Mid-Year Progress Report and Forecast

At the beginning of the year I set my goal at having a list of games completed as long as my list of games bought. I may have to amend that with the advent of copious amounts of cheap, bite-sized iPhone games. Then again, I have bought considerably less high-dollar games over the last six months, and almost nothing at full, new-at-release price. The closest I've come to doing so would be Red Faction, which I got for about $45 new, and Burnout Paradise, which I paid the whole $30 for over PSN. I've passed over things I wanted this year, such as Killzone 2, Halo Wars, Wrath of the Lich King, and numerous PC titles, opting to finish stuff I have and/or wait for awesome sale prices. So, all in all, I'm not doing too bad.

The 6-months of WoW I paid for might have something to do with that, but that game remains half or less of my gaming focus overall, which is right where I like it. I'm paid up for another six weeks or so, and I'm undecided what I'll do after that. I may try EVE Online or another MMO, or I may pick up Wrath and continue on to 80. I probably won't buy another 6-month chunk of time, though; I like more flexibility than that.

I'm pretty happy with the list of games I've completed (or sections of games completed in some cases). My main goals for the rest of the year should be to finish all remaining Starcraft/Brood War campaigns, and to hit, hard, my Wii, DS, and remaining PS2 libraries of games.

I'm almost batting 1000 on 360. I've beaten every retail release I can, leaving only Forza 2 and Rockband 2 that need more playtime, aside from a few XBLA games, of course. On PS3, I'm building a great library of games I hope to one day play: Uncharted, Resistance, Ryu Ga Gotoku 3, and the copy of Infamous I should be receiving in the mail sometime. PC is a new platform for me, so somewhat understandably, I'm building a large library of games, and a lot of those need a lot more time in the rotation--Far Cry 2 (which I'm loving), Crysis, World of Goo, Half-Life 2 series, TF2, L4D, Freedom Force series, and more...

With all this gaming, my reading time has really suffered. It's traditionally been off-topic here, but I want to redouble my efforts on that front, as well. Movies and TV-wise, I've been doing great. I've even managed to work pretty regular exercise into my free time (3-ish times a week). Now if only I didn't have a long-ass commute to and from work every day!

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.

Another Full Week

It was another busy week in gaming at chez Elmdor.

I played more WoW than anything, raising my Warrior up to almost level 56, and knocking through several zones in the process: The Blasted Lands, Azshara, Felwood, and on to Un'Goro Crater. Not that I exhausted them all of quests, just that I got in and looked around and quested until I was satisfied with each. I still want the achievement for exploring each zone fully, but that'll wait until I get my epic mount for the speed boost in running around (plus the help that being 60 will figure into things). This game is addicting, but it hasn't gotten it's hooks all the way into me the way FFXI did, and I don't think it ever will. At least I hope it won't. I like playing other things (and having a good marriage and being able to perform somewhat well at work).

Speaking of other things, I sat down with Red Faction a couple of nights this week, and ended up playing for longer than I expected both times. Yes, it's still badass. I'm at the final sector now, Eos, and still finding new weapons to play with. The rail gun is pretty cool. You can shoot guys through cover with it.

I played a bunch of Geometry Wars 2 and Super Stardust HD, as well. GW2's Pacifism mode is the real genius in that game, but the whole thing remains remarkably awesome. I like how the original GW isn't quite obsolete, too, with it's rotating gun modes, original music, and different multiplier scoring system from the Evolved mode in GW2. It doesn't look as clean as GW2, though. Stardust is also great, but I'm still pretty new to it. I laid waste to Lonesteban's high score in arcade mode, though, more than tripling it with a 16-and-a-half minute first life. Take that, you craven!

Elsewhere, I pulled out my GBA Final Fantasy II in-progress game from 2+ years ago and tried to continue on from that. I think I found the thread, now just to find where it leads. I also bought a couple of new iPhone games for a buck each, Knights Onrush and Hero of Sparta. I've only tried Knights so far, but it seems to be a simple and fun castle defense game, somewhat like a tower defense game, but on a more micro scale.

Tenebrous Maelstrom of Umbral Inferno

This is what my mind is like when I try to recall the games I played over the last week. I've been kind of busy. Let's do a list with quick and dirty impressions:

Hitman: Blood Money PC demo - good, but kind of low-fi, Xbox 1 gen-looking.
Vanguard Storm lite - simple FFTA-style strategy. $5? Not a good price on the app store.
GeoDefense lite - coolest tower defense I've played on iPhone. Didn't buy it, though.
UniWar Lite - complex hex-based 3-way strategy. Need to play more.

Einhander - still really hard, still fucking awesome.
Pixel Junk Monsters - probably coolest tower defense game I've played at all (short time only)
Super Stardust HD - played a couple of games. Already nearing Lonesteban's high score. Makes me want to play more Geometry Wars 2, too.
World of Warcraft - jumped in and killed some stuff for the first time in a month. Currently killing stuff in The Blasted Lands. Still level 52.
Red Faction: Guerilla - liberated Badlands, finished all guerilla actions up to and into Oasis, still having a ball. Most fun game in a while. So great.

I picked up Twilight Princess again after playing the initial couple of hours probably a year ago. I figured it's about time I played a Wii game, and since it's been years and years since I really played a Zelda game (the last was Ocarina of Time), where better to start? So far I've played through the first dungeon, the Forest Temple, got the boomerang, and made my way across Hyrule Field to Kakariko Village. The dungeon took me a while to get through. It was really well designed, though. It will be cool to get further into the game and see more. It's really similar to OoT in a lot of ways, so far.

I never played Wind Waker past a couple of hours in, when someone asked me to go collect butterflies for him. I kind of wish I had stuck with it now, though. Ah well, Twilight Princess it is. I have Phantom Hourglass for DS, too.

The Wii may end up getting a lot of play in the latter half of the year. Besides Zelda, I have Super Mario Galaxy to play through, and I'm more excited than I should be about both Metroid Prime Trilogy and New Super Mario Bros. Wii. Who knows, I might dip into VC stuff at some point, too. I want to play FFIV: The After Years...

Take My Hand

Since last writing here, I righted a longstanding wrong in my gaming experience. Back in 2001, I bought Ico just as it came out, but for whatever reason I never got around to finishing it. I'm not even certain how far into it I got, but if I stopped where I think I did, I was only 30 minutes or from the end.

I started Ico this Saturday, and after three or four sessions, finished it tonight with a time of about 6 hours into it. What a beautiful game. The castle the game is set in is remarkably consistent and well realized. If you see a big building, you can go into it, and just about any feature you see in the game, you will traverse at one point or another. Every time you "zone" onto a new screen, you are right where you ought to be; there are no awkward transitions between one area and the next. It feels like a real environment you could actually walk around in. It's gorgeous, too, and solemn and majestic.

The only things that slightly break the illusion are elaborate puzzles and constructions in each area, but what can you do? Ico is just about the perfect environment navigation puzzle game. I can't really think of one better. I appreciate the lesser focus on combat in Ico as compared with Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Maybe I should try the newest Prince of Persia game sometime.

I wonder at the connections between Shadow of the Colossus and Ico. SotC is apparently a prequel to the latter, and seems to show the origin of the horned boy phenomenon. Both games share an evil, black, misty antagonist, and of course both games share a similar architecture. Maybe The Last Guardian will elaborate some, in its way, on this mysterious world.

Elsewise, I probably put 10 hours into Red Faction: Guerilla over the last week. It's a blast. I've done a crapload of Guerilla Actions to this point, and am working on liberating Badlands and Oasis. The weapons in this game are awesome, especially the Nano Rifle, which shoots a bullet of something like anti-matter that just disintegrates a big chunk of whatever it hits. It's great for say, taking out struts and buttresses of a big bridge over a wide chasm as an armed convoy rolls across it.

I still have yet to try Red Faction's multiplayer, but the single player is doing more than enough to keep me entertained for the time being. This is easily the most purely fun game I've played since Crackdown.

Killer, Crusader, Revolutionary

I was up until 6 a.m. over this past Saturday night, binging on Oblivion.

I followed the Dark Brotherhood quest line to its inexorable conclusion, with no shortage of surprises along the way. Just as I was starting to question the point of moving from one dead-drop to another for another parcel of gold and another mark, the whole thing got turned on its head in a crazy and amazing way. No one should play Oblivion and skip over this 'faction.'

Right after finishing that, I started on the first expansionary quest line, Knights of the Nine. I had previously thought to just create a new character for each faction, and had for a few, but here I just decided to continue on with my Rogue I had been using as an assassin. It's easier to fast travel around the world if you've been around a bunch of places before. So I took my remorseless death dealer on a pilgrimage around the world to the shrines of the nine divines, gathered the sanctified relics of a holy knight, restored an ancient order of crusaders, and led them to combat an evil from beyond the realm of mortals. It only took about 4 and a half hours.

Now the only major things left in Oblivion are the Arena (no plans to do this) and the larger Shivering Isles expansion, which I'll come back for sometime later. My copy of Red Faction arrived yesterday afternoon.

I got about three hours with the game last night; long enough to liberate the first of six Martian sectors. It's pretty awesome so far. This GeoMod 2.0 tech is tons of fun. If you've ever wanted to plant charges around the circumference of a giant smokestack and blow them all at once, this is your game. You can demolish bridges as your enemy is crossing them, or just bring down their base on top of their heads. The game has a GTA-like open world mission-based structure to it, but gives you even more freedom to go about your objectives, simply because if you don't like where the entrance or exit to a building is, you can create your own in seconds.

I've been on a number of different mission types so far, ranging from defending rebel camps to extracting hostages, destroying important enemy facilities, and puzzle-like destruction challenges that give you time and weapon/ammo limits. It's great fun so far, and I'm excited to explore more of Mars and blow more stuff up for fun and profit. The multiplayer has been getting a ton of praise from RL friends of mine and lots of people on forums and podcasts, too, so I'll need to check that out soon.

E3 2009 and Oblivion

Not much in the way of a play report this week, just a little Peggle, TF2, and Phoenix Wright, aside from jumping back into Oblivion and doing a bunch of the Dark Brotherhood stuff.  That's where my focus has been, mainly.  It has been a series of pretty interesting quests so far, probably some of the most inventive I've seen in the game, and I've already been through the main story, the fighters', mages', and theives' guilds plus the whole vampirism and finding a cure thing and a whole bunch of other random quests.  There was one where I was locked in a house with 5 treasure hunters and had to off them all one by one without anyone suspecting it was me, and there was a big WTF moment when I had to go kill X group of people.  Oblivion is an awesome game.

I have been so tempted to rush out and pick up Red Faction: Guerilla.  That demo on XBL (the single-player one) is insane fun.  I am definitely going to buy this game at some point.  I hope I can find a good deal on it somewhere soon.  I did pick up the Freedom Force games in the Steam sale last week, based solely on recommendations and Irrational's (later) pedigree, including BioShock.  I only messed around with the demo for Freedom Force Vs. The Third Reich before buying, but it seemed cool (and complicated at first), and both games were only $6.74 together.  I absolutely love Steam.

This past week was probably the biggest news week for gaming that will happen all year.  Certainly, it was.  It was E3, and not the lame E3 from the past couple of years, but a full-on assault of megaton announcements.  Some of what I'm most looking forward to, in no particular order:

Metroid: Other M

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow

Crackdown 2

Left 4 Dead 2

Final Fantasy XIV

PSP Go (price drop lol)

Metal Gear Solid: Rising

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker

So much new stuff came to light that I'm probably forgetting stuff, and there are a few things I think are cool that I'm not even going to bother to mention.  I'm skepical of Microsoft's "Project Natal" motion stuff, and I think Peter Molyneaux's Milo thing is outright bullshit.  Nintendo's fingertip pulse thing is a giant WTF and Sony's motion stuff actually looks the most interesting.

It's a great time to be a gamer.

Playcation

I took a trip this past week for Memorial Day weekend, so I did a lot of gaming on the go and with friends.

Before leaving, though, I played Far Cry 2 for another evening, at one point infiltrating a marina mercenary base and blowing up their fuel supply for one of my buddies.  I think I'm going to parcel this game out over several months or years like I have Oblivion and likely will Fallout 3, as well.  Speaking of Oblivion, I'm planning to pop that in just this evening after writing up this post and having dinner.

Arriving at some friends' house for a barbecue, the outdoor munching and conversation shifted indoors as the sun went down and the mosquitoes came out.  In a gathering full of moderate to hardcore gamers, it's no wonder Left 4 Dead on the 360 on my friend's 47" TV was a big hit.  My friend's wife (he prefers to watch) and I played through the No Mercy campaign right up to the end, and she (Louis) and I (Bill) were the only two to make it onto the helicopter to escape.  The game plays very well on the 360, but the limit of 2-player only for splitscreen kind of sucks for what is meant to be a 4-player experience.

Everything else I played over the past week has been portable.  I worked a little further into the fourth trial (Miles Edgeworth as the defendant) in the first Ace Attorney game on a couple of plane rides, and started Galaxy On Fire on my iPhone, and played completely through Underworlds, also on said device.  There's no denying the iPhone as a powerful platform for gaming at this point.

Galaxy On Fire is a fully 3D mission-based space flight game, a la Colony Wars, albeit suitably simplified for the platform.  I have to go against my usual stance here and recommend tilt controls over the digital analog (not an oxymoron) stick.  Touch-sensitive Dpads/sticks just do not work very well for me at all.  I can sort of hack it in iDracula just by sliding around in a circle, but here it's too imprecise and you end up obscuring too much of the screen.  Thankfully, the tilt controls work pretty well in GOF, and you can enable autofire on your ship's cannons just by double-tapping the fire button.  The game features a familar mission progression and seems to later enable free roaming in the galaxy and all the cargo trading you'd expect in a space game.  I'm looking forward to playing more.  This was a pretty awesome value for $3.

I believe I have written on this blog that I would be all over a Diablo-alike for the iPhone, and true to my word, I was all over Underworlds for a couple of days, playing right through it (about 3 hours) and starting another run immediately thereafter.  It's basically Diablo shoehorned onto the iPhone.  It's definitely not as polished or eminently replayable as Diablo, and it kind of runs like shit, but there is enough there to make for a pretty addictive mobile dungeon hack.  I'll outline a list of wishes for the next update or sequel:

• It needs to run better, with less stuttering in the frame rate.
  
• Touch controls need to be more sensitive and precise.
  
• There needs to be more than one real character class (the melee-centric warrior).
  
• Gear changes should be reflected on the character model, ideally.
  
• The level cap (10) needs to be done away with to encourage replays on higher difficulty settings.
  
• There needs to be a better shopkeeper interface for choosing which loot to buy/sell.
  
• There was music, but I barely noticed it.
  

I fear this reads like I hated the game, but that's really not the case at all.  I really enjoyed it, and have spent more time with it than any other iPhone game with the possible exception of Galcon.  Underworlds is a really solid foundation for an excellent Diablo clone, and for $1, it's practically an obligatory purchase. 

All Quiet On The Digital Front

There has not been much at all to report over the past week.  

I played some WoW, getting up to level 52 on my warrior, and starting to move into the last couple of tiers of zones in the "old world."  I want to explore every zone here before I venture into Outland and other Burning Crusade content.  I should probably work on hitting 60 and getting my epic mount to speed that process along.

I've spent a few more hours exploring and merc'ing around war-torn Africa in Far Cry 2.  This is a game that is beautiful in it's simplicity.  It's an open-world mission-based FPS, like a cross between Oblivion, GTA, and some shooter.  Most of the missions are of a pretty similar cutout, but roving around taking guys out and looking for hidden diamonds just doesn't seem to get old.

I finished the adventure mode of Peggle Deluxe this week, and started into Peggle Nights.  Great games, as everyone knows.  I also finished the third trial in the first Phoenix Wright, and got started on the fourth.  I'm saving this for my trip to Arkansas, along with some iPhone games and demos I picked up, too.  I've got a bunch of old games and systems there, too, though.  Maybe I'll hit up the retro while I'm home.

Checkpoint

It's been a pretty light week in terms of gaming. That's probably because I cranked through the final 10 episodes of Battlestar Galactica and then went to see Star Trek on top of that.

I finished up the second trial in the first Phoenix Wright game, and I'm into the second investigation phase of the third trial, Turnabout Samurai. I didn't think I'd like this game as much as I do, but it's got a lot of character.

I got some more into Far Cry 2 one night, doing another weapon convoy mission and an assassination, as well as roaming around the countryside unlocking more safehouses and causing a ruckus. My next mission is another buddy mission for Quarbani Singh. Still loving it.

And of course, I spent a lot of time playing WoW, mostly running around The Hinterlands knocking out quests and earning a lot more gold now that I've given up blacksmithing and have gotten my skinning up and running. I finally decided (at level 49, lol) to see what glyphs are all about, and picked up a few of them to make a few of my abilities more useful. I also jumped into a Warsong Gulch match last night, which is a CTF scenario, whereas Arathi Basin is more of a control point game. It was pretty fun. PvP is a whole other game than PvE, and battle tactics are drastically different. Thankfully, my spec is actually probably better suited to PvP, though it is more than effective enough at PvE, obviously. I focus on demobilization and burst damage, because one way or another, PvP fights tend to end quickly.

Some Things To Write About

I took a burnout break from WoW this past week from about Wednesday until Sunday night when boredom finally got the better of me. Consequently, I actually have some other games to thought-spew about! Just to get WoW out of the way, though, I'm almost to level 47, still mucking around Stranglethorn, and my skinning skill is already almost at 300! Incredible how fast that levels.

After scraping away a year or more's worth of dust, I found my copy of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney in my DS game drawer and finally gave it a whirl. I played through the first case trial all in one go, and kind of got a feel for how the game works. It's not really like anything else I've played before, but seems pretty enjoyable. As of now, I'm into the second trial case, about to begin the actual court proceedings.

Chronologically, the next thing I played was some Galactrix, followed by several hours of Far Cry 2. Nothing much to say about PQ: G, other than that it remains pretty fun, and good for wasting time. Playing FC2, though, is a really unique experience. I completed a couple of sabotage type missions with one of my npc buddies and then did a couple of convoy ambush missions for the arms dealers in the countryside to open up more guns to buy for myself. I also did some diamond hunting and guard post scouting and safe house unlocking.

One incident that was totally awesome was approaching a checkpoint from the side just as a roving death squad was motoring through town. As they drove away I manned a gun emplacement and shot at them to get their attention, and as they turned around to come back I got off of my turret and ran across the road to some cover, and fired some shots at them with my automatic rifle as they drove into the little clump of buildings. Then, just as they came alongside the wall I was hiding behind, I pulled out my flamethrower and smoked both the driver and the guy manning the gun mount, and the jeep crashed and exploded and set the whole area ablaze. It was one of those Kodak moments you wish all your friends could have been there to see. I love the fire in this game. I read that during playtesting they had to tone the fire down because people could throw a molotov and set the whole country alight and kill the Jackal (main bad guy and target in the game) from miles away. How cool is that?

I tried out a bunch of demos this weekend, as well. The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, Bionic Commando multiplayer, and Red Faction: Guerilla.

Riddick has gotten huge amounts of acclaim, or rather, Butcher Bay has. Dark Athena has gotten less. This demo was from the latter. It seemed ok. The graphics were better than I had been led to believe (save Riddick's own model, which still looks last-gen). It was a lot harder than I was expecting, too. The demo was on the normal difficulty level, but I must have died at least 20 times just in the 15 minute or so demo section. I think I went into it expecting typical FPS type gameplay, but there seemed to be a lot heavier emphasis on stealth tactics that I didn't quite pick up totally in this short bit of game. I don't feel super compelled to pick up the game, but if I ever find it for $20 or something I may give it a go for Butcher Bay alone.

Bionic Commando, sadly, felt kind of janky. I didn't care for how the swing/jump was implemented (seemed like it required too many presses of the A button), and I really didn't like how the gun targeting and shooting felt. Your reticle is freaking huge, and you don't really have any indication of where exactly in there you're hitting. It seemed like maybe the game was registering a hit as long as the target was anywhere inside that huge reticle, which would make sense, since you'd likely need a large degree of aim-assist to shoot anything while swinging around wildly, but there just needs to be better feedback as to whether you're actually hitting the guy you're aiming for. It felt like I was shooting buckshot at something a football field away. The multiplayer character models suck, too. And 2 out of the 3 games I played, I was the pink guy, out of 8 possible colors. That's just not cool.

Red Faction: Guerilla was pretty exciting as a demo, though. It gave off Crackdown vibes in the way the character and camera are controlled, and the destructability of practically every object in the environment could potentially blow the doors of open-world mission-based gameplay. I liked the sledgehammer for breaking stuff, and the sticky remote-detonated mines are awesome. I'll be keeping an eye on this one in the future.

The Uninteresting Files

That's pretty much what this blog is fast becoming, the more I play WoW. The funny thing is that I haven't spent all that much time playing WoW, it's just been a disproportionate amount of my gaming time, altogether. As far as I can recall since last I wrote, I have made it to level 45, done a bunch of exploring around the world, and dropped Blacksmithing as a profession, replacing it with Skinning, instead, in an effort to both make more gold and to streamline my play experience. I'm not that into combing the AH for mats to collect for big complicated recipes, but I do like going out and killing and looting stuff!

I got that Green Hills of Stranglethorn achivement, finally finished the Warrior quest to get my Whirlwind Axe (long after twinks would have discarded it, no doubt), and did a bunch of other quests in random places. I finally visited the last Horde city, Silvermoon, in the blood elf starting area. Leaving from there I discovered a handful of other zones I had not yet been to, including The Hinterlands, The Badlands, Loch Modan, and Searing Gorge, I think. I had about half an hour of a podcast to kill last night, so I thought I'd jump into WoW to do it. I wasn't really feeling it, though, so after just one short quest I was done for the night. I might shelve it altogether until the weekend.

I got back into Far Cry 2 a couple of nights last week, doing a couple of missions and taking over some safehouses and finding some diamonds. I can see that there's a ton of fighting checkpoint guards and roaming death squads in the game, but it hasn't really bugged me yet. I get the same thing from the leapgate hacking in Galactrix. I've heard all about how much of an annoying hassle it is, but it just hasn't gotten to me yet. Similarly, I'd heard that the ending of Assassin's Creed was a huge letdown, but since I knew to expect that, I was strangely accepting of it. I think if you go into something with your expectations tempered a bit, your reactions aren't so volatile. I really dig Far Cry 2 so far, though. I'm still just like 3% into it or something ridiculous, though.

I just downloaded a free iphone game, Dark Nova, to get me through some idiotic training meeting thing at work. It's a kind of space trading thing.

Week of World of Warcraft

I spent the last week playing WoW almost exclusively, but I can hardly remember what I did in the game. It all just seems to blur together. I spent a bunch of time in Stranglethorn Vale doing quests and a little PvP here and there. There was this one poor Warrior a few levels below me that I ran into and killed repeatedly. Another time I was drafted into a ganking party, which basically just amounts to griefing people. I left pretty soon after I realized we weren't going to get any honorable kills doing that.

It's so hard to think of specific things I did that warrant mission in the game. It's kind of amazing considering the amount of time I spent playing it over the last week. I'm halfway through level 43 now, and almost have the Green Hills of Stranglethorn achievement. Basically, I did a lot of running around killing stuff and taking the proof of that work back to people who would shower me with silver pieces and experience points. I also messed around with some mods and checked out a lvl 4 Draenei warrior that was left on my account from it's previous steward. It's more fun than it sounds. It's like a treadmill, but a really good one. I guess. At any rate, I'm going to be playing a larger variety of stuff this week.

My DS backlog is fat and bloated and disgusting, so I whittled a few games off of it this weekend. I briefly tried them all out just long enough to confirm that I'd never play them again, and once or twice wondered why I ever bought them in the first place. Gone now, are: Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword, Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime, and Lunar Knights. Each of these must have been on my shelf a year or more. I'm trying to get away from the buy-and-sit-on-it thing, and move toward a buy-and-play-it-right-away model. Strike while the iron is hot and all that. Which is one reason I want to play more Far Cry 2 and Galactrix this week.

The other games I played just a little last night were Peggle and Pixel Junk Eden. I'm working through the adventure modes of both Peggle Deluxe and Peggle Nights, and I'm still just barely into Eden, as well. Cool game, though.

I'm On A Quest!

I spent almost all of my game time over the last week playing World of Warcraft and Puzzle Quest: Galactrix. I acquired a lot more though: Peggle Deluxe and Peggle Nights in a half-off deal on Steam, and then Super Stardust HD, Pixel Junk Monsters, and The Last Guy via gamesharing on PSN. I only really tried out Stardust, and that was just one round of it. I'll have to get around to all of those sometime.

The big new thing for me is, of course, Galactrix. I've been waiting for this game for at least a year, from the time the first screenshot was posted online. I was a huge addict to the original Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, the XBLA version. After a few hours with Galactrix (also XBLA; I hear the DS version has issues), I can say that I like it a lot. They had a killer combination to begin with, combining an addictive puzzle-battle game with the inherent hooks of character and story progression. They didn't need to change a whole lot, and wisely, they didn't.

The big differences, apart from the stock fantasy to stock science fiction swap, are the zero-gravity puzzle grids and greater character re-spec ability in place of different classes. Matches are now made vertically or diagonally (the hexagon pieces have no left-right oriented faces), and new pieces fall into the board in from the direction that the last move was made from. Also, you can have up to three ships to switch between, each outfitted with different equipment and abilities. It has that same variety of puzzle games to fight battles, craft items, mine resources, haggle with traders, and open leap gates for faster-than-light travel.

This brings me to the one major gripe people seem to have with Galactrix, the leap gate hacking. You need to hack a leap gate in order to access it to jump to the next star system. You do this a lot. This is also the only timed puzzle variant, and the only one that can really stop you in your tracks if you are unable to complete it. I haven't had too much trouble with the gates yet, myself, but I can see it getting repetitive (but the same could be said of every other puzzle variant, too), and I haven't had gates close on me yet, though I hear it happens after some time. We'll have to see how that shakes out, but so far I'm totally into the game. It's more or less just what I was expecting.

This weekend was another spent on mad questing in WoW. I spent a bunch of time in both Stranglethorn Vale and Arathi Highlands doing a bunch of quests, and went and did my first battleground PVP in Arathi Basin. It was a lot of fun. I went from level 38 to 41, and also got my first couple of world honorable kills in addition to a ton in the battleground. It's amazing how so much time spent can be summed up in so little writing.

"I'd like to get my hands on the guy responsible for all of this."

I believe it's considered dramatic irony when one of the Barneys, Half-Life's ubiquitous security guards utters the phrase above. This may also be the first little inkling of trouble coming with the mute protagonist convention. I realize why they do it, but I'm never really put off when the Master Chief contributes to the conversation as any normal human being would. I don't feel disconnected or at odds with the way the narrative is unfolding, even when the speakers are lunkheads like Dom and Marcus. I may not like the character very much (Altair), but them having a personality adds to the experience in a way that, until speech recognition and AI are improved dramatically, casting myself as the main character cannot.

The mute main character bothered me in Chrono Trigger, Dragon Quest, and others. It can be said to have worked in Portal, but how many characters are there in that game that are trying to have a conversation with you? A Portal with a character who wisecracks back at GLaDOS wouldn't have had the same charm, but grunts and sighs and exclamations of "a ha!" may have added something used sparingly. Think Samus Aran in Metroid Prime. By contrast, some of the most awesome main characters are the ones with a lot of dialogue; Solid Snake, Kiryuu Kazuma, Leon S. Kennedy, the Prince of Persia, even Lara Croft and the aforementioned Gears.

I completed Half-Life: Source this weekend. I'd heard that Xen was really frustrating because of the platforming, but I didn't have much trouble at all with that. It was those flying big-head bastards that got to me the most. I thought the big headcrab boss battle was cool as a level of its own, but the final boss was kind of frustrating in how he could kill you with outright with one of his attacks, and how he kept teleporting me away to annoying places where I'd have to make annoying jumps to get teleported back to continue fighting him. I fought him for probably half an hour before I realized he was absorbing energy from the crystals in on the walls of his chamber and blew them up. The thing is, I'm not sure that even really helped to kill him, since there wasn't much indication as such. It didn't seem to stop him from using his most annoying attacks, that much is sure.

I never knew that Half-Life had more than one ending, but I discovered both. The bad ending gave me flashbacks to the end of the shareware version of Doom, where the final telepad takes you to a room of demons that rip you to shreds. You buy the full version and the telepad then warps you to Deimos as it should. I never knew that Gordon Freeman was supposed to be "hired" by the G-man, either. I know next to nothing of the Half-Life 2 story, so I'll be interested to get into that series later on sometime. I think my next FPS has got to be Far Cry 2, though.

I messed around some more with Crysis last Friday night. I decided to bump my resolution one level down to 1920X1080, I think it is. Before it was 2xxxX12xx or something. I'm not great at remembering resolution numbers. At any rate, I couldn't tell any difference in looks, but the frame rate seems better, and there seems to be less v-sync issues. I think I'm sort of getting the whole power suit thing. I've been taking a stealthy approach so far, but setting the suit to strengh mode and then going and punching down buildings on top of enemy soldiers is fun, too. I get the feeling the game is meant to be as much an open playground as a linear progression through specific battlegrounds.

Finally, I played some WoW, levelling up to 37 and into some kick-ass new gear, a nice scarlet helm with bull's horns on the sides, and a viscious looking new two-handed axe. When I first concieved of my warrior, I intended him to be a tank primarily. Extreme damage seems to be the way to go for solo play, though--the quick way, at the very least. Just being a warrior grants me a suite of abilities to call on when facing multiple mobs at once, so that I can pretty easily survive 2 and 3-on-1 encounters with mobs at or around the same level. My cool new axe actually has a chance at striking nearby foes in addition to the one I'm fighting at the moment. Both of these drops came from Scarlet Monastery, which my brother-in-law ran me through alone several times and let me take all the cool stuff for myself. It was easy as breathing to his 80 rogue.

I did some exploring around Desolace and got the achievement for that, also did a bunch of mining and smithing. I have a problem--too many quests. My log is full. I think I'm going to go over to Hillsbrad and do all of those and maybe come back to Desolace or another appropriate zone later. There's just too much to explore! Since I don't see myself hardcore raiding at 80, I've been thinking I might roll and Alliance character and see some of the other stuff in the game. God knows when that'd be. I might want to try some other MMO by then.

Playlog - last week of March 2009

I played a bunch of different things lightly over the last week, spending some time in TF2 playing on the new (to me) Egyptian-themed map, and messing around with the two Peggle variants on my system (a demo and the Half-Life themed one).

I also finally got a chance to play some Far Cry 2, having picked it up for the nice price of $15 on Steam.  I pretty much love that service.  I only played with it for a couple of hours, but it seems pretty cool so far.  I started out as the Irishman, but I think I'm going to go back and choose the black guy instead.  I like his suit.  I want to get more into this one soon.

I accidentally purchased Aurora Feint II: The Beginning on iTunes (clicked the wrong link).  That's cool, because I probably would have bought it anyway.  It's a tile-match puzzle game with a sort of meta element where you earn crystals and then can purchase character upgrades and stuff.  It's sort of like Puzzle Quest, but only in that it's a puzzle game with a little something else to it.  This is more of a Tetris Attack/Puzzle League game than PQ's take on Bejeweled.  Also, you can apparently battle with other players.  You might have to buy the more expensive version, though.  This one was only $1.99.

The two games I played the most in the last 7 days were WoW, and Half-Life.  I got my Warrior up to almost 37, and did a crapload of quests in the Thousand Needles zone.  I downloaded an awesome mod for the game called ArkInventory which lets you pool all your inventory bags and then have stuff autosort into different columns.  This should totally have been in the game from the beginning.  I can't fathom why after what, 5 years, it isn't, other than the fact that futzing around with your bags is another form of timesink, which we all know MMO developers would sacrifice their very souls for the sake of.  Which reminds me, I need to check my auctions.

So, Half-Life is the game I made the biggest strides in this week (relative to game size, of course, since I played WoW for much longer).  This is an extremely long game, by modern FPS standards.  I remember the days of Doom and Quake, and those were long games, to be sure, although I'm not sure they were this long.  Those games were neatly divided up into levels and chapters, though, so they may be easier to wrap your head around than Half-Life.  I made it from some part just after Gordon gets ambushed and left for dead with no weapons to another part after killing a helicopter and fighting my way through an alien/paramilitary conflict.  I think I'm on chapter 13 or 14 of 19--around 60-70% of the way through.  I got stuck once where I needed some ammo to set off some of those laser-triggered mines in a crawlspace.  I had used it all up sometime in the previous 20 minutes since, and I really didn't want to replay that stuff, so I looked up how to cheat and made the game give me a clip of 9mm ammunition to allow me to clear my path ahead.

Half-Life continues to surprise me with how unique and novel it feels compared to modern FPS.  Valve created these situations and scenarios for you to work through, totally unconventional for the time (and indeed, now), and trusted that you'd find your own way through.  Contrast this to the clear and unmistakable indicators of modern games and that most blatant man-behind-the-curtain phenomenon, the quest arrow--used even in titles so lofty as the mighty Bioshock.  It's not that I feel like a genius for solving Half-Life; it's that I don't feel like an imbecile who needs to be led around by the hand.

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.

Game Soup

Though I finished GTA IV's story last week, I found myself drawn back to the game several times this week to tie up loose ends and because I guess I really just hadn't had enough.  I hopped back into Liberty City three or four nights to finish the Assassin missions, find all of the random stranger encounters, and mess around trying to get a few achievements.  I think I'm finally done, until I feel like playing The Lost and Damned.

Another nice time-waster for me this week was iDracula, a 99 cent iphone "twin stick" shooter.  You play a guy with a gun, several guns, killing various monsters that try to swarm you.  The controls aren't flawless (my left thumb doesn't slide all that well on the left "stick", but maybe that's just me), but they work well enough.  It's nothing revolutionary, but it's pretty fun and it's got freaking great graphics.  It's two dimensional and sprite-based, like a higher resolution Diablo II.  Someone really needs to take this "engine" and make a Diablo clone.  It could totally work, but I fear for the world's economic recovery if that were ever to come to pass.

I had occassion to try out a couple of new games this week, Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, and Crysis.  Hulk is pretty good, but kind of ugly these days, being a PS2 game, and also very simplistic.  It feels good jumping around an open city and smashing stuff, but this game's time was definitely 2005.  We're in a post-Crackdown world now, and the team that made Hulk should be coming out with their new game, Prototype, this year sometime (barring delay or cancellation, of course).  

Crysis, though--awesome.  All I'd ever heard about it was that there was some sort of suit involved and that it is pretty much the de facto standard PC benchmark these days.   I didn't know how amazing it would look on my PC (the game defaulted settings to high, but I should probably back it off a bit for a smoother framerate--I'm still new to the PC thing), or much about how open-ended the mission structure seems (I'm only about half an hour in so far).  I sat down with it out of curiosity more than anything, since I'd picked it up for only ten bucks.  I came away pretty impressed.  I knew I liked this game when I put the nanosuit into maximum strength mode and punched down my first tree.

Otherwise, I played some SuperSFIITurboHDRemix.  There was like one other guy online when I wanted to play, and he beat me over and over.  I lost with every character, except Akuma, who I don't have unlocked.  It was fun, though, and I won a few rounds here and there.  I stretched out my Noby Noby Boy some, tried out the Just Cause demo on Steam (not great as a PC port), and lastly spent a couple of hours killing stuff in WoW.  Ropvanks is now level 32 Warrior, with craptastic gear.  I'm using this mace I found and this goofy tiki head shield and random junk armor I've gotten from quests.  I'm still in Ashenvale, but I'll be leaving there soon, I think. 

Murder And Mayhem In Liberty City

Apart from a little bit of Team Fortress 2 and World of Goo, which I picked up for $5 on Steam yesterday, I spent all my game time this past week playing GTA IV.

I am now at the final mission(s), a choice that boils down to either money or revenge, or more likely, Niko's cousin or love interest. My choice is for revenge, but I'll probably end up doing both to see what's different in the ending. I attempted each path once so far but died, and had to go to bed. I had already been playing like 6 hours anyway.

This past week I managed to crank through all the rest of the Irish mob jobs and then the Italian mafia jobs so that now all that's left is the ending of the main thread and the Assassin missions, and the tons and tons of side stuff you can do in the game. I'll probably end up doing some of that stuff and going for achievements, too, after finally finishing off the story.

There are a few choices you have to make in the game, whether to kill guy X or guy Y, or whether to kill guy Z or just walk away. The former scenarios, I opted to kill Playboy X, Francis McReary, and now Dimitri Rascalov. There was one odd mission where it looked like I was going to be given the choice of killing Phil or Ray (mafia capos), but the boss decided for me and had me go kill Ray, which would have been my choice anyway. In each of the kill/walk away scenarios, I used my better judgment, which as far as I can recall, was walking away each time save Vlad, whom I remember killing. The most interesting was Niko's long-awaited confrontation with "that special someone," Darko Brevic. I figured that it would have been the height of hypocrisy to kill him for having been only what Niko has become over the course of the game, a hired killer with little allegiance to anything but money. I'm not sure what impact any of these decisions have on the outcome of the game, but at the very least, a few of them helped me to define for myself what sort of character Niko would become, and I like that.

I've seen and heard a lot of people saying they don't like the person he becomes in the game, and that's fine for me. I don't have to like every character I control in a game (though I do happen to like Niko), as long as they're somewhat well defined and believable as a character. Aside from the necessary exaggerations and implausibilities (it is a game, there has to be insane fun stuff), Niko passes this test in my eyes. It's a tough line to walk in this series, though.

As Rockstar takes it in a less cartoon-ish and more serious crime fiction direction, it's hard not to lose some of the outlandishness (Area 52 jet-packs in GTA: SA), which often means losing some of the fun (no planes in GTA IV). I think GTA IV is a sweet spot, pretty satisfying on both ends, without undermining one hand with the other. This story just would not work in Crackdown, nor would Crackdown's insane (and awesome) gameplay work for this story (or any story, really).

Addendum: I finished the story last night, choosing the revenge route. After checking out the other ending on Youtube, I'm happy with my choice.

Phantasy Star Portable

Hi! Remember me?

Anyway I've been busy doing actual PhD work, so I haven't had much time to play games! But recently I found Phantasy Star Portable and figured I must have it (I'm a great fan of the PS series) so I played it most of yesterday when I really ought to have been doing something else ^^;

Anyway I wanted to review it, so here goes!

Things I like about Phantasy Star Portable:

1) the graphics are quite good, with gameplay smooth and quite impressive for the console. I was quite surprised to see such good quality graphics and such!
2) It reminds me of PSU! It has much nostalgia factor because it basically has the same maps and bosses and such as PSU. A couple of differences here and there but certainly it is basically PSU again in a singleplayer hand-held console form.
3) It has good upgrading and such for weapons. Only one type of grinder, which makes upgrading much simpler, seems to be a fairly standard upgrade per grinder too, so if you're into the nerdy details you can probably work things out a lot more than my "gut instinct" eyeballing. :)
4) Has partner machines! They don't craft or anything but you can bring 'em along with you. I've found I don't really need it, but I might if I go and do a B level dungeon without grinding a bit first. I like the challenge of doing it without a PM :)
5) Achievement rewards! These are cool, they're rares and whatnot for completing various achievements. I got a double-bladed axe-sword thing with the blades in the shape of love hearts that whoosh love hearts around when I swing it. LOL. It also deals a good deal of area damage so I love whooshing through large groups with it, haha. Feel the love!!
6) Music's good too. Same music as PSU pretty much, but it suits it all.
7) No stupid hackers. Hated this about PSU.
8) Controls aren't too bad. They were a bit fiddly to start with but now I've got the hang of them they're okay. Not as good as keyboard controls though, haha.

Things I don't like about PSP:
1) The story. BORING. Seriously.
2) The story cutscenes. Cardboard cut-outs with various stances do not a cutscene make.
3) Full voice acting. While I appreciate the effort of full voice acting, the voices annoy the fuck out of me. Why do they find such fricken whiny-sounding women to do the female voices, seriously?!
4) It's much the same as PSU. De Ragan, RELICS, etc., all the same maps, all the same grinds. Though it's nostalgic, it'll probably wear pretty thin after a while.
5) NO PURPLE CARPET ROOM OMG. Why do you have most the same maps/etc. and not have Grove of Fanatics at Neudaiz? You'd better unlock it for me later or there will be hell to pay! (My favourite PSU level.)
6) "Random encounters": I call them this because after you finish a general grind mission (not story) you will probably have a random encounter back in the city with some character or other. Cut to 5 mins of boring cardboard cut out cutscenes with whiny voices. Just let me go kill shit!
7) No purple carpet room *hmpf*
8) The shops and cities are basically just maps with clickables. No running around cities like in PSU. Fair enough, and good for cutting down on time, but yeah.
9) No online play. WTF? Local area multiplayer only is teh suck.

So yeah, in all an entertaining distraction for the day; I'm lvl 27 and haven't really hit too much of a challenge yet, though that could be because I know most of the boss weaknesses ^^; I actually miss being my PSU CAST ranger; shooting the crap out of things makes taking down flying bosses a lot easier than my Beast hunter... though being able to do massive area dmg is good fun too. I think things were a lot more challenging on my CAST in PSU, I might make a CAST to compare!

Anyway I'd recommend it for PS series tragics like myself ^^; But if you were bored with PSU you probably wouldn't enjoy it since it's much the same but on a smaller scale.

The One Where I Got An iPhone

I have to write these posts more often. A week goes by and I play so many different things that I can hardly recall them all.

I replaced one mobile platform with another this week. Well, I actually sold my PSP months ago, but this week I finally sold my stock (games) in it, upon seeing the lastest crop of (seemingly credible) rumors about the next PSP. Whether it's the PSP 4000, PSP2, PSPi, or whatever, sooner or later they're going to come out with one done right, with a second analog, no shitty UMD drive, a download service (to be fair, they kinda already have this), and maybe a touch screen. I'll pick up one of those. For the moment, I'm fine with my 10+ DS game backlog, and my new iPhone.

Yeah, my 2 year contract with Verizon was up, and for only $20 more per month I was able to go from a shit phone I never used for anything but calling to a fucking revelation in mobile computing. The iPhone is god. The Internet in my pocket, accessible anywhere, not to mention a phone and iPod in one, and a decent (potentially great) mobile gaming platform. I've had it for 7 days, and I already find it indespensible. But the games--I've downloaded and tried out a small handful, and found two so far that I really, really like.

One is Galcon, which is sort of mini-RTS. There are a bunch of planets on the screen, and you face off against one or two enemies (CPU or humans online, if you can believe that) sending ships from planet to planet to conquer them and take over the entire system. Incredibly accessible, and crazily addictive. One game of Galcon can be over in 10-20 seconds, and they rarely last longer than a couple of minutes. It's pretty much the perfect mobile game to sit and play while you wait. There's a free demo version, and the full thing is $5. Well worth it, in my book.

The other is called Tap Defense, which is pretty much your standard tower defense game. Most people pretty much know what they're getting with this type of thing, so suffice it to say that it works really well on the touch screen, and it's a lot of fun. I hadn't ever actually played one before, but this is cool. And free!

Elswhere, also in the cheap and novel category, was Noby Noby Boy, the newest creation from the guy behind the Katamari series. It is insane. I picked it up about the time everyone's cumulative stretch length had reached the Moon. I wouldn't really call it a game, it seems more like a toy, just one that you download and play with on your TV using a Playstation controller. That's not to say it's not cool, it's just literally unlike anything that there's pretty much ever been in gaming. I like it, and I'll probably mess with it from time to time to contribute to Girl's space expansion.

I felt like knocking through some more of GTA IV this weekened, so I had a couple of sessions of that, totalling 6 or 8 missions done. According to the game's menus, I'm about 45% of the way done. The story is probably only about 65% of the total, though. I'm liking playing this like Oblivion--doing a bunch at a time, taking a long break, and then coming back later for another hit. At this rate I'll be ready for Lost & Damned around the time the next DLC pack comes available.

And finally, triumphantly, I finished the Starcraft Terran campaign. That last mission was giving me hell for a while. I kept trying to go back to saves I made along the way, but I had painted myself into a corner more or less from the beginning by being slow to gather resources and not discovering a Vespene geyser in a key base location. I must have spent 4 hours across a couple of days to no avail, and finally went online looking for strategies. That convinced me to try out the seige tanks' special seige mode and use them for offense and defense both. The mission is to take out a giant ion cannon on the other end of the map, but to get to it you have to fight off two seperate and very well entrenched Terran armies and then make your way past all the turrets, ghosts, and other guardians to blow it up. In the end I had like seven battlecruisers and a host of tanks, goliaths, marines, and ghosts storm the cannon and take it out with a combination of Yamato guns and nuclear missiles. It still took an hour and a half, not counting failed raids and stratagems gone awry forcing reloads along the way. It was an oddyssey in and of itself. Hard to believe that's only a third of (half of) the game.

The Fast And The Deliberate, Crushing Hammer Of Doom

Much of the past week I spent playing Burnout and Starcraft, an interesting juxtaposition. One is a seat-of-the-pants, devil-may-care, caution-to-the-wind affair at insane velocities, and the other perfects that feeling of constructing, painstakingly and with much mumbling and hand-wringing, a scenario of ultimate reckoning for one's enemies. Both are absolutely fantastic.

I completed enough events to get my A liscense in Burnout, unlocking several more cars and having fun tearing around the city in the process. Playing GTA or Crackdown or some such, you can never fully enjoy the driving models they present. You're constantly crashing--same as in Burnout--but each and every time, you're out on the street on your feet again and more often than not end up relegated to shitty little hatchback that all the sudden is the only thing anyone drives in the city. In Burnout, though, when you careen off a ramp, over a cliff, upside-down and face-first into a brick wall, you're treated to a dynamic, slow-mo, deconstruction of your car, and then there you are back on the road and burning rubber again. There's nothing stopping you from being reckless as you can be.

I'm at the end of the Terran campaign in Starcraft, on the 10th and what I believe to the the final mission. It goes without saying that this is an outstanding game. I'll just say that so far I've really enjoyed the Terrans and their awesome bunkers, Goliaths, Ghosts, and Battlecruisers. I'm excited to try the Zerg shortly, as well. This game gives me a feeling I haven't had since the days of monochrome green army men out in the yard, those and Battle Beasts. And the Lego army wars I used to set up in the days before I discovered the NES.

I also breifly popped onto WoW last week (a couple of times), to hit level 31 and do a few quests and take care of my auctions. I signed up for another 6 months, might as well use it! I jumped into Left 4 Dead for just about half an hour, in a versus game. It was cool. I got to play as the infected, the smoker, the boomer, the hunter, and the tank. Do people play as the witch? I don't know yet. I need to carve out some time in my schedule for both this and TF2.

Finally, I tossed into the PS3 an (odd) X-mas present from my mom, Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga Volume 1 Avatar Tuner. I think that's all of it's titles. I was expecting more of the same from Nocturne, which I quit and sold halfway through, but from the hour or so I played it seems to be a little more to-the-point, with sprucier graphics and more of a plot. I read that it's only 20 to 30 hours, too, which at this point is a plus in my book, for a JRPG.

Zeroing In

I've unconsciously narrowed my focus over the last week, having only fired up a relative handful of games.

Earlier last week I was putting some time into Half-Life. I find it remarkable that as I play through this game that is more than a decade old standard in a now (and then, even) well established and well-conventioned genre, everything it does still feels fresh and not so well-worn. People say this game defined the genre, but it seems more like it set a bar that no one has been able to (or bothered to) reach in terms of environment. In fact, Half-Life is, up to around half-way through where I am, more about navigating interesting environments than killing dumb creatures. This stands as a stark contrast to what most other FPS go for (pedestrian environs and more exciting firefights). I just passed the part where you launch the satellite into orbit and now I'm in some water-filled rooms with a fish monster and a tranq gun. I'm amazed at the sheer variety of scenarios I've come across thus far in the game.

The other thing on PC I've been playing quite a bit of, besides a few rounds of TF2, is Starcraft. I've been trying to replay through to the point I'm at on my Mac installation. Just one more mission to go, I think, and then I'll be back to where I was before in the Terran campaign. This time I'm planning to keep going and hopefully finish the game and expansion. I've still never played Zerg or Protoss at all, yet. Playing through the first 6-7 missions again has helped me get more familiar with the game flow, which is good. Here's another 11-year-old, completely awesome PC game, and another genre archetype, coincidentally. I think I should complete everything here before playing Halo Wars or any other PC RTS (Dawn of War II sounds cool).

Finally, I played a ton of Burnout Paradise this weekend. I've still got like 12 events to win before I get my A licsense, but I've already cleared the city of gate smashes (400/400), billboard breaks (120/120), and super jumps (50/50). I've never completed stuff like that in a GTA or any other open-world game. This game just rocks. You go fast, drift corners, smash stuff up, and when you crash you get a sweet crash scene and then you're instantly back on the road and in motion. This is one of those games that you can't just sit down and play for a little bit. Every time I get into it I'm there for like three hours. It's a great game to play mindlessly or while listening to podcasts or something, too.

One last thing: the HAWX demo. First: what the hell is this shitty third-person 'cinematic' camera mode, and why is it being forced on me for the entirety of the tutorial mission? Why would anyone want to play a fighter jet game like that? Otherwise, it feels pretty much like an Ace Combat game, but it has an XP/level system which apparently ranks you up and into better planes and loadouts. Could be alright, maybe. Feels like a $10 bargain bin pick-up.

I Need To De-frag My Brain

I don't think I can even summon up a complete list off all the games I've played over the last week.  It's been so disparate lately with getting my new PC and installing and sampling tons of stuff--the dust has got to settle so I can see the way forward from here.

Console side first - Thin Lizzy tracks came out for Rock Band last week, so I downloaded those and tried them out.  They're from a forthcoming live album, so it's the first anyone's really ever heard them, though each of the songs (Jailbreak, Cowboy Song, and The Boys Are Back) are fairly well-known.  Love me some Thin Lizzy!  I also played some of the awesome Megadeth DLC, Peace Sells.... But Who's Buying?

On top of that, I played some Burnout the other day after downloading the re-start patch (which institutes a previously unavailable event re-start option, among other things), and got my B liscense.  I also downloaded the Halo Wars demo and have booted that up a couple of times since.  I dig it!  It's like a streamlined-for-console-controls version of Starcraft.  I was a little skeptical--cautiously optimistic--but playing the demo has cemented it for me.  I'm definitely going to be picking that up.  I'm glad, because I'm a big fan of the Halo franchise, and I'd hate to see it shitted up.

PC gaming-wise is where it starts to get a little hazy.  Let me just go through each of the games installed on my computer this week, and you can assume that I've spent an hour or two at the very least with all of them:  Team Fortress 2, Diablo II, Starcraft, Oblivion, WoW, Mount and Blade (demo), and Half-Life: Source.

Mount and Blade is an interesting Indie game.  The closest comparison I can make is Oblivion, but M&B is much more about factions.  You can join one of several in the game, and you actually accrue your own army as you go along.  I played for only a couple of hours so far, but it's pretty cool.  You start out on a giant overworld-style map, and you go around to the tons of little villages and castles that dot the land, encountering armies and bandits along the way that take you into a battlefield mode to fight.  It's your army versus theirs in a full-on medieval battle, done in a way unlike any I've ever seen before.  If you're mounted, you can gallop by enemy dudes and strike them with your sword, or feather them with arrows if you can figure out how to shoot halfway decent; I couldn't!  You can take prisoners or recruit guys from local villages, you can become the vassal of a local lord, or just do whatever, it seems, and the local economy is effected.  Towns become richer or poorer based on how the war is going, or one of several other factors you can no doubt influence.  I want to get back to this one eventually for more in-depth play.

The other main thing I focused a lot on this week was Half-Life: Source, the most-current (for now) version of the original HL game.  I played Half-Life some back in 1999, during my first year at college, but I'm pretty sure that was all LAN deathmatch.  I may have played the first hour or so of the campaign, but that's about it.  I'm beginning a full series playthrough now (probably to continue to about the point when HL2: Episode 3 is released), though, and it's still pretty great, even 10 years later.  I'm to a point now about maybe halfway in (or less), where there's a big tentacle monster in a missile silo, if you're familiar with the game.  Now I really understand people's aversion to headcrabs...

PC is finally here!

That's right, it finally arrived.  My long overdue entry into PC gaming is manifest.  To celebrate, the first thing I did after all the preliminary setup was to go and download Steam, and promptly pick up the Half-Life series, specifically the Source engine remake of the original, and The Orange Box, which of course has the sequel and all of it's....quasi-sequels.

Interestingly enough, on the PC the box comes with a couple of things not in the console versions: Lost Coast, another add-on to HL2, and Peggle Extreme, a Valve-themed version of the popular Pop Cap game.  And so the first game I played on my new machine was Peggle.  The second was Portal; I just played through the whole thing again (for the fourth time, if I remember right) before writing this.  I figured it was a good "training session" to get me re-acclimated to the first-person mouse & keyboard scheme.

I can never get enough Oblivion, so I picked up the full box version, featuring both expansions, as well.  And this is just the beginning.  I've got a lot of catching up to do!

Before the arrival of my new machine, and in the post-Killzone interim, I want back to GTA IV.  I'm somewhere in the middle of the game, and apparently doing things backwards, somewhat.  Most accounts I've heard of people playing the game, they've gotten to the point where they have to choose to kill either Playboy X or Dwayne and then later gone on to do the big bank robbery straight-out-of-the-movie-Heat mission.  Either way, I've past both of those now and have finally opened up the last island.

When I first started playing these games, with GTA III, I used to ignore the missions and such for hours and just go blow stuff up and see how long I could survive with a full wanted level.  That's not where GTA IV shines, though.  If I want to do that I'll go play Crackdown.  I find GTA IV is best when I'm moving swiftly from mission to mission, and not just the main plotline ones, but including the side activities like helping the random people around the city or stealing rare cars for Brucie, or just doing the social activities with Niko's friends and girlfriends (though these get tiresome).

Lastly, Necovia/Lonesteban and I finished up Gears of War on Hardcore last night, getting the A Dish Best Served Cold achivement to unlock RAAM in Gears 2.  That was a lot of fun, and I think it's really telling that the parts we had the most trouble with in the game were the parts where we were forced to go separate ways and couldn't watch each other's back so well.  Still a great game, though.  Gears 2 Horde Mode soon!

Killz0wned

I just finished up Killzone tonight, so now I'm ready for KZ2 when it comes out, and more importantly, my plate is pretty clean for the imminent arrival of my new PC.  

Final verdict--I liked the game, but didn't love it.  I'm glad I played it, though.  I can't really think of any other FPS I've played on PS2.  The story was pretty cool, I guess.  On par with a summer popcorn flick.  I'm excited to see where it goes in the sequel, as the Helghast are pretty cool as an adversary.  I just hope they aren't so AI-deficient in KZ2.

The other night I downloaded the Resident Evil 5 demo on my 360.  I went into it with low expectations, and I wasn't disappointed.  Capcom, and the Resident Evil series in particular, aren't known for drastically changing games up from iteration to iteration.  RE4 was a remarkable exception, and it's extensive overhaul of the by-then stale RE formula was in large part responsible for that.  RE5 is Capcom lapsing back into their old ways, the same ones that have given us 50+ games in the Mega Man arch-series and 15 or more under the umbrella of Street Fighter.  Entire polygon models are recycled from a 5-year-old  game, and the GUI looks like something they slapped together in Crayon Physics.  

I'm sure people will eat it up, what with the online co-op and all, but it just seems sloppy, and stands out as another instance of Japanese developers having pretty much lost the plot over the last few years and the switch to HD.

Holding Pattern

This week has been much the same as the last.  Highlights being finally finishing Metroid Fusion and playing Gears of War co-op through acts 2 and 3 on Saturday night.

It was nice in Metroid to finally accrue all of Samus' lost power-ups and be able to face down the SA-X for once.  Most of the game you're avoiding or running in terror from it.  I almost had to call foul on the game, though, for pulling the old Metroid escape sequence but spiking it with a final boss battle.  I almost didn't make it through in terms of either life or time.  I'm done with this one.  It was cool to see where the overarching plot went, but by all reports Metroid: Zero Mission is the better GBA outing in the series, and I've got that in the queue waiting for a likely time.

I played some more Burnout Paradise this week, too.  That's a great game.  It's got a bunch of those qualities that keep you coming back to a game, like short, attainable goals, a sense of progression from unlocking more cars and beating more events, and a great online mode.  The sense of speed in the game is also excellent.  I crash a lot.

I put maybe 4 hours into Killzone this week, too.  I'm up to the beginning of the 8th mission, of 11.  I have a few gripes forming: a) checkpoints in this game are few and far between,  b) enemy grenades seem way too unfairly deadly, c) the Helghast are beyond stupid AI-wise (and need more lines of spoken dialogue, or at least the frequency with which they spout their limited lexicon dialed back a bit).  Otherwise, it's cool.  The level design is kind of sparse, but I'd chalk that up to it being a hardware limitation, since the art-direction is pretty spot-on.  Also, some of the dialogue is a bit overwrought--it's standard action-flick fare.  Again, the limitations of the PS2 are the albatross around this game's neck.  I'm excited to see how the sequel turns out when it's released in a month or so.  The weapons and sense of being there and atmosphere are already pretty great.

I had a few minutes to kill tonight and so I played some Hexic.  My brain just does not work the way that game wants it to.  I got my best score to date, nonetheless.  I think I made two of the star-flower things.  If I understood the victory conditions correctly, I would need at least 18, arranged in the proper manner, to make 3 black pearls, and then get those arranged together, to win.  I hope Puzzle Quest Galactrix is released soon...

Progress Report 01/19/2009

I got some good time in with an assortment of games this past week. Variety is always nice. I've been jumping into Metroid Fusion for 30 minutes to an hour at a time every couple of days. It's good, but not totally engaging me the way Super Metroid or Symphony of the Night have in the past. That's probably no fault of the game's, though; in an era of gigantic open world, open-ended gaming, it just seems kind of quaint. I do enjoy it, just in a more connoisseur-ial fashion. I appreciate it.

Finishing Gears of War 2 left me wanting more, and coincidentally there's a Gears 1 achievement I want to unlock so that I can unlock the final playable character model in Gears 2 multiplayer, so I popped the first game into my system this week and started off a playthrough on Hardcore difficulty. I finished Act 1 so far, and hopefully someone will jump in with me for some buddy action!

I've been extremely impressed by the post-release DLC support (entirely free to this point) that Burnout Paradise has received over the last year, and all the raving (and my desire for something new to play before/after watching a DVD without having to toss a disc in) finally convinced me to pick it up from the PSN store. I've never played another Burnout before, but it sorta reminds me of a mix of Ridge Racer and GTA's driving engine. It's a free-roaming city street racing game, but you have no goals you have to meet, or anything you really have to do in order to progress, except just have fun.

What's really cool is the (almost) seamless online integration. I can just hit right on the d-pad a couple of times and all of the sudden I'm online and there are a bunch of other players around the city doing things, cooperatively or competitively. I'm in the same city, on the same street as before, only now there are real people driving (a few) of the other cars on the road. I got into a game the other night where a couple of the 8 people had headsets (I don't, on PSN), and they were able to give directions and coordinate with the rest of us to meet up in certain areas and do things to complete some multiplayer challenges. It's good, mindless fun, not something with a million cars and parts you really have to worry over or races you have to practice a whole lot at, like a lot of other racing games.

When I was logging onto the PSN store to get that, I noticed a new PSOne Castlevania up on the store that I'd never played before, and it was only $6, so I impulse bought Castlevania: Chronicles. Turns out this is a port of an old Japanese PC adaptation of the original NES Castlevania. I knew about the game since it came out in 2001, but I'd thought it was just a PSX update of the NES Castlevania. The difference, essentially, is a bunch of extra levels and some tunes that weren't in the NES game. Win-win. Tough game--luckily you can save at the beginning of each level. The graphical fidelity is somewhere between 8- and 16- bit--adequate.

Lastly, I played through missions 2 and 3 in Killzone last night, since Netflix streaming on the 360 was being difficult. As I've said before, it's a classic example of a developer trying to outdo their platform. It's like how Crytek future-proofed Crysis by making it for 2010 machines in 2007. Except Killzone's case is a little dumb when you consider the fact that PS2's aren't upgradeable. Apart from the frame rate, and brain-dead enemies, I think it's a pretty good game. The graphics are pretty impressive at times for a PS2 game, and the weapons are cool. I also like how you can choose to control any of the people in your squad. I played for a bit as the assassin woman, and I just added a new guy with a minigun. More will be written about this one later.

The Dawn Of A New Era

I just ordered my new gaming PC, a Dell Studio XPS, featuring the new Core i7 CPU from Intel, 6 GB DDR3 RAM, Radeon 4850 512 MB GPU, and 640 GB (2x 320) HDD in a RAID 0 configuration. Grand total of about $1650, with the 22'' widescreen monitor and everything. I think that should be sufficient.

I can't wait to get the thing and get on Steam and lose myself in a sea of FPS. I'm already planning to get the Half-Life series, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (or maybe Clear Sky), Far Cry 2, Mirror's Edge, Fallout 3, and Mass Effect. I already have the big Blizzard games and Dead Space. And Warhammer , but I think WoW is enough as far as MMOs go...

Light Week

I didn't play much at all this past week. I put about an hour into Killzone, a couple into Metroid Fusion, and about the same into WoW. I was getting over jet lag part of the time, and the rest of the time making good on my fitness resolution, watching movies and shows on Netflix, and watching the fallout from the EGM closure/massive 1UP layoffs online. EGM used to be so awesome back when I was in high school. You know what else was true of that time? We didn't have the Internet in practically every home in the world where anyone cares about gaming.

If I had to name the one big thing I did, it would be (in WoW) to have finished up all of quests in my level range in the Stonetalon Mountains zone. Next I need to finish up the Ashenvale stuff, and try to catch up on instances, too. I got my dire wolf mount, also, which is cool.

At the top of my list of priorities for completion right now is probably Metroid Fusion, because it'll probably be the quickest and easiest to get through, but also because I've been playing it off and on for god knows how long, and I really need to finish it to be caught up on the (real) Metroid series. They really need to come out with that rumored Metroid Dread for the DS.

My 2008 GOTY

Every site/podcast out there chooses theirs, so I thought I should, too. I'm going to limit this to 2008 games that I actually played in 2008, as opposed to older games I played in 2008 or 2008 games I haven't played yet. You have to draw the line somewhere.

I don't think I ever named a game for 2007, though, so here's that one first: BioShock. Honorable Mention goes to Halo 3.

Without further ado, my game of the year 2008 is: Metal Gear Solid 4. It was completely awesome, and as good a cap to the series and wish fulfillment as could be hoped for. Who could forget Metal Gear on Metal Gear battle, or Snake's agonizing crawl through that microwave tunnel? Unbelievable, I loved it. Pretty good control scheme, even!

Honorable Mention goes to Gears of War 2.

I didn't actually play that many 2008 games in 2008...

WoW Update & Thoughts

It's about all I've been playing while out of town. I've got my Warrior up to 28 now, and I've been exploring a couple of new zones and doing a bunch of quests. My gear is crap, and while that doesn't matter so much since 99% of the time I'm soloing, it means that I kind of suck in groups, and I get my ass handed to me in PvP. The latter could just be that I'm a noob at dueling and ganking, but regardless, I'm looking to correct this.

My WoW gaming, while taking up a lot of time, has been remarkably casual. I've barely done any forum-browsing or database searching in my off-game time. Reading a strategy guide on the plane and around my parents' place is really about it so far; something that is very much in stark contrast to the way I played and obsessed over FFXI. This is probably at least partly due to the fact that so far WoW is primarily a solo experience. I almost never even talk to another player, let alone be required to spend hours LFG just to go grind out some XP. I've kind of felt that this is a double-edged sword, though. What keeps people from getting all the way to the level cap and being totally ignorant of how groups work, or of how to behave in one? FFXI players, for the most part, are damn well trained by the mid to late game.

Just something I was pondering.

2008 Year-End Recap & Thoughts

In 2008, I finished 26 games:

Gears of War 2

Oblivion (Main)

Oblivion (Fighter's Guild)

Oblivion (Mage's Guild)

Oblivion (Thieves' Guild)
Crackdown
Assassin's Creed
Diablo II
New Super Mario Bros.
Mega Man X
Bionic Commando Re-Armed
Braid
Diablo
Shadow of the Colossus
Etrian Odyssey
MGS 4
Puzzle Quest
MGS 2
MGS
CC: FFVII
COD4
Jeanne D'Arc
Rez HD
MGS: PO
Ninja Gaiden Black
RE4: Separate Ways

This is a substantial increase from the 2007 total of 15:

Final Fantasy XI (got 3rd 75, all desired gear, quit)
Final Fantasy XII
Gears of War
Halo
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
Halo 2
Prince of Persia: Sands of Time
Prince of Persia Classic
Dragon Quest VIII
Bioshock
Halo 3 (Heroic & Legendary)
Portal
Yakuza
Rock Band
Resident Evil 4

However, the backlog is still epic, and there is much play left to do. I'm off to a decent start in 2009, though, having finally finished up Diablo II: Lord of Destruction on the first day of the year. My starting to play WoW could affect my overall gaming progress in two ways: it could halt backlog-thinning progress by consuming a large chunk of my playtime, but on the other hand, it could also slow backlog accumulation by consuming a large chunk of my attention, causing me to only go out and buy big releases or games I'm dying to play. This remains to be seen.

I bought a staggering amount of games in 2008, and resold a fair number of them. Many of these were never even opened, though often enough I turned a profit on them, so buying them wasn't all for naught. My goal for the year was to by the end, have a list of completed games at least as long as my pile of shame, and through the magic of "game beaten OR game sold = game removed from pile," I am happy to say that I've been able to do that (...at least until I re-populate the Pile of Shame to account for games bought in 2008 and still not played). For 2009, I'd like to have a list of completed games at least as long as games bought. A lofty goal, to be sure. I'm already up by one, though!

An interesting bit of trivia is that the first game I finished in 2008 was actually expanded content of one I finished in 2007, Separate Ways, the Ada Wong standalone adventure from Resident Evil 4. The trend continues with the first thing I finshed in 2009 being Lord of Destruction, Diablo II's expansion and fifth act.

Now that I've finished up the Diablo series to this point, I'm going to shelve it in favor of more WoW, of course, but also Starcraft. It's high time I educate myself on how to play an RTS at least kind of well. This will be concurrent with making progress on other fronts, as well. I have an embarrassing amount of unplayed DS and PS2 games, and not a few games on the 360/PS3/Wii that I want to play. So, I had a blast in 2008, and here's to a rather enjoyable 2009!

Gears Of War, Fuck Yeah! Comin' Again To Save The Motherfuckin' Day, Yeah!

I just finished the campaign in Gears of War 2 (fuck yeah!). Holy fucking crap! That was awesome. At no point in the game (and I played through a good bit of it twice) did I ever get tired of what I was doing and want to quit. I only ever put the game down because I didn't have time to plow through it all in one sitting. I'd say it's a non-stop thrill ride, but that might imply that that'd be the only summer movie cliche that applies, and that is simply just not the case; it's also the most fun you'll have all summer, the feel-good hit of the season, and the fun for the whole family. But I ask of you, what kind of fucked up family plays Gears of War together? This is hardcore gaming shit, ain't no Wii goddamn bowling. You'll give grandma nightmares.

I got all the way to the end of Gears 1 solo, and then for the life of me I couldn't kill the last guy. I didn't even know he was the last guy, either. I thought he was just some jackass holding me up until my friend Dustin, aka DeeZee, jumped in to play it co-op with me and said, "Damn, you're all the way at the end." We killed him first try, then. No such difficulties (or ambivalence) about Gears 2, though--though the end section not especially difficult, it was absolutely EPIC, and I knew it was the end this time because there's no way they could top that section without 2 more years of dev time and another sequel.

Oh yeah, I played some WoW and Diablo this week, also. I'm getting closer to the end of Lord of Destruction, with my now level 33 Assassin, and I've got my WoW character up to level 26 now. It's definitely way, way more casual of an MMO than FFXI, at least on the way up to endgame. I've only had to group up for a few quests so far, all dungeon instances, and of course those have all been 100% optional. I like to do and see as much as I can, though, and I scored some nice loot that you can't get anywhere else. Not that it matters; I'm sure it'll all be obsoleted twenty times over by the time I get to level 80. Want to see my WoW character? Check this out.

Pretty cool, huh? FFXI never had that. WoW's got achievements, too, which are always fun.

I'm going out of town, to Germany, for the holidays, but I'm taking my MacBook and DS with me, so I should be able to do a little gaming in the downtime and while traveling. Maybe I can finish Metroid Fusion.

The latest game I picked up

So, uh, yeah, I haven't exactly been playing much >_>

Mostly I've been playing Nose To The Grind Stone, with my thesis submission date end of next month. But in my down time, or when I need to space out Zen-like, I do this. Makes me happy. :)

(this is my 3rd attempt ever by the way, the first 2 goes were very chunky)

The Recurring Theme Starts Now

This past week of game time has been me playing a lot of WoW. I have a feeling it's going to be a big part of my gaming for a while to come. I've got my warrior up to level 21 now, and I'm starting to get more accustomed to the game. There are a ton of major differences between this and FFXI, but quite a lot of similarities, also, so while I know what I'm doing in the macro sense, I often don't know how to do it yet in the micro.

I've probably spent 40 hours in the game so far, which is nothing for an MMO, but progress is always coming along at a steady clip. I've only been running around questing in two of the game's extremely large (by comparison to FFXI) zones, and I'm not anywhere near done with them. Today some higher level players ran me through Ragefire Chasm, the first instance I came across. I like the way those are set up; in instances, you can go in and kill stuff, and it stays dead forever, as near as I can tell, or at least until you opt to reset the instance. So you can go in alone or with a few people and chip away at the hordes of monsters before you die, and then come right back and pick up where you left off. I also like the flight routes in the game. It's pretty cool to be flying in real time over the zone below you, seeing mobs and other people down there running around.

The auction house, I'm still trying to figure out. It's not set up like the one in FFXI at all. You actually have to wait the full 24/48/72 hours for your stuff to sell to the highest bidder, unless you put a buy-it-now price on the item. I don't have near the knowledge of the game's economy to dig deep into the AH, but what's cool is that I really don't have to, because when I go to list an item, the game provides me with a good starting price for that item.

Again, 99% of the time I've been playing solo so far, but I can still get most stuff done as long as the quests are green/yellow/orange to me, and are not dungeon (instance) or group quests. I'm paying attention to the quest text and other lore as I go along, and I'm really enjoying it so far.

The only other thing I've played this week is Gears of War 2. I'm up to the beginning of act four in my solo playthrough, and just last night I played some co-op campaign with Necovia, AKA Lonesteban. We played through one of my favorite parts of the game so far, the abandoned research facility where the guys jump out of the glass tubes at you. Chainsaw spree! That's a lot of fun.

For The Horde!

I can recognize the signs of MMO addiction setting in, having been through this once before. There's something about making those numbers go up and making those bars fill, especially in the midst of a huge world with a rich lore. It's a would-be, all-encompassing obsession, an undertow overcome only by clinging to the floating debris of limited free time. As long as the most I can ever devote is a few hours at a time, I should be able to keep my head above the water line. I'm almost to level 16, woot!

Last weekend I plowed through all of the Thieves' guild quest line in Oblivion, leaving only The Dark Brotherhood line that I plan to do sometime later. If you add up all the time on each of my characters, I probably have 130 hours into that game, but oddly, it doesn't feel like I've played it that much. Maybe because that's been over a year and a half or so, but by the time I had 100 hours into FFXII and DQVIII, I felt it. Again, it's amazing how well the world of Cyrodiil is put together. There have been some really cool moments in the quests in the main guild series. I'm expecting great things from Fallout 3 when I get around to that game.

I've been playing Gears of War 2 this week, as well, and I've been blown away. I've made it through the first two of five acts, and I've been continually impressed by the variety of environments I've been through, the set-piece scenarios, and the awesome firefights. There are some caves you are dropped into at the beginning of act two that look absolutely amazing, they're possibly the most gorgeous graphics I've ever seen in a game--it's unreal. Your AI-controlled squadmates seem much more reliable this time around, and maybe it's just my imagination, but even the signature Gears cover mechanic seems improved and not so cumbersome as it was for me before.

It's been a long time since I played the original Gears (I sold my copy a while back), but that game never quite won me over entirely. I sort of went through the whole thing with one eyebrow raised. I can't put my finger on any one thing that they've improved for Gears 2 that has wiped away my skepticism, but there you have it. I can even give myself over to the cheesy '80s action movie dialogue and mid-battle banter, immortal exchanges like this one between rookie gear Carmine and grizzled main character Marcus Fenix:

"Sarge, I heard there are a shitload of locust there."

"More like ten shitloads, rook."

Maybe Gears 2 just hit me at the right time, rubbed me the right way, and I just wasn't as receptive to the original. Now, strangely OCD as I am, I feel like I have to go back and give that game another chance sometime. I'd like get someone to jump into a game of Gears 2 with me (or vice versa) and play the campaign co-op, and I also need to check out the multiplayer some, especially the new Horde mode. So far I only played one of the tutorial matches with bots, which was cool. I had never played anything with bots before.