After a week long break from playing any games at all (more on that later) I decided to jump back in and give a couple a go last night. This was mostly caused by Egosoft releasing the latest X expansion, which bridges X3 to the new game that is due out next year and so I though I would fire it up and take a look.

Some strange decisions aside (there is no plot at all for the Terran faction, and amazingly one of the others still tells you to shoot something in the tutorial when you don’t have any guns. That’s been a bug since the first version of X3!) but it’s fun enough and I’ll potter away at it until the new game is released. That’s the good thing about the game, you can just potter and leave it earning cash through a massive industrial infrastructure. I’m really not selling it to you very well am I?

I also jumped into Star Trek Online to see the Christmas event, which seems to consist of snowman watching (like Twitching, but more boring) and running a race on an icy track. It’s a dismal little event that gives some interesting rewards randomly, but you can buy them from the store as well. That leaves some food, snowballs and three scarfs that have instantly become the focus of my obsession as every Starship captain needs a scarf for when they have away missions on cold worlds. It’s all getting a bit Douglas Adams at that point.

I think christmas events in MMOs are a post-ironic statement about the futility of greed. They require you to grind daily in order to get something cosmetic that you don’t really want and what’s worse I fall for it every time.

The ability to actually just buy the cool stuff is interesting as it gives me a “I think that my time should be valued at £x” value for the event. That’s a slippery slope of objectifying the worth of content in games that I’ve not had to really deal with before. Well I have, I’ve just chosen not to say that item X has Y hours of content and so is not worth it, and of course the other way around too. Maybe I should.