Judgment: Celebration

I apologize for missing the Saturday blog. For those of you who know me, you know that this past week was stressful. I celebrated just making it through by playing Judgment.

That work thing I talked about a couple of months ago – the one that hurt my soul? I played the waiting game and it all worked out. Through a lot of extra work and the intervention of a guardian angel, we could participate. Everything went better than anyone expected. Everyone performed admirably, except me. I got lost in the skywalk (twice). I was late, and sweaty, and one step away from a full-blown panic attack. I didn’t man check-in for the event, something I promised I would do. The event coordinator didn’t call me on it, either. I think he could tell I was frazzled-as-fuck, and he was not touching that with a ten-foot pole.

I will do my best to make it up next year. That’s all I can do. It doesn’t keep me from hating myself.

Judgment helps with that. Unfortunately, it also consumes my writing time.

Why Judgment? What is it about that game that I love more than any other Gears of War game? Judgment doesn’t play around with stupid objectives. They finally made a versus competition that allows you to kill or be killed, and that’s the only objective: Free for All. The only other versus game that allows you to get a ton of kills is King of the Hill, as long as you don’t give a shit about the rings and concentrate on kills. You get medals for weapons kills. What better way to rack them up?

The game took some criticism for changing the gameplay and making Free for All a humans-only slaughterhouse (no Locusts are included in the line-up). Maybe I should care, but honestly, I just love this game so much. I pretend it’s a training exercise and those aren’t really Baird’s guts all over the floor after I chainsaw him in half. He respawns two seconds later, anyway, and then he’s coming after me. See? He’s fine.

Besides, everyone wants to kill this guy:

What is your celebratory video game of choice?