I went to my sister's wedding and came back with a new phone.

To my loyal fans who have been wondering where I've been, I apologize for the sudden M.I.A. Last week, my mother called to give me a week's notice for my sister's wedding back home, so I had to fly out to where there is no WoW or even a computer capable of running Neopets flash games without lagging. I was hoping to find some free time to blog while I was up there, but it turned out that weddings are quite a bit of work, and the only thing I managed to fit in between dress fittings and raiding crafts stores was letting my wrist recover from playing too much D3. I supposed I should thank my sister for being the reason there's no longer a radiating pain in my right wrist despite the fact that going to a doctor would have been a lot cheaper than plane tickets and a dress.

Dr. Know-It-All says, "You could just take a break from gaming."

In other good news, I managed to upgrade my phone over the weekend, and now that I've turned off all of its amazing new features that sound pretty cool but drain the battery mad hard, it's time to do some serious decision making about what games to put on it. After all, the games on my phone are going to be responsible for keeping me fully entertained whether I'm on an hour-long bus ride or waiting two minutes on a grocery store checkout line. It needs to keep me engaged and yet not distract me so much that I'm unaware of my surroundings. There can't be too much loading time or aimless RPG-style wandering, but if my non-existent boss calls on me, I must have the freedom to put it on pause or just set it down without ruining my score. Also, it needs to have enough content to be worth the three or so dollars that I've allocated for it in my yearly budget.

By personal preference, I've already eliminated any games like Angry Birds or Bejeweled where one can ignore the instructions in lieu of swiping angrily all over the screen. There's nothing wrong with playing these games; I just don't like my gaming to start off with a delusion of strategy that then quickly devolves into frustrated button mashing to get to the next level. I'm also not a fan of anything that I suck at and thus makes me feel stupid, so that gets rid of things like Sudoku and, oddly enough, Peggle. While I love Cut the Rope and similar physics games, it ends up embarrassing in public because I always find myself leaning to one side or the other like tilting my phone or even my entire body will help that little ball get to where it's supposed to go. Finally, even though word puzzles are my favorite type, waiting eight hours for someone to make a move in Words with Friends kind of ruins the point of why I personally play a phone game, which is to fill in a window of boredom. If I'm already at home and playing D3 by the time they get back to me, they're going to have to wait eight hours for my turn too. It's a vicious cycle.

After much thought and research, I've come to a final decision about what game to put on my precious new phone, to entertain and to engage, to educate and to uplift, to amuse and to soothe my world-weary soul.
 


-Avia.