I remember when all was well. When browsing IGN reviews and Christmas Lists was all I needed to do to find out what games were good the coming third and fourth quarters of the video game universe. I remember when I had emails from IGN, 1UP, GameSpot, even EuroGamer coming in and I would read nearly all of them every day.

I remember when my method of knowing what game to buy was strictly these sites, Kotaku, some less popular blogs, some social networks, and from word of mouth.

Then, I would eventually stop playing all sorts of games. No more role-play, platformers, real time strategy, and I didn't really question it because ever since my Delta Force days I always knew myself to be a first person shooter gamer.

I always considered RTS to be the most stale genre out there. I just didn't even feel like I was really thinking or enjoying myself. After the Prince of Persia trilogy (or the remastered trilogy if you want to be technical), I didn't feel like any platformer was that great anyway. I never bothered playing Assassin's Creed. I played the newest GTA all the way through but the fourth just felt like it lacked everything I liked about the GTA series. It felt like eyecandy was added to shit gameplay and an actually okay (and slightly, but barely believable story) and the graphics on the PC were definitely underpar compared to other games. '07 I wasted a shit load on a nice computer to play what was expected to be the most amazing thing ever: Crysis. The king of all eyecandy. I don't know if anything actually even comes close to it in that regard. And gameplay wasn't too stale. Definitely not as slow as some games but other than shit cheat protection and shit multiplayer in general (it had punkbuster LOL), the game just didn't satisfy me enough to play it through to the end. It wasn't like Half-Life 2. It didn't drive me to the climax and then make me ask for more.

In short, singleplayer became completely unsatisfying and almost pointless.

Fast forward to 2009. I discover Quake Live.

My life has never been the same.

I can't play anything but Quake.

Everything is boring.

Everything is slow.

Everything is easy (yet Quake I'm still shit at).

Everything is crap.

Eyecandy doesn't matter.

Fast forward to 2012. Quake Live is boring.

It's too slow.

It's too easy (even if I am still shit at it).

Everything is crap.

I don't know what else there is to play.

If I base things off of enjoyment I definitely enjoy some good ol' Polish clan arena CPMA style with fast rail THE MOST.
Which some of you might laugh at.

If I base it off of the active users and population even in America Quake Live is kind of a stretch.

TDM is dead. CTF is pretty much dead. It has a pickup channel but I really don't even enjoy the pickups that much. FFA, and insta, PQL, etc I don't care for it. So clan arena and duel.

CLAN ARENA.... and duel.
Both of which I find tolerable but not as fun as QW or CPMA.

Quakeworld has some people playing it. It's fun. I'm new to it. I feel like it's something I could keep playing but at the same time I feel like I DON'T LOVE IT. Who loves losing twenty points each duel? Even forty.

If I want to be super hardcore, QuakeWorld it is.

If I want to be mainstream, Quake Live it is.

If I want to play what I love most, with 110 ping on an okidoki server with polish kids, CPM it is.

And here's the hilarity of my situation.

In a fit of rage yesterday, out of anger at how hard it was to find a game in both QW and CPM. I just deleted them. Uninstalled. Along with other games. But kept QL. Because I feel like QL has a future. That QL is modern. That QL is now.

And now I'm beginning to think that maybe, in the end what does it matter what I play. It's what I get out of it right? So maybe I'll have to go through the arduous process of reinstalling Quake Live and CPM, all over again. God bless me.