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.

I like to shoot stuff.

I've played a bunch of shooters on XBLA this week. I jumped back into the original Geometry Wars trying to best my high score there--only managing to get approximately halfway there. I also booted up Rez again for the first time in forever to chill out to some techno and shoot some things all at once. I even played a game of Ikaruga. Some of the most satisfying games are purely mechanical, divorcing narrative and lore entriely from the experience.

Others garnish the main dish with it, like the other two games I spent a lot of time with over the last week. Red Faction: Guerilla serves it up merely as a raison de demolishment, and it works just fine. I completed that game's story campaign this week, and tried a single match of the multiplayer just to check it out and see the experience system. I'm still going to be playing RF:G for a while, because it's so damned awesome. I still have several achievements within reach in the single-player game (and Wrecking Crew), and I want to get a bunch of xp and unlock stuff in multiplayer, too. This is the Game Of The First Half Of My Year, which is based on the games I played in the time period, rather than what was released therein.

I also played a whole bunch of WoW. I'm level 58 now, working on quests all over Kalimdor, but mainly in Winterspring, Un'Goro Crater, and Silithus. I got the achievement for completing 500 quests yesterday. The new guild I joined, The Blood Knights, is working out pretty well. I joined after receiving a blind invite, having nothing to lose, but it seems like a good fit, actually. It seems to be made up of more casual, non-raiding types who level lots of alts and don't mind fielding my noobish questions about whether I should wear Pants A or Pants B. My WoW plan right now is to power on to 60, get my epic mount, complete the exploration achivements for Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms, and then probably jump into The Burning Crusade content and be on my way to 70.

knockin' 'em down

This was a good weekend for the Pile of Shame. I woke up on Saturday and finally managed to knock out Rez HD (for the first time). The end sequence with the computer program lady was giving me trouble, but I managed to get up to that part still in the highest evolution state (the infant), and so had enough life to withstand a few hits in the course of zapping her to death. Maybe I zapped her to life? It's a very psychedelic encounter.

Then, tonight, in the culmination of a good two-to-three week run, I finished Jeanne D'Arc's crusade to save France (and all the world) from demonically possessed English king Henry VI. There exists additional content within the game, but if you take one glance over at the Pile of Shame, you'll understand why I don't dig deeper. A few of the last battles proved pretty difficult, and it wasn't until I turned to Rufus, who had sucked for most of the game, that I was able to defeat the child-king. I gave Rufus the Two Rounds stone that let him get in back-to-back swings with his big axe, and his newfound might was such that it could cleave the boy ruler's mighty demonic defenses and lay bare the foul possessor to my squad's fell magicks and sharp steel.

So kick another two up on to the 2008 pile o' skulls (of defeated videogames). This year, we dine in Hell!

Speaking of Spartans, I got a free demo of the soon-to-be-released God of War: Chains of Olympus when I pre-ordered said game at my local EB. If I don't like the demo, I'll just move my pre-order over to Ninja Gaiden DS or something. I went in there to put some money down on MGS4, to ensure I get into the Metal Gear Online beta (though the guys in the store of course had no clue what I was talking about when I mentioned it), and I also found a copy of the MGS Digital Graphic Novel, so I picked that up for about 12 bucks. The PSP is starting to really rival the DS for the spot of my favorite portable this generation.