to do will prevail. This plus working commitments, hehe.. I really don’t know if I should be staying up to see the sunrise that much. As the saying goes, early to bed, early to rise. The only problem here is I never went to bed!