Blasting in the New Year

I caught a bit of the DICE bug over the weekend, and decided to crack into both Battlefield 1 and Star Wars: Battlefront for the first times. I had some good fun with both of them, the only real sour note was when a player on the other team logged on with unsavory ideological messages conveyed in his player emblem.

I was impressed with the graphics of both games; the Frostbite engine is really something. Both games were fun and had a good feel to what I played. I get the impression that Battlefront may be a little more casual and arcade game-like, and Battlefield 1 a little more geared toward the classic hardcore shooter. I'd like to play more of both, but it's hard to say whether I'll put too much time into them. It would probably behoove me to get Battlefront II, instead, so maybe I'll lean toward Battlefield 1 more if I do want to play a game like this.

I played a little Rocket League, as well. That game is as smooth and fun as ever. It's really smartly designed and presented. Again, I should play more of this.

Mark of the Ninja is another new one for me. I chose this one to knock off of the backlog both because I was kind of feeling like a 2D action game and because it starts with M. It's much less the platformer I was kind of craving and much more of a hardcore stealth game pulled off nearly flawlessly in two dimensions. It's a joy to play. Everything feels crisp and intentional, and there's very little room to fumble your actions in the control scheme. The levels branch nicely and offer alternate pathways through the spaces, which is impressive for 2D environments. It's like Klei wanted to bring over all the best parts of immersive sim stealth into 2D, and it really works. I played a solid 2 hours in my first session.

I also finally got around to trying out Warhammer 40,000: Armageddon. It's a hex-based, turn-based war game, as I anticipated, but not quite so hardcore and forbidding as I had thought it might be. It's maybe not even much more complex than Battle of Tallarn; indeed it lacks the import that game puts on unit facing on the battlefield. I'm not sure it is more complex at all, come to think of it. It offers more units, sure, and they're upgradable, but I'm not sure there is that much more to it. And it doesn't quite raise the production values bar as high as I'd like above Tallarn, either. It is better presented, to be sure, but not that much better presented.

Regardless, I'm having a good time with it, and the campaign seems pretty long and involved, with a lot of scenarios. I'm definitely going to keep playing this one, and I'm sure I'll have more impressions as I delve further in.

13 Days' Round-Up

It's been about two weeks of fairly varied play.


Varied play beginning with the Battlefield 1 beta, which I thought was entertaining, but ultimately left me questioning why. This was followed fairly close on by some Battlefield 4 play, after EA made all of the DLC free for a short time. Also entertaining, but I can never quite get over the sensation that I would get more out of playing another game.


Final Fantasy IV is still serving for Japanese practice, but I've put only a little time into it since the last post. My party talked to some people in Fabul, and are about to depart there on a ship, bound for Baron once more, if I understood properly.


Castle of Illusion, the Mickey Mouse platformer, or more precisely the recent remake of the original, was to be pulled from sale due to a licensing issue, so I picked it up very cheaply before it disappeared, thinking that my daughters would probably enjoy it, or watching me play it, at least. It's a little beyond their game skills at this point. This is actually a very good game. I am not familiar with the original, which I think was a Sega Genesis game, but I knew this version was well regarded going in. I can see why. First, its gorgeous. The locales are varied and vibrant, and perfect for Mickey. Second, the platforming is also very well done. Mickey controls well, and the levels are put together in a good, fun way. I was impressed.


I've been bringing together a small, high quality library of games for my 3DS(s), including a game I had not played since 1998 and in the meantime has become, I feel, one of the most over-celebrated games of all time, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Nevertheless, I felt it deserved a place in my collection, so I picked up the 3DS remake, which is 99% the same game, but with some good tech and usability improvements. I do maintain it is widely over-appreciated by nostalgia junky fanboy manchildren, but it is still a very good game. I've played through the first few sections of it, and I'm on my way to Death Mountain now.


Another recent addition to my 3DS library is Mario Kart 7, which, alongside the original Mario Kart on SFC, I have been playing some of along with Mia. She still can't drive, but she's kind of learning.


There's a new video game CCG, a Hearthstone-like, out now called Duelyst. The twist here is that instead of just putting cards out on a table, cards summon creatures onto a tactical grid where positioning is a very real factor in how fights turn out. I thought the art looked nice, and so was interested to begin with, but 20 free card packs through a Humble Bundle newsletter promotion tempted me into actually downloading and trying out the game. It seems like a cool thing after a few practice games, and I'm happy to have an alternative to Hearthstone, which I do not particularly relish going back to play more of, even while I recognize the near inevitability of such a thing, given how well Blizzard supports their games in the very long term. Perhaps Duelyst will attract enough of an audience to remain on the scene for a while. I wouldn't bet on it, though, regardless of the game's quality.


Speaking of Blizzard games, I have also been spending a lot of time indeed with World of Warcraft. I have my Death Knight at level 100 now, and I am enjoying the Legion content a good deal. The Death Knight class-specific and spec-specific content has been really cool so far. It's a novel experience to be more or less current with the game for the first time ever, and I'm looking forward to playing to the cap and beyond.

Detours

I have been making some good progress through Mass Effect 3, but it is also true that my attention has been diverted in a number of different directions, in the meantime. I am planning on paring that back down some and continuing on Shepard's quest very soon.

The Steam summer sale happened recently, and with that my backlog swelled again to even greater volume. I have knocked a few off the pile, though. Quickly and dirty reviews:

Chivalry: Deadliest Warrior - fun and fairly unique melee-focused combat featuring a number of historical warrior types. Did I uninstall this? What was I thinking? I want to go play more right now. The downside is that there doesn't seem to be much balance. Samurai appear to be the best class overall, by historical rankings in the leaderboards. Pirates look to be bringing up the rear. Cool game, but I'm not sure how much potential there is for a serious competitive scene.

Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams - a great platformer with a gorgeous presentation, and quite difficult, too. There don't seem to be a huge amount of stages, but the ones I saw--up through the first boss fight--are large and feature a number of secrets. There is also the fact that each exists in two states, happy fairy land and dead Halloween land. You play as two girls, one at a time, shifting back and forth from girl and world to girl and world. Recommended for platformer fans.

Garry's Mod - I don't get it. I guess it's kind of a meta-Minecraft in which you can construct not only worlds, but game types, as well. I messed around a bit with dropping objects into the world, and I saw that there were a ton of people playing original game types on various servers, but I didn't join any. I tried to get onto something running some sort of Fallout: New Vegas roleplaying thing, but it was taking forever to connect, so I cancelled and quit out. This seems like a deep, deep hole, and I don't know that I want to jump down it.

Goat Simulator - Finally a game that Mia appreciates. She's three years old, today.

Wizorb - it's 8-bit-esque JRPG Arkanoid.

I also returned to a number of games for a bit more, and even finished off the Bioshock franchise, as it exists now, with the second part of Infinite's Burial at Sea expansion. It was good, and did a decent job of elaborating on the events of Infinite and connecting them to those of the original Bioshock. Not that that was really necessary, but it was a nice touch, I thought.

I let Mia check out some World of Goo, Peggle, and Hearthstone while sitting on my lap. She seems think they're variously OK for up to about 5 minutes before bombing off to do something else.

I made a tiny bit more progress through Half-Life 2. At this pace I'll finish itup sometime in 2016, making this one of the more extended contiguous (to my definition) playthroughs I've ever done. It's a great, great game, though. It feels great to play. Maybe I just don't want it to end.

I've kind of reached a multiplayer FPS crisis. That is, I don't know if there is a game for me in this genre. Battlefield has evolved to something I don't really care for. Call of Duty has never been my thing. Counter-Strike seems like the best game out there, but after about 15 or 20 minutes, I feel like I'm done for the day. Matches seem to last longer than that. Plus, Counter-Strike is extremely skill-intensive, and I'll never be that good. I need something more casual, I think. Maybe Borderlands or the upcoming Destiny or another co-op game, like the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, is more my speed these days. I've tried the Left 4 Dead games, but they just don't seem to take, either. They're incredibly intense and repetitive, and like with CS, I want to bail out after just a short time. The aforementioned multiplayer in Mass Effect 3 is pretty good, maybe I'll stick with that for the time being, while I'm playing the campaign, anyway. I should also play the Payday series, which I do own.

Going forward, I guess I'll try to focus on ME3, though I am awaiting Diablo III's 2.1 patch and the Destiny beta. We'll see how that goes.

The Only Constant

I outlined in my last post the upcoming handoff from Dark Souls to Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2, and that has happened, but with some other unexpected developments, as well.

I've missed my Spelunky daily run a number of times over the last week, either out of fatigue or forgetfulness. Once I was just too absorbed in Dark Souls, and played right up to my hard cut-off for the night. Another time I completely forgot about the run playing Castlevania, and finally last night I was just too beat by the time I could have played to actually go ahead and do so. Will I ever actually beat Spelunky? Despite how much I've played it, I have yet to ever get past 4-2, and to even finish it the easy way, I have to finish 4-4. Meanwhile, since I learned how the City of Gold is accessed, I've been trying to fulfill the reqs for that each game, and that more often than not spells an early death that might otherwise be avoided. It's a tough time for Spelunky runs, right now; I'm only scoring in the 40-thousands when I do a daily, and I don't really ever do anything else.

I was in the Titanfall beta for PC for a few days; it's a pretty fun game. It is definitely more of a giant kill-churn sort of game, with rapid respawns and highly lethal weaponry. I may pick it up for cheap at some point after release. I mention it because it also segued into playing some more Battlefield 4 over the last week. I do think BF is still my multi-player shooter of choice, but being an ultra-casual player, I am no good at it at all, and overwhelmed at the amount of stuff in the arsenal. I am just trying to stick with the most basic stuff in each kit until I figure out what any of it is good for, or until I nail down some sort of role I like to take on the battlefield. I think I like the vehicles more than anything, save for the jets. The maps are just too small to make flying a jet anything more than a bunch of turning and looping maneuvers, as far as my abilities go. Maybe I'll try to practice flying more, because on paper doing so should be a blast.

Another unforseen event in the last week was the appearance of the Diablo III pre-expansion patch with the Loot 2.0 and Paragon 2.0 updates. I hopped back into the game, now with a completely different difficulty mode assortment, and picked up my Barbarian again. Within just a couple of hours I have geared him out to a strength exponentially better than what I had before, and also withint a couple of hours I had found 3(!) legendary items, where before I had found the same amount in 200+ hours of playtime. And these new ones were even desireable! So, thus far I am thinking Loot 2.0 is a success, if what Blizzard is looking for is to drive people to gear up by actually playing the game as opposed to playing the auction house. Not that we will have any choice, soon, but that is another discussion.

With these new changes to the game, I am more excited to play it, and for Reaper of Souls to come out, than I have been in quite some time. At release, I think I may create a Crusader and jump right ahead to Act V to play through that once, since that should be completely doable with the way monsters now scale to your character's level, and difficulty levels have more to do with how well your character is kitted out than anything else. The progression idea seems to be to play Normal until you have some decent magical equipment, and then switch to Hard and gather some good rares, then switch to Expert when you are well gemmed-out, and so on and so forth, staying in a difficulty mode until you are so geared as to just steamroll over everything, and then moving up for more challenge, gold, experience, and possibly better drop rates in the later, higher difficulty modes.

A Dark Souls update on where I left off for Castlevania: after my last post, I proceeded to test out some of the ultra-greatsword class of weapons, and I have fallen in love with the Zweihander, a huge greatsword that, while it has a lower max damage than others, is faster to swing, and does incredible damage to the enemy's poise, staggering, and in some cases, knocking them down. Knocking a silver knight or darkwraith into a faceplant is an awesome feeling. I've also leveled up to the point where I can use it along with some of the heaviest armor in the game, in fact I have also leveled up a couple pieces of the Giant armor set to the maximum to replace Smough's set in some instances. I also ascended the Zweihander to +15, as well. The Souls games have some of the most satisfying character building of any games I can think of. Progression-wise, I fought through the Catacombs and Tomb of Giants and killed Gravelord Nito, and then went into the Painted World in Anor Londo, where my character now awaits my return.

This brings me to Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2, the long-awaited sequel to 2010's epic action-adventure series reboot with a twist. Without attempting to spurn the sequel, I wonder if maybe they should have just left off after that amazing epilogue to the first game. It was the type of thing to set the mind spinning with all sorts of grand ideas for the type of game that could follow, and what could conceivably live up to everything their hints might inspire hope for?

Well, for better or worse, they went ahead and actually made the game that logically follows on from said epliogue, and I'd like to just take a moment here to appreciate that they actually went ahead and did it--this absolutely mind-blowing thing--they actually went and tried to realize it. I think that took balls. Real balls. Just upending the confused morass of what Castlevania had been prior to Lords of Shadow, incurring the wrath of thousands of nostalgia-blinded and dependent fanboys took balls. But this--holy shit. I can't imagine Konami was on board with the idea right away--it's just not the sort of thing you see in large-scale AAA games, especially ones using an established franchise or brand. So, plaudits to Mercury Steam for that.

As for how the actual game has turned out; my overal impression so far is pretty good. It retains a good deal of what the first Lords of Shadow had, and adds some great combat moves with the new Void Sword and Chaos Claws that replace the light and shadow magics of the original. The combat is fun, the boss battles are cool, the graphics and art in the gothic areas are great. The modern areas are weaker, of course, probably due to the fact that modern environments are inherently less interesting than dark gothic fantasy ones, but there is also an embarrasingly amateur scaling issue in the modern areas. Dracula appears to be about 3 feet tall in the modern era, doorhandles towering above him. Trash cans and industrial liquid totes are neck-high on the Prince of Darkness. It's sloppy, and immersion-breaking, and ridiculous, but at least there is no functional detriment to the game, otherwise.

I have been ejoying the game so far, but I have to admit that my general ambivalence to this whole genre and its contrived puzzles, arena battles, and improbably designed spaces with inexplicably extant collectables grates on me. I kind of just wish all of my favorite parts (which, if I'm honest, are just the story-related bits and cool art and environments) could be presented to me without all the filler. I'll keep the combat, since that is fun, but I could easily lose much of the rest.

Wrapping Up 2013

We're nearing the end of the year, and it's time to start thinking about Game Of The Year proceedings here at 9 Parsecs, and on Call Of Podcast. In light of that fact, I have been making a slight effort to look into 2013 games to try to cover as many bases as possible. Here are the meager fruits of this half-hearted effort:

Poker Night 2 -- OK, this wasn't really for GOTY consideration at all, it was just installed and I had a few minutes to kill with something. I played a handful of short Texas Hold 'Em tournaments and got a sampling of the mildly entertaining presentation of the game. I think maybe the assortment of characters in the first game resonated more. But then, maybe not. These are not poker games for serious poker enthusiasts. I'm not sure who they're for, but since they're never more than $5 and are a novel distraction and feature a base level poker functionality, I keep buying them.

Teleglitch -- It's Doom meets Hotline Miami meets Rogue, but with Quake's decor. It didn't really do much for me, despite the lauding I've seen it get elsewhere.

Monaco -- Designed as a co-op, top-down heist game with a trippy aesthetic, I expected to immediately vomit and uninstall, but to be honest I enjoyed the hour(ish) I spent playing this. About half of that time was spent co-op with a couple of randoms. It was sort of fun, and had nice music. I wouldn't go out of my way to play more, though.

Battlefield 4 -- I guess this is a 2013 game. I have only played one round so far, but it seems like a Battlefield game. I think 2014 might be this game's year to shine.

Apart from trying to tick boxes next to 2013 games, I've also done some quick hits on:

Wasteland -- The original, rereleased leading up to Wasteland 2's release, which I find to be a little too archaic or my tastes. This is like going back to play the first Dragon Warrior or something, but Westernized. I would like to really give it a shot, though.

Company of Heroes 2 -- The first game I ever streamed myself playing! It was a short lived disaster. I only ducked in long enough to see how the streaming worked and have the first person on my team in a 4 on 4 match go "WTF dude?," at my immediately apparent ineptitude before I quit out. Not sure what I was thinking, here.

Diablo III -- Esteban finally saw the light and has gotten into the game. I jumped in with my Barbarian as he was finishing up Normal to skip a few beats ahead in the game, and then later went back and killed Diablo on Normal with my now level 28 guy, and will probably move him on to Nightmare next time I play. Or should I go back and complete the parts of the game I skipped? I'm torn.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown -- I aborted my problematic Normal/Ironman game and began a new one, which so far is coming along very well. I'm starting to get into the game more, and wish I had more time to play it.

Hearthstone -- The game was recently updated with some changes to a few problematic cards and a new ranking system for constructed deck play. I continue to jump in and do the daily quests, though I sometimes wonder why. I think Blizzard needs to add more of a reason to keep playing the game, especially outside of Arena. Constructed play is nothing but a ladder grind, and luck has such a heavy hand in any game of Hearthstone that it's hard not to chalk up wins and losses just to luck of the draw rather than any skill surplus or deficit.

Spelunky -- I keep hitting the daily challenge every day, now on Vita/PS3 as well as on the PC version. I have a hard time wanting to play outside of the daily, though. Usually one or two runs will do it for me, especially if one happens to go on to the Jungle or beyond.

Assassin's Creed -- I've put some unholy amount of time into IV so far, and have not yet finished up the story stuff. I want to do that soon. I'm curious what happens with Kenway in the end, and whether Haytham figures into the end of the game at all. I re-installed AC III this weekend, too, just to play through the opening stuff again. The Kenway line is pretty interesting, which is why I'm curious where Edward ends up in the whole Assassin/Templar conflict. So far he's been killing a bunch of Templars, but for his own reasons; he's not explicity with the Assassins. Not yet, anyway.

Flying the Black Flag

I have just begun to consummate the yearly Assassin's Creed affair, this time with the pirate Edward Kenway. I only put in abut 90 minutes so far, but the broad strokes are of course, very familiar. I'm looking forward to seeing how Edward's story plays out, and exploring what appears to be the goofy extra-Animus conceit of the series, going forward. General impressions of this year's game, the sixth fully-fledged adventure in the series, are much more positive than they were for last year's AC3, which I enjoyed a great deal, constant readers might remember. One black mark that game had, though, was that the primary protagonist, Connor "Ratonhnhaké:ton" Kenway, was always so serious, and just not much fun. He was no Ezio Auditore, that is for sure. Edward, Connor's grandfather, appears to be much more of swashbuckling rogue out to make a fortune and have a good time doing it.

Beyond that, I've just been playing the Spelunky and Hearthstone circuit, for the most part, while advancing my way through Dragon Age II.

I did duck into a couple more DLC modules, 400 Days for The Walking Dead, and Burial at Sea Episode 1 for Bioshock Infinite. Both were enjoyable, featuring interesting new content with the familiar mechanics of the parent game.

I also played, and subsequently decided to be done with (for now), Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Battlefield 3. CS:GO is fun, but man, I am bad, and I don't care to put in the time to get any better at it. I'd play more BF3, sometime, but BF4 is already out, and I'd just as soon pick that up and start on it. Which I will, at some point, no doubt.

Playlog: First Week of November, 2013

Most of what I’ve been playing over the last week is the same as the week before. I managed to get in a good, solid 4 hours of game time on Halloween, being alone at home periodically answering the door to hand out candy. Most nights I can play for around 2 hours or so beginning at about 9pm, if I’m willing to give up doing anything else with that free time. Often enough, I am.

I did make some time this week to check out a couple of 2013’s smaller independent releases, namely The Stanley Parable and Proteus. I want to be suitably informed when it comes time to talk Game of the Year. The Stanley Parable is a very clever subversive deconstruction of the typical modern AAA video game, and at times chuckle-inducing. Anyone reading this blog would probably enjoy it. Proteus, though, I’m not too sure about. It’s less a game even than Stanley or Gone Home; it is more of a ponderous exploration of a small, randomly-generated island through a day of each of the four seasons, with soothing music. There is nothing to do but wander around and take in the sights, and once per night cycle find your way to the proper location to trigger procession to the next season. At the end of winter, the whole thing ends, and you are free to play it again. Or not, as I elected.

Dragon Age II is coming along well enough. About 10 hours in, I have noticed repeating environments, and MMO-style light, almost throwaway quest design, but the world and political circumstance as well as the interactions between Hawke and crew are enough of a draw to keep me playing. The combat is either too easy or too complex, seemingly, depending on how you play the game. I have just been focusing on pointing Hawke at who she needs to stab, leaving my part mates to be handled by the AI. This works out well enough, until Hawke gets knocked out, and I’m forced to take over control of one of the other characters, none of whose abilities I am familiar with, since I’ve been letting the game auto-level them up and altogether unconcerned with what they do in battle or how they are doing it. I should probably take a little more of a hands-on approach, assuming control of the mage or fighter types here and there. I’ve had one fight versus a dragon that I might call a boss fight, at this point, and it went down pretty easily, though.

I’ve gotten to a point with Spelunky where I can more consistently get into the jungle levels and accrue around $50,000 worth of treasure before dying. I still have never made it past the jungle, though. I still need a lot more practice.

I have been hitting Hearthstone in a big way since getting access to the beta. I now have almost all of the basic card set unlocked, with 7 of 9 classes leveled to 10 or higher, and I have been doing the daily quests every day to earn more gold so that I can do more Arena draft runs. This is a really good game. The limited card variety and tighter focus on creature fights mean that games are over a lot quicker than in Magic, and while I haven’t done any scientific testing on the matter, it feels kind of like you are more dependent on lucky draws for success at the game. Then again, the removal of mana from the deck means the risk of a completely fruitless once-per-turn card draw are dramatically reduced. Either way, I am having a great time with Hearthstone.

I’ve spent a few hours playing more Battlefield 3 since re-installing it last week, and I’m still kind of ambivalent on the game. I think Bad Company 2 might have been a better game, or at least had better maps. I don’t actually feel like the jets are much fun in BF3—the maps are entirely too small to support them, even the big ones. You spend more time banking and looping trying to line up a strafing run on tightly clustered targets than you do actually having fun with them. The helicopters are a lot more fun to play with, I think. I still don’t feel like I’ve played enough BF3 to warrant the $60 I spent on it when it came out, and thus I am very wary of buying BF4 anytime soon. I need to either get more out of 3, or find 4 for like $30 for that to happen.

A New Daily Rotation

I've established a solid routine over the last few weeks of Spelunky daily challenges (and sometimes normal Spelunky runs). I continue to get better at the game bit by bit, and my average score and leaderboard position are still climbing bit by bit, but if I don't really focus on delving further and gaining more experience, I'll never be able to finish the game or approach the highest ranks of players on the leaderboard. So, I need to practice more during my daily sessions.

I've also gotten really into Hearthstone, and into doing the daily challenges it gives, which usually mean playing 3 to 5 matches to accomplish whatever quest they dole out. This game is just a lot of fun, and you win enough gold quickly enough to make your next turn in the arena, and your next chance at bragging rights and fabulous card-related prizes perpetually just around the corner. I am still in the process of playing long enough with every character to unlock all of the cards in the basic set. Once I'm done with that, I guess I'll pick one or two to build decks around and set about the business of disenchanting and crafting to build out my card collection to feed those. CCGs!

I am still playing Dragon Age II, but it's been a few days since I jumped in. I've been busy in the evenings to the point where I don't have much more time and energy than it takes to play some Spelunky and Hearthstone. I am still at an early stage of the game, trying to earn a total of 50 gold so I can buy Hawke and crew's way onto an treasure-hunting expedition into the dwarven "Deep Roads."  I now have Merril, Fenris, Varric, Aveline, and Bethany in my circle of adventurer friends.

I had a hankering to play some Battlefield yesterday, so I re-installed BF3 last night, and spent as much or more time futzing around with Punkbuster as actually in game. Punkbuster sucks; I can't believe modern releases are still using that trash. BF3 requires Origin--why can't EA come up with a better anti-cheat solution? I almost decided to go back and play more Bad Company 2, instead, but that's neither here nor there. It's a bummer not having access to around half of the maps in BF3, and EA is still charging $30 for Battlefield Premium to complete the set, even though BF4 is out, now. Legacy product support--EA is the absolute worst about this kind of thing. I still can't believe the hoops required to be jumped through for DLC for Mass Effect 2. Ridiculous.

On the reading front, I recently finished the Horus Heresy novel Mechanicum, and after queueing up my next 4 books on that series, I actually started two new books. The first is a non-fiction book about the ninja in Japanese history, and the second is Red Storm Rising, the only Tom Clancy novel I have not read. I thought I would check it out since I've owned it for ages and ages, and the man recently died. I'm not very far in just yet, but it already seems like a real page-turner, like I remember most of his others being. Those were a lot of fun, if a little jingoistic. I'm not sure how well they would hold up to the scrutiny of recent political and intelligence-related revelations, but hey, they were from a differenet era. The one Clancy book I read and that he wrote in a post 9/11 world was not really what he had become known for, as well. Those Jack Ryan books, and Red Storm Rising, certainly--being a tale of the Cold War going hot--are products of their time.

Fighting My Way Back

I am in the middle of so many games right now, it's obscene. I don't even know where to begin to go about clearing my plate, forget the backlog! The ones bubbling up to the top of consciousness lately though, are Nehrim, which I've put a bit of time into lately, Fallout 2, which I desperately want to get back to and finish, Blade Runner, which I just want to experience, and Batman: Arkham Asylum, which I feel the most guilty about not having played through yet.

And now, lyrics from a Thin Lizzy song, the inspiration for this post's title:

I'm dustin' out/and I'm going in/
and I'm kickin' up/'bout the state I'm in/
'cause I'm tough, rough, ready, and I'm able/
to pick myself up from underneath this table

Fighting my way back
Fighting my way back

Realistically, this is not the time to be fighting the good fight. I've got my health to take care of (I need way more exercise), a kid to help out with, stuff around the house, a novel I'm trying to write (little by little), and on top of that this is the season that all the huge games come out. I'm playing Battlefield 3 every night now, even if it's just an hour or so, and I'm planning on playing Assassin's Creed Revelations the first day I can get my hands on it. That's not to mention the myriad of other games I have sitting around unplayed for one reason or another. I had to force myself to stop playing Dark Souls before I got so far down that hole my entire month would disappear. I'm pumped to get back to it at some point, though.

I guess I should give an update on Dark Souls, seeing as my last post several weeks ago was when I was just about to start it. I did start it, and I started it well as a knight. I think I am soul level 19 or so right now, and I have progressed far enough to have rung the bell on top of the undead church, and then onto find my way to the Capra Demon, which is the next fool to be felled when I get back to the game. I didn't know where to go immediately after ringing the first bell, so I tried both the graveyard catacombs and the underground grotto accessible via elevator under the Firelink shrine. I've been playing as a knight, as I said, with heavy armor, and using both sword and spear, and even an axe, briefly. I've upgraded my broadsword a couple of times, and I think I'll stick with it for a while. What a great game. I hope it doesn't take me two years again to circle back around to this one, as it did with Demon's Souls.

I feel like playing something tonight, but what? Some Battlefield, to be sure, but what else? Maybe I'll try to make some more progress in Blade Runner. I've never really played a point and click adventure game before, and I like Blade Runner, the film.

Never A Dull Moment

I feel like I have no reason to ever be bored at home, just considering all of the games I could be playing, let alone all of the books and movies and good TV to watch anytime I want.  Imagine the odd feeling I got this past weekend when I didn't really feel like doing any of that for several hours.  I think I ended up playing some more Bad Company 2 multiplayer.

I'm playing the PC version of BF:BC2 now, since my 360 red ringed, and I had gotten rid of the console version anyway when I went "xbox live free," and picked up the PC version for like $7 during the December Steam blowouts.  That game is so good, it's easily my favorite multiplayer shooter ever.  I've never been extremely into any of them, really, but the only ones I've played and enjoyed anywhere near as much as BC2 are Halo 3 and Team Fortress 2.  TF2 I really like, too, but only play occasionally.  I can sink my teeth into BC2, though.  I played somewhere around 30 hours worth on the 360 version, and another 3-4 so far on the PC version.  Battlefield 3 is going to be awesome.  Red Orchestra 2, also.  RO is kind of like BF, but more realistic and with less servers.  Hopefully the sequel gains more traction with players.

I've been playing Dead Space since last week, but I'm still less than halfway in.  I'm at the beginning of chapter 5 right now.  It's executed very well.  It feels like next-gen Resident Evil 4 in space, like better Resident Evil in space.  The graphics are very nice, the UI and general presentation is slick as hell.  If I have any problem with it, it's just that this style of game has never been my favorite, and I don't feel anything drawing me through the game; it's kind of the opposite, because of the tension waiting for the next big startle.  I feel more inclined to not play the game than to play it.  Without the force of will, this game my fall by the wayside.  It's not overly long, though, so I may push on through just to finish it off and see more of the cool graphics.

I played some more Magicka over the weekend, too.  Esteban and I played a few short rounds of the arena challenge mode, and I played through a couple more of levels on the single player campaign.  Magicka, in a word, is crazy.  You are frantically trying to assemble any kind of offensive spell that will knock guys back and dispatch them.  It's funny at times when your hastily assembled spell explodes and kills you and everyone around you, or when you somehow trick enemy wizards into frying each other with their magic.  The game also has a really campy sense of humor, spoofing every RPG trope you can think of, and referencing everything from Rambo to 300.  My wizard currently has an M60 machine gun instead of a sword to complement his staff.  This is a great package for $10, and I hope it's unique magic system is co-opted into other games somehow.  Maybe a simpler version with 4-6 elements would fit into a more serious game like a Mass Effect or something.

Demon's Souls is the Resolution game for this week, and I'm trying to pick up where I left off not too long ago, working through 4-2, getting some souls.  I have still never even visited worlds 3 or 5; I should probably check those out to see if there's any useful loot or easy bosses.

Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together was finally released this week, and I bought it over PSN and downloaded it onto my PSP through my PS3.  So far, so good.  I'm only 4-5 battles in thus far, just through the introductory stuff, for the most part.  It seems deeper in some ways than FFT, but less so in others.  I really love what they've done as far as UI and ancillary information to the game (the Warren Report).  I haven't had occasion to use the Chariot system yet, which allows for rewinding battle turns, but I think the next battle will be a tough one, so we'll see.

I miss FFT's ability to spin the entire stage around in 90 degree increments, and the ability to tilt it up and down, but TO allows for a bird's eye view--from two different angles, which strikes me as redundant, but whatever.  Also, the sprites and environments are by default zoomed-in, so they appear blurry on the PSP screen, but if you zoom the view out so they appear nice and sharp, then they're too small to see very well.  More options here and there would be nice, as would an option in the store to see what all of your guys are wearing at the moment, and how that gear compares to what's on sale.  That should be in every RPG, period.  Come on, people!

I'm not far enough in to really be into the plot, but so far it looks like it has all of the hallmark's of a Matsuno game.  I'm excited to get further in.

Revenge of the Consoles

I've been playing a bunch more console stuff recently, since my last few "focus" games have been Assassin's Creed 2, Uncharted 2, and now Dead Space.  I expect that to continue for a good bit; there are a lot of things I need to get around to on PS3, and many of them should be fairly neat 12-20 hour experiences.

I guess first thing I need to cover here is Uncharted 2, which I played through in about 12 hours over 4-5 days this week and last.  It was pretty much more of what the first game had to offer, but in different locales.  There's not a ton to say about it, other than it was mostly enjoyable, but is a little too proud of it's combat system.  Less goons to wade through would be a good thing for this series, on a number of levels.  It would help pacing, alleviate frustration, and eliminate some of the very real dissonance between the Nathan Drake of Uncharted's many well done cinematics, and the Nathan Drake of Uncharted's action-heavy gameplay.  The final encounter was kind of lame, but otherwise the game is mostly fit for the win category.

Magicka, a neat little indie PC game, is also mostly win.  It's an action RPG played from an isometric perspective much like Diablo, but with a very original and very novel casting system that has you choose elements to cast using the QWERASDF keys, and right-click to cast whatever combination of elements you've queued up.  Most random combinations will result in something happening, as long as you don't negate any elements with their opposites (stone and shock, for instance, or healing and arcane).  There are hundreds, maybe thousands of permutations to try as you make your way through the humorous quest or fight in multiplayer arenas versus waves of enemies.  The game is best played with other people, but single player is pretty fun, too.

I finally decided to download and install my Steam copy of Battlefield: Bad Company 2, having not played the game in months.  This is my favorite multiplayer shooter in recent memory, and probably my favorite ever.  If Battlefield 3 is a substantial improvement on this, it'll be beyond incredible.  It looks and runs really well on my PC, too.  Even on high settings I get 50+ frames per second, whereas I think the 360 version topped out at 30.  It's good to be back in, even if I do have to start over with the unlocks from where I was on the 360 version.

For Resolution, I started Dead Space tonight.  It's pretty slick so far, I have to admit.  I finished the first 2 chapters of 12.  More on this as it develops!

Rolling Start 2011

It's been a good long while since I've had a chance to update my progress in a blog post.  It's been really busy at work, and I tend to play games at home more than read or write about them.  I've had a very eventful gaming time these past few weeks!  I finished 3 whole games!  Quickly:

Bayonetta - I pushed hard through the second half of this game to finish it off before the end of 2010, but I really enjoyed it.  It's a must play for anyone who likes the action genre or Japanese gaming, or both!  I'm not big on either, lately, but Bayonetta was a load of fun.  This is probably one I would have played multiple times back when I was in school and had tons of time.  The combat is fun, smooth, and has a lot of depth to it if you want that.

Halo: Reach - the first game I played for my Resolution feature, as voted on by Call Of Podcast listeners.  It was good, but it doesn't stick out to me as much more than just another Halo game.  It's surely the apex of Halo multiplayer, but that's not really why I play Halo, and indeed I am not even subscribed to XBL anymore.  I thought the campaign was just kind of average, and definitely lacking in the wow factor that other missions in other series entries had.  The action all being centered on one planet and not on crazy space installations with epic landscaping is to blame for that.  I did appreciate the space flight and other vehicle sections new to the series, but those all together make up maybe 10% of the campaign.  I kind of wonder about the future of this franchise...

Fallout - probably the most unorthodox RPG playthrough I've ever had.  I kind of stumbled onto the endgame not really knowing that it was the endgame.  The whole thing ended up being shorter than I had thought it would be, and by a good margin.  The entire critical path of the game really only has two legs, though the second consists of two objectives.  First you find a water chip (by hook or by crook), then you're tasked with  destroying the leader of the super mutants, and separately destroying the source of the super mutants.  This is really all the direction you're ever given in the game; the rest is up to you.  You have to figure out how to use the resources present in the world, in the form of people you meet, the skills you gain, and the gear you're able to get your hands on, to accomplish your goals.  I hunted around until I sniffed out a trail for the water chip, and I joined the Brotherhood of Steel to get my hands on some power armor and heavy weaponry for the latter objectives.  There are other, equally valid ways of doing these things, all of which have an effect on the game's ending.  My game had a kind of bitter ending for several factions, as I'd inadvertently allowed the super mutants lay waste to the ghoul town of Necropolis and scare away all the residents of The Hub, as well.

I finished Fallout, but hadn't had enough, so the next day I jumped right into Fallout 2! I'm just a few hours in, but so far so good.  It's very similar to the first game, just with a few improvements having been made in the year between the two games' release dates.  In Fallout 2 you play The Chosen One, a descendant of The Vault Dweller, the protagonist of the first game, and you are sent out into the world in search of a Garden of Eden Construction Kit, or GECK.

It was high time that I jump into Assassin's Creed II, as well, so jump I did.  It's great so far!  Ezio Auditore da Firenze is a much more likeable player character than Altair was in the first game, and the variety of mission objectives and other things to do in the game is a tremendous improvement upon AC1.  I'll have more to talk about regarding this game at a later date.

That about wraps things up for now, aside from some light warfighting/manshooting I've been doing in Red Orchestra: Ostfront '41 -'45 and Battlefield 2, both excellent games, by the way.  More on those later, too.

A Million Roads Diverged In A Yellow Wood

...and sorry I cannot travel them all.

I finished up Call of Duty (the first) this past weekend, and enjoyed it thoroughly.  I'm tempted to jump right into the expansion, United Assault, I think it's called, but I should probably knock out at least something else from my stable of games 'in progress,' first.  What, though, is the question.

Waffling, I have dabbled a little in Rez HD and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 the past couple of nights.  I'll never quite get the former, though it is a curious flashy thing.  I'm not sure how much longer I'll be playing the latter, either.  I'm considering letting my Live account fall to silver level.  There's plenty of good shooters that I own on Steam and that are currently neglected.  I don't play online enou----oh fuck, I just realized that I have to stay gold to maintain Netflix instant watch.  Goddamn you, Microsoft.  I guess that settles that.

I have enough RPGs in my backlog that the single genre could probably equal the playtime of all other games on the list, so I'm thinking I need to constantly be working on one amongst everything else.  Planescape is down, and currently I'm working my way (slowly) through The Witcher.  It's great, and I'll have more to say about it on the next Call Of Podcast.  I kind of want to hit Fallout (the first) next, but who can say.  It may be months before I'm done with Geralt of Rivia.

I've played a little bit of Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker every day since purchasing it.  It's good for an hour here and there; a quick 2-3 missions, some Mother Base maintenance, and I'm done.  It's definitely a descendant of Portable Ops, but done better.  I did go back and try the controls in PO, and PW's are an improvement on one variant of that game.  There are key differences though, that are not reproduceable in PO.  I won't go into them, but suffice it to say that PW's setup is better, overall.  Peace Walker is satisfying in a long-term growth kind of way, but the individual missions so far have been pretty easy.  I've had one major 'boss' fight, and it was on a whole other level from the rest of them.  It was pretty tough to do the stealthy, recruit/abduct everyone way, but pretty satisfying when I finally pulled it off.  I'm into the game, so far, just not head over heels, yet.

Bad As I Want To Be

Last week I finished up my romp through Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, and I thoroughly enjoyed the game, as I mentioned on the latest Call Of Podcast. It's the type of game where you can see all of the seams, the load times in the menus are inexcusable, and it's probably a bit short for some, but it's cool all the same.  It has its one trick, and it does it well.  Even the QTE's, which I normally despise, were ok because they were so forgiving, and just required one button press, rather than the "test of strength" variety in some games.  I even played one of the bonus campaign levels (I have the special edition), the Jedi Temple, and enjoyed the cool fight at the end of that one.  One gripe I have though, is with the dark side (non-canon) ending.  It was just nowhere near as cool as it should have been, to set up Starkiller's further dark side missions post-game (the other two bonus campaign levels, Hoth and Tatooine).  I wonder if the sequel will be any good.

The biggest story for this blog update is that I finally started inFamous, which has been sitting on my shelf for probably a year, now.  I've gone from platforming and shooting lightning in Galaxy and SW:TFU to doing both at the same time in this game.  I mentioned being kind of "meh" about it on the podcast, and after putting in a few more hours, I'm starting to like it a little more.  I'm being as comically evil as I can possibly be.  I push people around with my force electric powers just for fun, and if I'm given the choice to help some people or do something rude and selfish, I'll go the latter rout, with total disregard and contempt for the citizens of Genericity (that's not it's real name, but it'll do).  In a way, I'm projecting my own jaded, seen-it-all gamer disdain into Cole, who is a perfect conduit for it, since he's kind of a cock, himself.  I want to see if willing him to be as evil as possible will actually make him into a bad guy, or if he'll wuss out and have a change of heart at the end.  More games need to let you be the bad guy, and actually be a bad guy.  Like, reprehensible.

The game does an odd thing where it sends you into the sewers to get through these very straight-forward platformy sections, only they're super duper easy; because Cole tends to suction onto whatever surface is nearby, it feels like a three-year-old could blow through those sections.  I would actually appreciate a little more of a challenge there, something more akin to the jumping puzzles in a Prince of Persia game.  I do like Cole's Spider-Man act out in the open city, though.  It makes getting to the rooftops a lot easier and pretty effortless.  I also like his power line grind ability.  That's just fun.  The electric scatter grenades and the gound pound thing are cool, as well.  Now that I think about it, Cole's powers have a lot in common with Starkiller's.

Apart from those two main things, I made just a little progress in The Witcher, moving into Chapter II.  This is going to be a pretty long game. It's very good so far, though.  I played a little more Bad Company 2 with Esteban after recording the podcast this weekend.  I think it's still my favorite multiplayer shooter.  I also went back to Super Mario Galaxy and got my star count up to 78 before shelving that game for a while to return to Monster Hunter Tri on on the Wii.  I got in one good hunt online, taking down a Qurupeco with one other player, and getting my Hunter Rank to level 6.  There's a lot left to do in that game, yet.

Going Negative

I was forced into the minus world today.  You see, I was sitting at zero game completion tokens, but Fallout 3 Game Of The Year edition went on sale for half price on Steam, and I've been waiting and waiting (and waiting) for this day to add it to my ever-expanding backlog.  Paradoxically, even though Steam got my $25 (plus $5 for the Morrowind GOTY edition, as I didn't own Bloodmoon and Tribunal expacs until now), it is I who am declaring victory.

There is a legend that someone once asked three famous leaders of feudal Japan, Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu, what they would do if they were confronted with a bird who would not sing.   Oda Nobunaga (he of the ambition) replied that he would kill the bird.  Toyotomi replied that he would make the bird want to sing.  Tokugawa replied that he would wait, that when the time was right, the bird would sing of its own accord.  I went Tokugawa on this one, and Fallout 3 is my song.

What put me at this lack of game completion tokens though is the fact that just a couple of weeks ago Dragon Age and it's expansion were on sale on Impulse, and that just a couple of days ago I put up $15 of my own money to go with a gift card from work and purchased SW:TFU:USE, and a dictionary to help me break down acronyms.  I don't think I ever made a provision for going negative, but here you have it.  The good news is that I'm in the middle of at least 3 games right now that I am really excited about seeing through to the end, so that whenever the next big gotta-have-it thing rolls around, I should be back in the positive.  I'm not going to keep staying in the red unless it's something BIG, like a Dragon Age or Fallout 3 sale--something that doesn't come around a lot, and that I've been waiting for for a long time.  At the moment, there's nothing such that springs to mind.  Fallout 3 was no.1 with a bullet on my list for a long time.

A quick list of what I've been playing this week: Some more of The Witcher, where I'm still in chapter one, Super Mario Galaxy, where I'm up to about 30 stars collected, Doom on XBLA, just for shits (I found a secret level I'd never been to before), and a little Bad Company 2 multiplayer.  I also started SW:TFU last night, just going through the first level where you play as Darth Vader, which was pretty damned cool.  Man, original trilogy-era Star Wars is so much better than the prequel-era.

...Three Weeks Later

I've been absolutely swamped with work and doctor's appointments and whatnot lately, and while this is the first chance I've gotten to blog any, I have been doing quite a bit of gaming.  I've forgone watching these Rome DVDs, in fact, to fit in more time with some of these games.  I'll write this time period up in chronological order.

A few weeks ago Steam had a sale going on the X series, a long-running one where you play a space entrepreneur, and sometime privateer, out to make your own mark on the galaxy.  I did some quick research, and it was clear that the game to buy from this series is the most recent (and by all accounts, most complete) entry, X3: Terran Conflict.  It was only ten bucks, and I like space and had recently come to the conclusion that EVE Online and its monthly subscription weren't right for me, so I bit.

The game is vast and expansive, and by turns bewildering and incredibly difficult, but it is also strangely compelling.  Even 18 hours in, I feel like I have barely scratched the surface.  Every mission I try to take on is either outright impossible or so difficult as to make it virtually so.  Missions don't preclude you from taking them if say, you aren't in the right type of ship, or don't have a cargo bay big enough to transport the items in question, or don't have a ship fast enough to get to a place before the time limit of the mission.  So, right out of the gate, you are surrounded by missions and tasks you can attempt to do for people around the galaxy, but that would be functionally impossible to finish.  Still, I am compelled to get somewhere in this game.  I think what I need most is money to buy better ships for myself and money to invest in hiring other ships to run trade routes and money to build factories and stations with which to make more money to use to start to be able to get out and actually do some things to build some reputation with the various factions in the universe.   First, I need to find some good trade routes to run, then I need to run them for a while to build up some cash, and get the whole ball rolling.  We're talking hundreds of hours of potential playtime here, if one wanted to see and do everything in this game.  Did I mention that there is actually a plot and a series of story missions to play through?  I think 100+ hours into the game is probably a prerequisite to get anywhere into it at this point, though.

The other large and very time-intensive game I've been playing lately is Monster Hunter Tri.  I covered the basics about the game in my last post, but I've been delving farther in since.  I have about 35 hours now on the in-game clock, and I'm at the end of the third tier of guild quests in offline mode, about to hunt a Royal Ludroth.  What I've been playing some in the last couple of weeks is the online mode, where you can group up with 3 other players and head out to co-operatively kill these huge monsters for their horns and hides and such, which you can use to forge bigger and better weapons and armor with.  As co-op usually does, it adds a lot to the playability of the game.  You can group with people more experienced in order to learn how to handle the epic battles that some of the bigger game present you with.  I've grouped up with people a few times now, and working together we were able to do in 10-15 minutes what it took me 3-4 hours to accomplish alone, and by the skin of my teeth.  The closest parallel I know how to draw is trying to solo VT or IT mobs in FFXI vs. taking them down in a 3 or 4-man party.  Monster Hunter is a little more fair than that when you play solo, but only if you have the experience and skill that comes with a lot of trial and error.  The action is solid, and the progression addicting.  It's fun.

With May winding down, I decided to try and finish a couple of games to keep my pace up for the year.  I'm shooting at about 2 per month.  With that in mind, I went back in the last couple of days and polished off Torchlight.  I was at floor 23 or 24 of 35 when I'd last left off, so I had about a quarter of the game left.  Well, I'm done now.  The game started off really easy, so much so that I was playing on Hard mode with my Vanquisher.

Let me tell you, it gets a whole hell of a lot more difficult in that last stratum of the dungeon.  I was dying pretty much every time I ran into a room with more than 2-3 enemies to fight at a time.  The elemental damage from some of those guys was fucking brutal, one-shotting me time and time again.  Luckily, you have a few options for where you want to respawn, and how much of a death penalty you are willing to incur when you do so.  If you opt to respawn in town, you don't lose anything at all, so what I would do is set a town portal wherever I wanted my 'checkpoint' to be, and when I died I could just respawn in town and immediately take the portal back into the dungeon.  All I had to do was cast another portal spell as soon as I'd used the first, and I was set.  This strategy worked fine right up to the last boss, who was such a hardass that I can't even begin to describe what it was like to fight him.  He literally must have had a million hit points, and my average attack would hit for maybe 500, with crits doing about 1500.  If I'd had to rely on my pistols alone, I'd have been there all night, but luckily I had my flechette traps and Hail of Arrows abilities pumped up  and used those, primarily, to whittle him down over 15-20 minutes of non-stop death/respawn looping.  This guy would spawn scores of helper enemies that I had to try to deal with.  More often than not, he would actually kill them all himself in some sort of move that looked to be him consuming their life essence back into his own.  I never noticed his HP actually increase, however.  I must have died 30 times.  Here, I just said "fuck it," and elected to spawn right at the entrance to that floor, which was entirely given over to his lair anyway, and took the hit to my gold total.  There is an achievement for beating him on Very Hard Hardcore mode, which is one level higher than I was playing on, and with perma-death.  Yeah, on Hardcore, one death permanently erases your character, which of course means no respawns on the final boss, or anywhere else.  I can't imagine how I'd kill that guy on Easy without dying a bunch, so I have no fucking clue how anyone could do that.

So now, I'm done with Torchlight.  There is a lot more that the game has to offer, including higher difficulty, other character classes, a 100-floor alternate dungeon, tons of loot, and crazy ass mods, and I might be back for some of that at some point, but for now I move on to the next game I need to complete!

In all of this gaming confusion, I had to take a business trip up to Seattle, and I took my DS along for the ride, since the new Mac Steam platform is incompatible with the version of OS X on my MacBook.  I played a little bit of Touch! Kirby, which is still one of the best implementations of the DS stylus controls that I've ever seen, and a little bit more of the Final Fantasy IV remake.  I also got in a little bit of Battlefield with Lonesteban, the first I've played of that game in weeks.  That's all for now!  My goal for this week is to finish off Planescape: Torment and to play some more Monster Hunter and X3.

I Need To Focus

The good news is that I finished a game this week. The bad news is that it was just the campaign missions of UniWar. It counts though, because those 21 missions, 7 for each race, probably totalled 5 hours or more of my time! Plus, I've played a crapload of the game in VS. matches.

The other bad news is that I decided EVE just isn't for me, after all. The lack of explicit direction kind of made me down on it, but it was the subscription that killed it outright. Just having that $15 a month hanging over my head when I'm not certain I will even want to log on in a given week is enough to put me off. I want to play the game, or a game like it, but I want to play on my own terms. The subscription might not be a total deal-breaker, (we'll probably see whenever The Old Republic is released), but when you consider it combined with the extreme complexity of EVE, the whole game becomes this huge time investment that I don't want to make.

The other games I've played the most of over the last couple of weeks have been Super Mario Galaxy and Battlefield Bad Company 2. Galaxy continues to wow me with inventive levels, and I continue to rack up points, ranks, and unlocks in BC2. There isn't a lot of else to report, other than that I finally got back into Torment and hope to continue that to it's conclusion soonish.

I've really got to concentrate on finishing one game at a time. I've wondered if I shouldn't just try to play whatever I want whenever I want, but going that route seems to lead to playing a few hours of many different things, and not really getting deep into any of them. I think now I should probably try to concentrate on them like books, to either finish them altogether, or to wring as much as I can out of them before shelving them.

It's an odd fact that a lot of games lend themselves to this approach; many of them can easily be seen as single-hit experiences. It's the rare video game that many players treat like a traditional board-based or pen-and-paper or physical game, as something to come back to and play over and over, at any time, and for the pure enjoyment of the mechanics as opposed to any desire to follow a narrative through to its end.

So, for games that can be finished and don't offer much more than that, then that's what I'll try my best to do (Galaxy, STALKER, Planescape, etc.). For other games that offer more, like multi-player modes or replayability and character growth, I'll dip into them whenever I feel like a little of what they have to offer (Starcraft, BC2, Torchlight, Demon's Souls, etc.). Naturally, there are some games with overlap in both.

On a final note, I reinstalled Starcraft this week and got restarted on the Zerg campaign. I'm going to teach myself how to play well enough to finish all the campaigns, at least. I hope. SCII and the new battle.net look pretty awesome.

The Omnigamer

I have been all over the place in my gaming this week.

To begin with, I closed out March by finishing God of War, bringing my March completion total to 2, after Far Cry 2 on the 1st of the month. It was a good game. I would put it solidly in the B+/A- range if I were a game reviewer, and 5 years on, that's pretty impressive. Like Wolverine, God of War is the best there is at what it does. I'm not going to dive into the sequel(s) just yet, though. I wouldn't want to burn myself out on the formula.

Swept up in the enjoyment of action-y, platform-y gaming, I decided to finally get down to brass tacks with Super Mario Galaxy. I've had my Wii for going on 2 years now, I think, and still hadn't played any more of this game than I could at a GameStop back when it first was released. The sequel being on the horizon helped muster my hype, as well. After a couple of hours and 4-5 levels, I can tell you, it's great! It's Mario, and it's easy to forget how genius Nintendo's design can be when you go so long between playing entries in the series as have I. I put maybe 2 hours each into Mario 64 and Sunshine, so this is the first three-dimensional Mario experience I'm committing myself to, and I dig it. It's hard not to feel like a kid again in these inventive and colorful worlds filled with cute graphics and sounds. I might even be able to get my wife to try this game out.

Between these games and all the others I've dabbled in this week, I've kept up my wargaming, gold-starring my second gun in Bad Company 2 with Emily, and spending a couple of hours playing Battlefield 1943 when the PS3 happened to be turned on on account of a DVD being watched. I also messed around just long enough to make sure I'd seen every map in 1942, though I don't really intend to play it when newer versions are out. I'm going to surf through all the Battlefield Vietnam maps just the same, just to poke around at the series history. On PC, I'll continue to play Day of Defeat, though when I logged on last night I was getting killed almost before I even spawned in. The engine and UI update to that game, along with Steam achievements, do a lot to extend it's life well past its contemporaries. In other Battlefield news, a co-worker lent me Bad Company 1 so I could log a few matches of that to count toward my veteran status in 2, and play through the campaign at some point.

The rest, I fear, are the dregs. These are the games I played some, but not enough to really talk about or to make any significant progress, with perhaps one exception. In Dawn of War II, I played through one mission twice, losing the first time as I tried to recall how to play the game well. I fought my way to the end of one stratum of Torchlight, did a few small tasks that paid in STALKER, and proceeded through a few more tutorial missions in EVE Online. I've spent a good deal of time this week playing UniWar on iphone, though. I'm halfway through all the campaign missions, and I've got probably 20 separate a-synchronous vs. matches going with other players. It's a great hex-based, turn-based, StarCraft-like 3-race strategy game. The unit balance is really well done.

That's about it, for now.

March Game Blitz

It's been a hell of a busy month. First, a Road Map re-vamp:


I've been playing a crapload of Bad Company 2, lately with a friend who I got to buy the game. She's new to it, and hasn't played that many shooters, but she seems like she's having fun when we're in the squad taking out guys together. What a great game; this might be the best multiplayer shooter, or at least on a level with Team Fortress 2.

Playing Bad Company 2 (and it's veteran system) got me really interested in trying out other games in the series (and outside it, even). First, I picked up Day of Deafeat: Source on Steam for 10 bucks. It's a WWII-themed multiplayer shooter on smaller maps, more in the classic form of the genre, but updated with modern UI and achivements and such, being a Valve game. It's fun, and I found a newb-friendly server to play on, too. Next, I was in Best Buy and saw the Battlefield 1942 Complete Collection (all expansions + BF Vietnam) for another 10 bucks, and so I picked that up for the veteran status and to see what the original was like on PC. It's kind of archaic, but definitely functional, and there are plenty of servers still up and going. I only messed around in 3-4 matches so far, but you can see the lineage, especially when you look forward to Battlefield 1943, which I purchased on PSN for $15. This was released only last year, if memory serves, and it's "a re-imagining" of 1942's Pacific theater maps. It's very good, especially for a downloadable title. It runs on the Snowblind Engine, same as Bad Company 2 (and the original). It's got Wake Island, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and Coral Sea, which is a planes-only map. I'd recommend it to anyone wanting a quick-access shooter on their box without needing to toss in a disc after they've watched a movie or what have you. I think, along with BC2, this one will have the longest half-life with me, just by virtue of its convenience.

MAG, incidentally, is having a double-XP weekend this week, along with some free DLC. I'd like to check that out after a good week of nothing but Battlefield (as far as shooters).

The rest of my console gaming lately has been playing God of War (the first). It's good! It's not f'ing amazing or anything, but it's plenty fun. It's not been since Ninja Gaiden Black that I played a game in this genre, and that was a while ago, but leaving aside graphics (resolution) I think I like God of War better. I think NGB has the advantage as far as depth of the fighting system, but I'm not one to delve into that stuff. I'm a button masher when it comes to this type of game. I vastly prefer the story and presentation of God of War to Ninja Gaiden's senseless jumble of random anime tropes. It seems like Ninja Gaiden's combat was a lot faster, though. Kratos definitely lumbers at times, and hits with force, whereas Hayabusa is all about speed and precision. I guess both games have their moments.

Repeated issues with my PC led me to wipe it and install Windows 7, along with replacing the GPU and Motherboard (courtesy of Dell), meaning that the last few weeks of PC gaming has been more about re-downloading and re-installing and re-modding than playing very much. Just last night I re-downladed Torchlight, and thanks to the magic of the Steam Cloud, it installed and there was my savegame and all my settings, just waiting for me to jump back into the game. Awesome! I want to finish this one up reasonably soon (and start another playthrough, probably).

I also have really been meaning to get into and play and finish the Dawn of War II campaign, to get some more of the 40K goodness up in this bitch, and to then get the new Chaos Rising expansion and maximize my Space Marine Glorious Brodiosity For Make Benefit Of Glorious Emperor. Since re-installing the game I've just played a few rounds of The Last Stand mode as I mentioned on the podcast.

Having finished up Far Cry 2, I now have a real taste for the open-world shooter. Also possessing three STALKER games, I was debating on which to dive into. I'd started Shadow of Chernobyl (the first) before, but had recently heard that the new one, Call of Pripyat (the third) was definitely the one to play. I tried starting with CoP, but the sense of backstory and availability of kick-ass mods to the original led me back to it, tweaked out with the Complete 2009 mod that makes the UI better, fixes tons of bugs, and just all around makes the game better (and waaaay better looking, too; even better than vanilla CoP). A couple of hours in, STALKER feels like Oblivion with guns (ignore the fact that Fallout 3 has been tagged just that), which to me, is AWESOME.

Last but not least, I let my curiosity get the better of me and resubscribed to EVE Online, creating a new character and starting off a new career as a space explorer. I think I'm supposed to make tons of money charting unknown places and salvaging stuff from them. I managed to piss off the agent giving me my missions, though, and now she's not talking to me. I have no idea what I need to do to get back into her good graces. In the meantime, I'm starting on some of the military training missions in order to be able to defend myself against rats (the npc mobs in the game) and other player-character pirates and such when I'm out in the wilds of the void. What a crazy game. It's very cool and sci-fi-economic-political, but dense doesn't even begin to describe the complexity of EVE. I need a lot more time to acclimate.

As you can see, I've got a lot on my plate right now!

Shooting Lots Of Guys (Slicing A Few)

It's been a violent week in gaming. Aside from the odd game of Chess or Words With Friends, there's been a whole lot of dying going on.

It started with the bitter rivalry between two warring factions of an unnamed African nation coming to a head. I was put in a position to help an infamous and terminally ill arms dealer known as The Jackal bring to an end this conflict, and at the same time to help millions of refugees find a safe way out of the chaos. This was the final resolution of the mission given to my character in Far Cry 2, which was a very satisfying game in the end, and one of the most well-realized worlds I've had the pleasure to play in; a feat that was aided, no doubt, by it's novel choice of settings, a lush and realistic cross section of Africa's many types of geography.

I ordered Battlefield: Bad Company 2 from Amazon on the strength of it's multi-player demo for the 360, and the game arrived this past Tuesday, ushering a renaissance of XBL/PSN fragging into my living room. Together with MAG, another arrival this week, I've spent as much time shooting guys online in the last five days as in the last five months. Both games are a ton of fun, and both have the ever-addicting experience point and unlock system. I'm still level bullshit in BC2, but I've reached level 8 in MAG, which is when you get access to the biggest (256 players) game mode. EA has been having problems maintaining the servers for BC2 (guess it sold big), so this weekend I've mostly been playing MAG instead. I really like it, but the selection of maps seems pretty limited. I'll need a lot more time with both of these games to come to any real conclusions, but at first blush both are brilliant.

For some reason I got the itch the other day to finally start the God of War series. No one needs any explanation of what God of War is, but I have actually never played one up until this point. I played for a few hours, enjoying it, to a point where Kratos is storming his way through Athens on the way to encounter Ares. I have no real idea of how long the game is, but I'd guess it's 12-15 hours or something, putting me probably 1/5 of the way in.