EVE Online

Video games have long been my favorite hobby... although sadly as I get older I can definitely feel the loss of interest in games.

My main gripe now is that for single player games you are simple experiencing whatever the game designer has made for you.

While in online games, (mainly MMOs) there is no end goal, so you end up sinking incredible amounts of time to collect gear to kill dragons, to collect their loot so you can kill even bigger dragons. The cycle goes on and on....

I've been having some free time lately so I have been trying new games to get into (Dawn of War 2, Overlord 2, Sacred 2, The Sims 3, The Witcher, Dawn of Discovery, Trine), the only one that really stuck to me was EVE Online.

Now Eve has been out for a while, and back when it came out I tried it and had no interest in the game. Yet now that I'm older I appreciate and therefore enjoy the game more. It has everything I want in an MMO - a player run economy, and PVP centric.

The game is probably too hardcore for most people since you drop all your items when you die (and you *will* be player killed), yet it reminds me of MUDs, and in fact plays very similarly (although the graphics in EVE are beautiful).

One cool aspect as well is that your skills level up even when you are offline, so you do not need to spend all your time grinding at all. You can do missions to gain money in the game, but you can even purchase ISK (ingame credits) with real money to eliminate all grinding whatsoever.