One day a couple weeks ago I saw Greg playing this on Steam and one of the selections for your Steam friends is to watch them play the game. It basically kicks the game into streaming mode and I watched him play for a bit. This is a cool feature and the game looked like fun.

That said, the section of the game seemed to have a grey and brown ascetic something I haven't before seen in a Final Fantasy game.

No problem, it was awesome Steam lets you share your gameplay with friends. It's nice because you don't have to a full blown twitch stream but your friends can watch if they want.

I'm still looking forward to this because it seems like a more mature Animal Crossing, but at the same time this looks as though it may be *too* involved. I just hope it's open, so if you don't care about lifting weights, or don't want to spend an hour manually picking crops, for instance, you don't have to. Weight lifting was what really struck me, because it's become the poster-child for extra unneeded content because of GTA: San Andreas, where you had to stay in shape in addition to the normal hijinks, and most people hated that part of it.

Still, San Andreas was an amazing game, and it's still most people's favorite in the series.

So don't take this as criticism, I'm not about to criticize a game I haven't played. I'm definitely still looking forward to this.

How are we 4?

Seriously, it seems like it could have been less than a year ago. Great times. I'm glad you sent me a message on Facebook saying, basically "Hey, I made this site for video games and I think you might like it." Actually, I don't have my old Facebook history, I clear it every now and then, but if you do I'd love to see the conversation.

That's a good thing to kick off the conversation on this post: in as much detail as you can remember, how did you find the site?

I’d just like to share how it all started for me. I knew Jon from way back in 2004. We were both moderators on the official Ubuntu forums. We didn’t talk a TON but we knew basic things about each other, and I think we were Facebook friends at the time.

So out of the blue I get an email from Jon, with the subject line “Window Glass is an Upwardly Mobile Venture” and I can remember thinking “OK, I’m going to have to tell Jon his email account got hacked. But I read it anyway, and here’s what it said, with some things cleaned up for readability, and posted to pastebin so that this isn’t just a massive wall of text:

http://pastebin.com/SrKLJnRA

I was intrigued, but still not entirely sure of what to expect, and I responded as such: “Yeah man, sounds awesome. Let me know when it's online. I think I know what you're going for with it, but it sounds like something that will make more sense once I see it in action. I look forward to being a hipster cat.”

And that’s where it all began. When Jon launched the site, I joined up, and immediately dumped literally every single game I owned into it, on all platforms, and started chatting about games with people I’d never met. But I love this email that I sent back a week later, titled “One Week with Cheerful Ghost.” I read this now, four years later, and it still holds up:

http://pastebin.com/FjT9Zcnx

Seriously, it’s hard to believe that it’s been that long ago. I had no idea back then that I’d love this place as much as I do, but It has become an integral part of my life. Not because of the games, but because of the awesome people.

(and thanks, Jon, for forwarding these old emails to me)