What Up, Yo

I have played exactly three games this week, yo.  I spent the first few days playing a bunch of Monster Hunter Tri, then later focused on finishing the Zerg campaign in Starcraft before April ended, and also played a ton of Uniwar throughout.

Monster Hunter kicks ass, and I can't wait to play more.  I bought it kind of on a whim, kind of to see whether or not the newest, most accessible entry in the series would would actually appeal to me (long time readers might know that the PSP game failed to click with me a couple of years ago).  The addition of the second analog stick, by way of the Wii Classic Controller Pro, does wonders for the game's playability.  Capcom has also gone to lengths with Tri to include perfunctory tutorials and a free-hunt area that makes resource gathering and practice hunts a cinch.  I've logged about 12 -14 hours with the game, and I'm really enjoying it thus far.  I'm at the very end of the second tier of guild quests (rated 1-5 stars) in the single player game.  I understand there are more quests online.

It's just a great game.  It's heavily skill-based, as in you got to have skills, or you will get nowhere.  I'm given over to that type of gaming recently, though, with stuff like Demon's Souls, Starcraft, and a bevy of multiplayer FPS that I've been into.  I'm starting to game more for mechanics than for stories, like I have done in the past.  Monster Hunter mixes that skill-heavy play with a bunch of great RPG mechanics, too, like crafting your own armor and weapons from rare items obtained through hunting and gathering in the world.  There are a couple of aspects of the game that I find annoyingly last-gen, though, and they are the closed-off areas with loading screens between, and the somewhat janky UI and inventory systems.  You can tell that the game is largely un-evolved from the PS2/PSP entries.  I can live with that, though, because the game is really good when you get right down to it.  I've only fought one big monster so far, and the battle was pretty epic.

I've been "playing" Starcraft for an eternity now, but I'd only finished the Terran campaign.  Within the last couple of weeks I decided to get back into the game, and now I've finished off the Zerg campaign, as well.  This is another game I've sort of had to teach myself how to play when playing.  With the Zerg, though, most missions amounted to building, expanding to more resources, building more, and then overrunning the opposition through force of numbers.  I didn't have to outright restart that many times, I could mostly go back to a timely save file if a rush ended badly or a scouting attempt went wrong.  Still, each of the 10 missions took anywhere from 60-90 minutes, and more in a couple of cases.  It's significant enough an investment that I treat each race's campaign as a separate game for completion tracking purposes.  I'm not sure when I'll get to the Protoss, but I should do it sooner than it took me to get to the Zerg after finishing the Terran campaigns.  I still have all of Brood War to get through before I can play Starcraft II!

In other gaming, I've been playing tons of Uniwar online via my iphone.  That game kicks ass.  The asynchronus model for turn-based games is ace for mobile games.