En Taro Adun, Executor

My life for Aiur! For Adun! I have returned. I have returned. I have returned. My life for Aiur! For Adun! I have returned.

Yes, I have been playing a lot of Starcraft recently.  I beat it, actually, finally finishing off the game with the Protoss campaign.  Each race's campaign was 10 missions, and if I had to guess, each took somewhere around 12-15 hours to beat, it not more, counting all of the failed strategic gambits and false starts and reloads. Thus, I've been counting each campaign as a separate game.  I did the same with Oblivion's guild quest lines, and will split other games into halves as it suits me, perhaps Super Mario Galaxy will count again if I go and collect all the stars, or Peace Walker if I can ever finish all of the missions it has to offer.

I've enjoyed Starcraft, but have yet to get fully comfortable playing it.  Each campaign would probably need to be twice as long for comfort to set in, and what do you know, I have the Brood War expansion waiting, which features an additional campaign for each race, and a few new units, too, from what I gather.  By the time I'm done with that and the SC2 campaign(s), I should be ready to try multi-player.  At this pace, it'll be at least a year before I get there, though.

As far as strategy goes, I want to finish Dawn of War II next, and then I've got that game's first expansion, Company of Heroes complete and Dawn of War I complete to play, as well as the aforementioned Brood War, and I'll want to pick up Warcraft III at some point, too, since I don't own it, yet.  That's not to mention turn based or or 4X or SRPG or DOTA type games!

It's been a few weeks since I've written up a post about what I've been playing, but the list is fairly small.  In addition to finishing off Starcraft, I picked up Bayonetta, and have been enjoying that some, though I'm still not very far in.  The last week or so has been almost all Starcraft, though I've been trying to get back into The Witcher, an effort which was put off by a failed GPU fan.  Dell replaced my card, though, and so that will be back on just as soon as I get back from my trip this weekend for Labor Day.  While out of town I'll be playing FFT: War of the Lions, which I've also put a few hours into over the last couple of weeks.  Both that and Bayonetta I only have dabbled in (though I'm an old hand at FFT on PSX), but both are looking very good, and I'll have more to say on those later.

The game plan now (and it's always subject to change) though is to focus on Bayonetta, The Witcher, and DoW II once I get back, and to play more FFT and MGS PW while I'm gone.

I've also been reading recently--my first venture into the Warhammer 40K universe, a book called Eisenhorn by Dan Abnett.  It's almost a noir detective story, only set in the far flung future and strung out across the galaxy over centuries, chronicling the lengths one Imperial Inquisitor will go to in service of the God Emperor. It's very good.  Very, surprisingly, good.  I was expecting a level of quality along the lines of  books emblazoned with Dragonlance or Halo or Mass Effect logos, but it puts them to shame.  I would recommend it to anyone interested in sci-fi, especially anyone who likes Dune or anything with more fantastic elements.  Eisenhorn is an omnibus of three novels Xenos, Malleus, and Hereticus, with two interleaving short stories, the first of which, Missing In Action, I thought was especially good.