*Sigh* Well, that time of year is approaching again.

It is with a mixture of excitement and dread that I look to the Fall video-game release schedule each year. So many great titles that I long to play, and yet at the same time I know how many of them fall to the wayside unfinished, simply because there are so many games, and not enough time for me to play them all.

Recent times have been fairly straightforward for me. Battlefield: Bad Company occupied my “I want to laze about on the couch and blow up some stuff” moods, and the Warhammer Online beta test occupied my “I want to spend time and energy leveling and equipping a character which will be erased in a few weeks” mood.

I’ve now sworn off the Warhammer beta test though. I have played all classes, and settled on the Rune Priest for launch. I have filled out hundreds of those surveys, and reported a few bugs, so I’ve done my duty as a tester. Now I wait for retail, because I don’t want to get burned out on the game before it even really starts.

That leaves me with Bad Company, at least until tomorrow. Tomorrow Too Human takes over. Playing through on co-op is the plan, so that should help motivate a complete run-through of the game. I’ll be going Defender, and Captain Dumby “I haven’t seen The Dark Knight yet” McStupid will play a Commando. That means that I will defend myself as I steal all the loot, and he will command all of the enemies to attack and kill him. This is the arrangement as I see it, and as long as he never reads this post, he’ll never see it coming.

After Too Human, the floodgates open. This is just the list off the top of my head, and I’m most definitely forgetting some: Castle Crashers, The Force Unleashed, Warhammer Online (Warhammer and The Force Unleased release practically the same day… that sucks), Fable 2, Gears of War 2, Fallout 3, Spore, Two Worlds Epic Edition (Haha, no, I’m just kidding on that one. Could you imagine though?), Chrono Trigger DS, Mercenaries 2 (maybe, I’m not sure if I’m psyched for that one or not), Rock Band 2, The WoW expansion (if I happen to be playing at the time), and hell, the list goes on.

Fall is always such a wonderful and tortorous time to be a gamer.

I often wonder if participants of other hobbies and ways of life have similar “events” and releases that are anticipated on the same level. Like, I’m into this game Warmachine. I paint and play every week. A new expansion is coming out this month, and the new book, while not out for a couple of weeks, was sold at Gencon this past weekend. And so the spoilers started flowing, and it was like being a kid in a candy store, looking at all the cool new units and models my faction was getting.

Now, if someone is into, say, knitting or sewing… are there products that excite the knitting/sewing community in the same manner? Do knitters gather on forums to gossip and anticipate a new brand of yarn coming out soon? Or if someone plays tennis… do they feel this way about the upcoming releases of new racquets? Not being into either of these things, I find it hard to imagine transferring the level of anticipation, but on the same token, I don’t doubt that tennis players and knitters find it hard to understand why we get so excited over miniatures or new video games.

Just something I think about sometimes.