Crysis/WoW Weekend

I almost didn't play games over the last week. Much of my free time was spent watching season one of Battlestar Galactica, but I played a little bit of SSFIITHDR one night, and just a smidgen of Burnout another. I kicked off the weekend well, though, with some Crysis and then jumped headlong into a wild weekend fling with World of Warcraft.

Crysis is really cool, but I'm going to be progressing at a snail's pace because it's fairly difficult, seeing as I'm playing on the hardest setting. When you go to choose your difficulty level, they give you a brief description of each, listing what features are present and what configuration they are in. For instance, on "Delta" (the hardest), enemies speak Korean instead of English, your binoculars are normal type instead of simplified, and you have no crosshair, which forces you to use iron sights or other gun-mounted aiming aids, like scopes and laser sights. It's a unique way to do things, and Delta sounded the coolest to me, so I went with it.

I played for an hour or so but probably only made about 10 minutes of real progress, if that. Most of my time was spent just running around the rather large coast and bay "corridor" (mountains on one side, open ocean on the other) open to me trying various angles of attack and just playing around with the nanosuit's capabilities. I died a lot--over and over while experimenting--and finally determined that for the moment my best shot at it was to get to high ground or behind some cover and try to set up a sniper ambush to headshot one or two guys in a squad at a time. Once I gave away my position, however, the enemies would hardly ever let up unless I really lost them and then turned on the suit's cloak. I need to find ways to better exploit the strength and speed modes to kill guys with more than just guns.

I'm not sure what triggered it, but I was finally ready to jump back into WoW this weekend. I got a couple of levels, up to 34, and finished a bunch of quests. My lvl 80 brother-in-law ran me through the Scarlet Monastery instance several times, and I got some really good gear to use once I get to levels 37-39. I also pretty much finished up the Ashenvale quests, and it looks like from here there are 5-10 seperate zones that are viable, and I have no idea which ones to tackle. So for now, I'm concentrating on finishing my Warrior-unique Brutal armor set. I have 2 of the 4 pieces so far. After I'm done with that, I guess I'll just continue on with my green and yellow quests and see where they lead me. I really just get a kick out of exploring Azeroth, but I should probably focus on ones that will get me the most gold and warrior-oriented gear. Yeah, that sounds like a plan.