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I started my second tour of duty with EA this week. It feels great to be back. Honestly, when I look back at leaving, I have a hard time believing that I left.

It was definitely good to leave though. I needed to go out, see what was there, and get some perspective on every thing. Perspective has told me that EA is damn near the best place in the world to work. It comes with unbelievable perks.

Part of why I left was personality conflicts with my boss at the time. We just didn’t click. Part of it was the direction of the project, it just really wasn’t as exciting the third time around. They were moving to focus on things that, I myself as a fan of the series can say, honestly didn’t interest me.

Part of it was the counter culture within EA. I started to get sucked into the “I hate EA” mentality. I won’t let that happen again.

Part of it was that a lot of my friends were moving on from EA to other companies. There was both a sense of not wanting to miss out, as well as not wanting to be the only one left.

Part of it was that I had chased what felt like my impossible dream of working on a specific game franchise for what seemed like forever, and then caught it. What do you do once you’ve run out of goals? I’m still trying to figure that out, as I don’t really have any career oriented goals anymore.

And finally, part of it was just my gypsy soul. There is some broken part of me that loves change. A part of me that loves starting over and redefining who I am. A part of me that just craves the adventure into the unknown.

The job I wandered to was not as advertised to say the least. They didn’t want me, they wanted someone with my brain, but who was willing to become a mindless automaton that constantly did what they were told even when they knew that it was wrong. That just isn’t me. I’m too damn headstrong for that kind of nonsense.

The commute was a big factor too. I thought I could handle it, but 60+ minutes of travel each way is just too much. It extends an 8 hour workday into a 10+ hour workday. Effectively extending the work day by at least 20%.

Yesterday I got stuck in some crappy traffic on the way home, and I was still home in less than a half hour. People must have thought I was crazy because I was just laughing to myself about how happy I was to be stuck in traffic. I should say over how happy I was to be stuck in that traffic, rather than what would have been a good hour behind it if I was traveling from my last job.

It is good to have all of the perks back as well. This time around I am taking advantage of everything that EA has to offer. Milking the cow as they say. I took a paycut and sacrificed a weeks vacation each year to come back to EA; and I have to say, that for me, it was definitely worth it.

When I look at the whole situation I’m proud of myself. I was able to stand back, look at everything and admit that I made a mistake. More than that though, I acted and rectified the mistake. I think a lot of people would have just stayed; feeling trapped by their situation.

I was standing on the SkyTrain today just minding my own business on the mind numbing trip to work this morning, when an old friend stepped into the car. He looked at me and said “The grape vine has been talking to me about you.”

That damn grape vine. It just goes and goes. I swear, I have told almost no one that I was leaving my current job to go back to my old job; but everyone knows.

Most of them even know what I’m working on and who I’ll be working with. Hell, even I didn’t know for sure who I would be working with.

Since the world at large seems to know then this probably isn’t news to anyone reading this, but yes, the rumours are true; I am leaving my current company to return to my old company.

This has been an “educational” experience. I am very much looking forward to returning to my old post, even with the pay cut and the reduction in vacation time.

I’ll be working on something new, exciting, and completely unannounced. I plan to work there forever and ever and ever; or until I am in a position to either work for myself or to work at one or two select startups that may or may not happen over the course of the next couple of decades.

I’m going to hack away at a new toy engine at home that will be used for the three games I have in the design and prototyping phases.

If anyone has a suggestion for a name for the engine, I’d love to hear it. So far in the past I have written the following engines never to be released:

1. Cebidae
2. LiquidSpace
3. Orion

I’ve gone very retro with my gaming lately. I downloaded Sid Meier’s:
Pirates! from Xbox Live on Saturday and ever since then I’ve been
terrorizing the Caribbean with my pirate fleet.

It is one of those games that completely sucks you in to the point that you start losing track of time while you play it. While at the same time when you think about what it is that makes it fun, you can’t quite put your finger on it. All you can think is “Damn it feels good to be a Pirate!”

I lucked out at the beginning of my first time through the game and captured Black Beard’s ship during my second ship-to-ship battle. All of a sudden I was cruising around the Caribbean in probably one of the top five ships in the game. Of course, I didn’t know this at the time. I really only realized it when I lost it during another battle.

The game allows you to increase or decrease the difficulty each time that you divide your plunder with the crew. At which point you also lose all of the ships in your fleet except for your flag ship. My flag ship is the fiercely monickered “Holly May”.

There are several modes of gameplay although it mostly consists of sailing around and ship battles. There is a bit of a trade component to the game, but it really doesn’t work very well. You can tell that it was tacked on to the game and never given any real love.

Other modes include sacking cities, sneaking into cities and dueling. The dueling is very easy in the early levels and gets exponentially more difficult as you the difficulty levels increase. It also, interestingly enough, gets harder as your pirate ages. This adds a very subtle and yet amazingly accurate touch to the gameplay. It essentially forces you to retire as you get older, because you slow down to the point that you can’t duel the other captains effectively.

The core of the storyline, which you may or may not follow, is to save your family. You need to accomplish certain tasks such as capture a Sloop of War or finding buried treasure to unlock the tasks of finding the relatives. I’m not sure what happens if you find them all. I understand that there is a big show down with the pirate who captured them all, but I haven’t made it there yet. I’m also not sure that I can beat him in a duel.

I have named myself the “Dread Pirate Quinn”. There is no actual rank of Dread Pirate, but it seemed fitting. I sink ships of all nationalities, including my own if need be.

The most unfortunate part of the game is that you need to keep up a certain rate of fortune building to keep your crew happy, or they start jumping ship when you port, or eventually even mutiny against you. When they mutiny they will steal one of the additional ships in your fleet. I guess I can’t really blame them for being greedy, I mean, they are pirates after all!

As I said though, this is unfortunate because it pulls you out of the immersion of the game. Part of it has to do with the passage of time. Time flies by at a pretty hectic pace. You seem to age about five years for every hour played (I may be off on that, as I really don’t know how much time has passed since I started playing).

I do wish they could hack some gamerpoints in for finishing the downloaded original Xbox games. Even just one achievement; say 200-500 points for finishing the old game. Alas, I guess I’ll just have to keep playing for the fun of it