Just Cuz

The award for the most out of this world crazy, over-the-top game I've played in a while goes to Just Cause 2.

I love the aircraft, and I love how absolutely enormous the game's environment is. I've run around for a couple of hours and have probably seen about 5%-10% of the landmass, and that includes flying over it in planes and helicopters!

There's also a really cool contrast between creating tons of chaos in the form of towering explosions and then jumping off a cliff and peacefully para-sailing just wherever your whims take you. Missions pop up all over the place and can be done in any order. The game actually encourages you to run around and do whatever by doling out rewards and unlocking story missions based on how many side things you do (mostly destroying government infrastructure). It's great to jump into and mess around with such a huge and good looking open world.

Train, Roll On

I have been very schizophrenic about gaming lately. I'm all over the place here, getting in as many off-the-cuff game playing sessions as possible before the imminent birth of my first child. This all has got me thinking about the backlog,and I'm making a small change to my little system. I'm removing games from the Pile of Shame once I've played them at all, now. Otherwise, it gets bogged down with games that I have tried once and may never get around to playing again. I can't force myself to finish everything, or even prequels to other games I intend to play, like say, finishing Max Payne before trying part 2 or 3.

This doesn't mean I'm considering them complete or even given fair time for appraisal, it just means I got the shrinkwrap off or installed the game and checked it out for a bit. Take a look at the revised pile now, and you'll agree there are plenty of games in there even after culling the ones I'd played before--many of which I do intend to play more of! They're just not really all that shameful, anymore.

I've got a ton of games to write about playing, including WipeOut HD, Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit, Frozen Synapse, Quake, Batman: Arkham Asylum, and Just Cause 2, but unfortunately they'll have to wait until later, when I have more time to blog! It's time to go out for Sunday brunch, now.

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

I've completed the game twice now. The second time was really only the second half of the game replayed to take the alternate path, but altogether I probably spent 40 hours with the game, though I have no way of verifying that estimation. This is very likely my game of the year. No other 2011 release has been or is as highly anticipated by me as The Witcher 2, and it delivered on all counts.

Assassins of Kings not only took what was great about The Witcher and ran with it, but completely revamped the combat system to great effect. It was pretty difficult at the beginning of the game (a patch in the time since I last played the prologue and first chapter did some balancing), but after getting the hang of it and investing some skill points into the various development trees, I became a formidable master swordsman/mage/alchemist hybrid.

The role-playing choices to be made in the Witcher games absolutely shame anything I've seen in any other games. Not only are the consequences truly meaningful to the development of the game's plot, the choices are rarely set up in a neat black/white good/evil dichotomy, and it's almost never immediately obvious what the ramifications of a choice will be. There is no spectrum on which your character mathematically drifts one way or the other depending on these choices; there is only the often harsh realization that a decision you made hours of playtime ago has just now come back around to you through an elaborate chain of cause and effect.

One key decision near the end of chapter 1 completely changes the plot, availability of quests, and mission objectives for the rest of the game, not to mention many of the locations visited in chapter 2. This is the point from which I went back and replayed from after finishing the game initially. Without spoiling too much, you choose to align (but not necessarily ally) yourself with either the elvish guerilla Iorveth or the vengeful special forces commander Vernon Roche and where you are and what side of the conflict you are on in chapter 2 plays out accordingly.

I can't imagine how CD Projekt Red will be able to carry over all 16 possible end-game world states to The Witcher 3. Most likely they will leave behind entirely many of the characters of this game. The overall political situation of the world of the game is pretty much the same at the ending of the game no matter what choices you make, but major characters (to this story) live or die, and individual kingdoms may be with or without a monarch or at peace or at war. Geralt though, is likely bound in the same direction with the same objective no matter how the saga of the kingslayers has played out. The ending of the first game in the series was similar; no matter who you allied with, Geralt's job was done and he was leaving the kingdom with a fat coin purse when things got real complicated all of a sudden. Something ends, something begins, they said, and if I had to guess the same is true here.

I just hope it's not a 4 year wait for the next game in the series. The Witcher 2 uses a new engine that the developers built specifically for this game, and so now that that groundwork is laid, here's hoping they can get The Witcher 3 done in closer to 2 or 3 years. The way the series is built so far, there is an overarching story arc of Geralt recovering lost memories of his adventures before the events of the games (including those that happened in the popular series of Witcher novels that the games were inspired by), and each game is a self-contained story of the witcher becoming embroiled in grand schemes and political maneuvering while just trying to do his profession (monster slayer for hire with a peculiar warrior's moral code) and earn some coin.

Two games in, and The Witcher has become one of my favorite series in gaming, and Geralt himself one of my favorite characters, right up there with the likes Solid/Naked Snake, Ezio Auditore, FemShep, and the cast of Uncharted. The wait begins for the next entry!

Interlude - E3 2011 Day 1

So, today Nintendo announced the Wii U. I don't really know what to say about it, other than time will tell. I do think it faces a bit of an identity crisis, like Nintendo is somehow trying to take all their Blue Ocean success and fold it back into the hardcore game space. Or rather, trying to fold us hardcore types back into the Nintendo space. I think they'll have to do more than just secure ports of all the hot games already coming to the other platforms, though.

Personally, Nintendo properties just don't connect with me anymore. Sure, Mario is fun here and there, but nothing they put out is liable to keep me interested very long, if it catches my eye in the first place. What would make me interested in buying a Wii U? Well, the lower the price, the lower that bar goes, I suppose. At $199 I might get it just to keep up with my Virtual Console purchases, assuming they'll carry over. That controller, though... I really don't know what to even think of the thing.

I saw some video of Uncharted: Golden Abyss today, which was of course, PS Vita video. It looked good. I don't know that the business prospects of the Vita are worth a damn, but it looks like a desirable gadget, at the very least. I've seen an OLED TV screen before at my local Sony store, and it looked amazing. I'm excited to see a Vita up close and personal.

Interlude - E3 2011 Day 0

So today was the first day of this year's round of E3 bombshells.

Things started off pretty slow, as far as I'm concerned, with Microsoft lobbing softballs to the blue ocean crowd. It seems like 90% of what they talked about was Kinect trash. There's a half-hearted Halo HD remake coming out this fall, and Halo 4 is to be released late next year. Good thing they teased it now, huh?

There were also conferences by EA and Ubisoft today, so we learned a bit more about games I am excited about: Mass Effect 3, Battlefield 3, and Assassin's Creed Revelations. I hope EA's Origin business is as benign and unobtrusive as Ubisoft's U-play.

Sony seems to have won the day with the announcement that the NGP, now the Vita, will come in a $250 model as well as a $300 3G enabled one. People also seem excited by Uncharted, "transfarring," and cloud save synching like was shown with the game Ruin. I might like a Vita, myself. They'll need to show me the software first, of course. Dust 514, the MMOFPS by CCP that will somehow link to their incredibly interesting EVE Online, was also briefly shown. I've been interested in this one since it was announced quite some time ago. Longtime readers may remember that I've tried a couple of times to penetrate EVE, but just couldn't hack it. The interest is there, but not the will, time, or dedication. Maybe Dust will be the thing.

I just watched a bit of Skyrim being played by the game's director, Todd Howard. It looks good, like a modernized Oblivion. The dragons look especially cool.

Of the new, previously unannounced games to be revealed today, only Halo 4 and Far Cry 3 are of much interest. Halo 4 is a given, and far out. Far Cry 3 may also be far out, but the video shown today was, incredibly, all in-game, and it looked awesome. I enjoyed the hell out of Far Cry 2, flawed as it was. If FC3 is able to retain the incredible atmosphere and improve upon some of 2's weak points, it could be an amazing game. I want to remain skeptical, but you can't deny the fact that when almost every other game shown was nothing but CG, we saw a solid 7-8 minutes of actual play here, and it looked very good.

Making This A Thing Again

Blogging has really gotten away from me lately. I blame my job. I hardly have time to trawl the RSS feeds or NeoGAF anymore, much less wax on and on about games. Fortunate then, that I haven't been playing a hell of a lot new or different in the last month. I think it really only amounts to four games.

Bioshock 2 was the last Resolution pick I managed to get to. I played a couple of hours, and was really enjoying it. All the hullabaloo surrounding the original game was about the plot and all it's significance and this and that and  zzzzzz.... did everyone forget how much fun it was? Bioshock 2 is here to remind you. I'm excited to go back and play more, and what's more, the Minerva's Den DLC was recently released for the PC version, which I'm playing. I'll probably have to pick that up--again, as I bought it for the 360 version before catching a RROD to the console's face.

I also finally got around to finishing up S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Now that's a great open-world shooter. It's got some light role-play elements to it as far as choosing which missions to take and choosing who to ally yourself with, and it's got a great big expansive world to run around in and tons of dynamic stuff happening everywhere you go. It's also steeped in atmosphere unlike what you get with many other games.

Also steeped in its own very specific atmosphere is the PC adventure game Blade Runner. A Call Of Podcast listener was kind enough to send me a copy of this hard-to-find gem, and it's quite a find. If you can get it to run on a modern system, it still looks pretty good, and of course the sound is excellent and very reminiscent of the movie. Again I only got to play it for an hour or two, but I was instantly hooked, and mean to get back to it as soon as possible, perhaps when my next game relenquishes its hold on me.

Yes, the long-awaited sequel to The Witcher is out, and I have played it. I have completed it, and gone back to play more. It's good. Very good, in fact, and I'll write more about it, and in detail, in my next entry, due soon-ish.

Falling Behind

Man, it's like I haven't played anything over the last couple of weeks. Well, that's not exactly true. I did manage to get through the Portal 2 co-op mode with a friend. That was pretty fun. I tooled around in Portal 1 some, also. I guess Valve wasn't doing Steam Cloud back when I played through it on PC the first time, because I didn't have any saves or anything for it when I loaded it back up. That was well over two years ago, though. I'm not sure when they began the cloud thing. I need to finish up a playthrough to unlock all the challenge rooms and such. I'll bet my playthrough of Half-Life: Source is lost, too. Steam shows me having played 5 hours of that game, but I finished it, so something is off, there. Maybe they started tracking times when I was midway through.

So the resolution games for the last couple of weeks have been Sniper Elite, which I played about an hour of--pretty cool so far, very deliberate--and Trine, which I played about 45 minutes of just last night--also pretty cool, but no saving mid level? WTF? I'll need to replay almost all of that level, now.

I've been sick and otherwise indisposed lately, so I haven't played anything else but some Team Fortress 2. It's the perfect game to mess around in and kill off a couple of podcasts. Plus, I've been meaning to put more time into it forever to try out all the classes really well and to get a bunch of items. I found my second Gunslinger arm for the Engineer yesterday. I already have a vintage one though, so someone hit me up if you want a trade!

Resolve

A lot of the games I've been playing lately are ones that have been selected by Resolution on Call Of Podcast, or are on my short list of "must finish" games that I would like to knock out before my baby is due this summer.

Portal 2 was on that list, and when it was released last week, I played through it as quick as I could across three evenings. I only made it through the single-player portion, but hope to tackle the co-op soon. I had a great time with it, just like the first. I'll refrain from talking any more about it, because just look at the internet this week. It's lousy with Portal 2 talk.

I've also been playing a lot of STALKER, another game on that short list. I think I've made some pretty good progress, such that I'm about 2/3 to 3/4 of the way through it now. Maybe I can finish that game off this week, and then move on to Fallout 2 before The Witcher 2 is released. I've been live-tweeting my playthrough with the hashtag "#stalk3r," because there's constantly something cool and interesting happening in the Zone.

For Resolution, I've dug into Ryu Ga Gotoku 3 and Max Payne. Both are pretty good, and I'll carry on playing RGG3 to keep up my language practice and because I'm a fan of the series. With Max Payne, I came to a good stopping point. Maybe I'll come back to it eventually.

In the few days leading up to Portal 2's release, you could play any of the "potato sack" indie games to speed along its release. I contributed by checking out Super Meat Boy briefly (really needed a pad for this), and playing a couple of hours in Killing Floor, which plays kind of like a cross between the end scene of a Left 4 Dead scenario and Counter-Strike. You get one life per round, and kills earn you money you can spend to upgrade your arsenal between rounds. It's pretty simple, and fun.

Lost Count

I can't remember if I already subtracted 2 completions from my total for ordering Portal 2 from Amazon. Going off my list of completed/bought for 2011, though, I should still have 4 banked, being that I'm at 8 games beaten, and only 2 bought for over $25. I think what happened was that I ordered the game, took off 2 completions, but didn't add it to the pile o' treasure because I wouldn't receive it for a while. Yeah, lets roll with that. So now, now that I've cancelled that order, I can refund those 2 completions to bring me back up to 4. I'm just going to go and buy the game via Steam when I get home, anyway. When in doubt, err in your own favor, that's what I always say. This way I already have stocked the 2 completions I'll need to spend on The Witcher 2, my most anticipated game of 2011.

Actually, I think the token system has served its purpose well, having curbed my game acquisitions by a good amount. The key seems to be only buying a game when you are about to play it, unless it's a screaming 75% off deal or something. I may scrap that whole policy if I keep going at this rate, since it wouldn't be necessary, and I apparently can't keep count, anyway!

Better Use Of My Time

It occurred to me while playing Killzone 2 this past week that I didn't really like the campaign, and I wasn't going to waste anymore time with it. We talked about it on the last Call Of Podcast (Dad Man Walking), but I've got a baby on the way, and I'm looking at a drastic drop in the amount of free time I have for gaming. It's already started in a lot of ways. We're doing baby shopping, doctor visits, birthing classes, and the whole nine yards. Anyway, I've got games I figure are more fun--indeed, more important--to play. I was prompted to make a short list of "must complete" games that I'm going to focus on over the next several weeks before the baby is due (at the end of June). Said list:

STALKER
Fallout 2
Demon's Souls
Deus Ex
Portal 2
The Witcher 2

I'm well into the first 3, and the second 3 are my preliminary choices for last major pre-baby completion status. It's impossible to say how much time I'll have to play games in the second half of the year, but I'm betting it won't be a hell of a lot, and thus this initiative.

I've kicked off by jumping back into STALKER last night, and I'm planning a separate play diary of that, maybe in further blog posts here, or on twitter.

Otherwise, I spent the majority of my time gaming since the last post playing Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. I enjoyed the hell out of that game. As of this writing, I have collected every feather, every flag, and every treasure. I've finished every shop quest and own every piece of equipment and every piece of real estate available for purchase in the game. I've done every mission there is in the game, save two that were exclusive to the uber deluxe collector's edition of the game (I have done the Copernico missions that were exclusive to my PS3 copy of the game). I've finished the DLC, solved all of the glyph puzzles and played the Truth mission, and basically have seen all there is to see in the game.  I've only played about an hour of the multiplayer yet, though, and have done practically none of the VR missions.  There are also a couple of Ezio skins I haven't unlocked (Raiden from MGS4, and the Desmond skin). I got my money's worth, though, no doubt.

On a bit of a whim, I finally decided to load up X-Com: UFO Defense. It's a classic, as anyone who was gaming on PC in the early 90's will tell you. At first brush, it's a whole lot deeper than I was expecting, and I'll really need to sit down and get into it at some point in the future. It looks like it could be pretty addictive.

 

Blogging Backlog!

I've been so busy lately that I haven't gotten around to a proper post here in almost a month! I couldn't even begin to update with detailed impressions on everything I've been playing in the interim; the best place to as much as is available on that front is the latest episode of Call Of Podcast.

As far as the backlog goes, though, I think I'm doing pretty well. Thus far in 2011 I've bought pretty few games, and have been plowing through them at a great pace. I modified my game token policy to apply to games $25 and over to bring the letter of the law more in tune with the spirit of the law, as it were. I had a problem last year treating a $20 Bayonetta the same as a $60 Halo or what have you. My reasoning is that games typically hit prices ranging from $10 to $25 or $30 to $60, and also that anything over $25 is usually closer to that higher range, like $27.99 or $29.99. Also, once a certain caliber of game hits $20 or $25, it may not ever go any lower, even used. I was never going to blow a token on a $20 Darksiders, but at the same time, I might never be able to find it for $10 or $15. Again, it's the spirit of the law, not the letter, that matters to me here.

My intake of fresh, new games is probably going to end up around one a month this year. I had nothing in January, Tactics Ogre for February, Total War: Shogun 2 for March, and I'm looking at Portal 2 for April, and Witcher 2 for May. It's tough to say, after that, but I'm thinking there'll be Assassin's Creed 3 in November or December. We'll probably see the rest of this list fleshed out come E3. I'll probably want the new Deus Ex whenever that's released, and Battlefield 3, most definitely. Can't forget Skyrim, either. Oh, and Mass Effect 3. Sigh. That's a lot of completion tokens I need to accrue. And with a baby on the way, no less!

The past few weeks have been spotty in terms of Resolution, but with the schedule returning to normal this week, I should be able to pick it up again with Killzone 2. Other tasks lurking near the top of the pile are finishing Dead Space, Fallout 2, STALKER, and Nehrim. Then I need to play Red Dead, Batman, Darksiders, and the list goes on.

I finished Prince of Persia and Assassin's Creed Brotherhood most recently. PoP was merely OK, but ACB is awesome. I'm continuing to play it even after having finished up the main plot threads. There is a hell of a lot of content in there, and a whole big-ass multi-player mode, to boot!

I've had a resurgence in League of Legends lately, and I've been playing a lot of that using the champion Olaf, who is a melee dps/lifesteal type of guy with relatively high survivability and strength. It's a lot of fun. LoL still feels like a 80% great game, though. It needs a much better front end, and some of the champions and art are just lame. I can't wait to see what Valve has up their sleeve with DOTA 2. This genre needs to be cracked wide open, and Riot don't seem to be hitting that critical mass; as phenomenal a success as LoL apparently is, it's still very much an underground type of thing that only rarely is discussed even in hardcore gaming circles.

On the subject of real-time strategy, Total War: Shogun 2 was released last week, to the complete bafflement of yours truly. Perhaps not complete, but a lot of bafflement. I made it through a couple of tutorials well enough, but the third stands undefeated yet, a wall to my progress in learning the game. I haven't had just a hell of a lot of time with it yet, though, and I'm a slow learner when it comes to RTS. I need to make more time to sink my teeth into this game. The art and period atmosphere is magnificent.

I had a business trip to Chicago this week, and plenty of time on planes and in the hotel room to enjoy some Tactics Ogre. This is really a great game. Differences from FFT are starting to make themselves more apparent, now, chief among them the amount of thought that has to go into just navigating the battlefields and orienting your troops. It's much easier to have them clumped up and bottlenecked when you're working with up to 12 units instead of 5 or 6 like in FFT. The PSP remake of this game is just chock-full of greatness like the CHARIOT and WORLD tarot, leveling of classes rather than units, and the Warren Report, which may have been in the original. The plot also hinges much more on political machinations than supernatural artifacts of power, which is cool. If you still own a PSP, go buy this masterpiece.

Speaking of still owning a piece of hardware, I may sell my Wii. I can live without it, and have an interested party.

Games I Want To Go Play Right Now

League of Legends
Dawn of War II, The Last Stand
Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood
Dead Space
Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Vietnam
Team Fortress 2

Work sucks!

Here are some things I've been playing recently:
Prince of Persia (done)
League of Legends (swapped mains twice now)
Dead Space (at Ch. 7 now)
Recettear (about 3 hours)
AC:B (just checked out multi for a bit)
Tactics Ogre (still early in Ch. 2)

I'll have more in-depth impressions later, on the next Call Of Podcast.

Platform Joy

I've been doing a lot of platform jumping and navigating over the last week, having barreled through the entirety of VVVVVV in all it's glory, and jumping into a game I recently took an interest in, Prince of Persia (the 2008 release). My cause for playing the latter is having heard about it shunting combat off to the side, or rather, reducing its frequency and emphasis in the game to a level more fitting of its place in an adventure game--that is, not a combat-focused action game.

My major gripes with Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and both Uncharted games thus far are that the combat, in each case, drags the game down. I didn't show up for overlong, frustrating, not-very-well-done fighting sequences. I came for the adventure aspects; the exploration, navigation, puzzling--the fun bits. So far, I'm having a good time with PoP 2008. It's pretty straight forward and not terribly challenging, but so what? It's a good game to chill out with because the smoothness with which the prince can move around the attractive open world is very fluid and relaxing. I'm around a quarter of the way through it, I think. I'm thinking I might pick up the epilogue DLC if I'm still feeling it by the time I get to the end.  I only paid about $10 for the full disc, used, so I may kick $10 to Ubisoft to support this game, which I feel like probably wasn't a great success.

VVVVVV was the Resolution game for last week, and I got right through it and collected every shiny trinket in about 5 hours over 3-4 days.  I really like this game. I love the art and the retro C64 feel to it. I also love the music, which is chiptune and also retro sounding, but featuring fully modern production values. It is an amazing soundtrack, tickling my nostalgia bone just right. The game itself is a big open world hub with linear stages sprinkled throughout, so it's kind of Super Metroid like, except that you can go anywhere from the word go, and there are no power-ups of any kind. Start to finish, you only ever use three buttons, left, right, and gravity-flip. It's a hardcore old-school platformer in a lot of ways. There aren't really any enemies, only obstacles and gauntlets to navigate around. Anyway, VVVVVV comes highly recommended. I think I got this for $2.50 on Steam, though I also bought the soundtrack for $4 later on.

I jumped back into League of Legends this week, trying out a new champion, Pantheon, the Spartan-alike warrior with a spear and buckler. I am complete garbage at this game, and my team loses more often than not, but somehow I still end up having fun playing. I think I am now 2/5 or so with this character, and more like 1/6 in terms of games where I felt like I played worth a damn. Like I said, though, it is fun to play. I wonder how Valve's DOTA2 will compare. I know that is going to be a lot more like DOTA itself, so it may end up being less accessible than LOL, which would be weird, but then, I guess Counter-Strike is also a Valve game.

Elsewhere, I've been plugging along at Tactics Ogre. I feel like every great thing I want to say about this game I have already said in the past about Final Fantasy Tactics, but don't let my silence lie, this is a fantastic game, and a must-buy if you a) still own a PSP, and b) like turn-based tactical combat games. An appreciation for extreme political depth and subterfuge is also a plus. I got through another chapter of Dead Space, too! That puts me at Chapter 6.

Never A Dull Moment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Revenge of the Consoles

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

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

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

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

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

Death Comes For Us All, My Friend. Requiesquat En Pace.

Today I laid to rest a good friend who gave me much joy and satisfaction over the last 4 years, my Xbox 360. Yes, it was taken by the RROD, out of nowhere and with no warning signs.  Here one day, gone the next.  We had some times, though, from Halo: Combat Evolved and Oblivion to Halo: Reach and Assassin's Creed II, some great times, indeed.

Fortunately, I had already beaten Assassin's Creed II, and with over 30 hours on the clock, I was just hunting down the last 15ish feathers in the game and only about 4 achievements away from the full 1000 points.  I was sure I was going to finish that off tonight, and it would have been a brilliant end to my time with a brilliant game, but alas. The pezzo di merde kicked the bucket! Four years is a hell of a long time to get out of an old model 360, though, so I can't grouse too much.

Assassin's Creed II is an incredible game.  I loved every minute of it, and it's one of a very select group that I wanted to keep playing even after finishing the story.  I will very much be looking forward to playing Brotherhood while I attend to some other games on my PS3 and PC, primarily.  Now newly Xbox-less, I'm going to hold out as long as I possibly can before buying one of the new systems.  The guys at Microsoft offered to fix my console for about $100, but meh. Meh, I said, ambivalently.

There is no shortage of gaming to be had on my PS3, though.  I've got the aforementioned Assassin's Creed Brotherhood and Red Dead Redemption for the system, as well as a bevy of PS3 exclusive titles to keep me busy.  And you know, 2011 is looking a lot more like a Sony year than a MS year as far as exclusives go!

I haven't played much but ACII over the past couple of weeks, but I did spend a little time with New Super Mario Bros. Wii for Resolution.  Yep, it's a Mario game.  It's a lot like the DS one.  I finished up Metro 2033 from the week before, and enjoyed that a good bit, which lead to me playing some more STALKER a few days later, for the first time in a while.  I'll finish that game in good time.  It's my new Far Cry 2.  Elsewhere, a kind listener to Call Of Podcast gifted me a copy of Europa Universalis III over Steam.  A blog post wouldn't do that game justice; a master's thesis probably wouldn't, either! Suffice it to say that it's an incredibly deep strategy game where you manage one nation through several hundred years around and during the Renaissance.  It's way over my head, but it's pretty nice to load the game up and listen to the music whilst trying to make sense of the menus and available options.

Heading Into Another Weekend! Punctuation!

My Resolution feature for Call Of Podcast has been going well.  Last week I began Starcraft: Brood War, and this week I've been playing Metro 2033.  I have a feeling a lot of these games are going to fall by the wayside, but some will grab me and/or be short enough to finish, and I think Metro will be one of those.  Brood War, on the other hand... well, it'll be a while.

Metro 2033's closest analogue in my mind is probably Half-Life, but Call of Duty is a good comparison, too; it's just that the set pieces aren't so bombastic as your typical CoD.  I suspect Metro has a ton in common with Half-Life 2, but I haven't played that game yet! Get your Resolution votes in today!  The visuals in Metro are damned good, even set to low so that it'll run at a decent framerate in 1080p (bumped down from my usual 2048x1152, also to help the framerate) on my 4850 512mb.  I'm going to need to upgrade the GPU in my PC before anything, it seems.  I like the game well enough, but it's not really blowing me away.  The atmosphere is there, and pretty unique, but the combat could use some work.  Humans take way too many shots to go down, and the mutants all behave like Doom pinky demons--they charge you, and that's about it.  There are other nits to pick with Metro (the UI is bad, enemies need more dialogue barks), but I like the game for what it's trying to be, and where it does succeed.

Brood War is very good, and very hard.  It's Starcraft for veterans, which I guess I qualify as, but only just barely!  The game is rock-solid.  Rock-solid as in rocks to break yourself on like an ocean wave.  Over and over and over, until, particle by particle, you can erode bits and pieces of the cliff face away, and over eons make progress inland.

I can't seem to play Assassin's Creed 2 in anything other than 4 hour chunks.  There is just so much to do in this game!   I'm in the middle of the fifth DNA sequence of like 16 or something--I keep getting sidetracked doing optional missions of 100 stripes.  I have already fully upgraded the Villa as far as renovations go, I just need to collect all of the art and weapons and feathers and stuff like that.  The feathers, at least, will probably never happen, but the rest may.  This is a very playable game.

Rolling Start 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2010 Game Of The Year & Recap

My game of 2010:  Mass Effect 2
Runner-up: Castlevania: Lords Of Shadow

I took down 23 games in 2010, which is pretty good, I think, though I know I could have done better.

Games finished in 2010:
Bayonetta
Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines
The Witcher
Civilization V
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow
Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions
Starcraft (Protoss)
Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker
Alien Swarm
Call of Duty
inFAMOUS
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
Super Mario Galaxy
Planescape: Torment
Torchlight
Starcraft (Zerg)
UniWar
God of War
Far Cry 2
Mass Effect 2
Vagrant Story
Yakuza 2
Metroid: Zero Mission

Past years totals:
2009: 19
2008: 26
2007: 15

I've got a big 2011 ahead; in addition to having a baby, I'm going to be doing more writing and job hunting on the side, so I'm going to go ahead and set a more realistic goal of finishing one game a month on average.  This will of course mean focusing more on games I want to complete, but I'm sure I'll get plenty of variety in there.  Also, with the epic amount of games I bought in 2010 (around 120!), I need to work on both playing a bunch of those, and buying less overall.

I'm going forward with 2 out, 1 in, with indulgences for games under $20, but I do plan to be more selective, considering my massive, incredible backlog of games.  Help me thin out the pile by voting for games I'll play in the Resolution feature of Call Of Podcast!

Happy 2011, everyone!

What Am I Doing?

Yeah, I still have yet to finish any of the games I listed in my last post.  I won't even list all the games I bought, though.  In my defense, they were all ultra-cheap.  Maybe I should take drastic measures for 2011, like limiting myself to buying one game a month, or buying everything I want now (no restrictions) and then closing the wallet 100% for 2011.  That would be tough.

Well, maybe my current system will work.  I've eased the cutoff price up to $20 because I was tired of debating whether or not to spend completion tokens on $13 or $15 games. I figure once a current-gen console game hits $20, it won't go much lower unless it's a real turd or mega-bomb.  Take for instance a by all accounts good game, Darksiders.  That game has been $30 and then $20 for a while now, but I've yet to see it get near $10, whereas some supposedly big releases this year that flopped I've seen on sale in the $5-$10 range, and I don't even mean on Steam!

So, I don't really know what I'm ultimately going to do with this whole game buying/playing balancing act, but for now I'll say 2 completions earn 1 purchase for games over $20, I guess.  I started at 1 for 1 above $10, but this may be a better balance as far as inflow and outflow.

Enough of that--games! I've been busy playing a whole host of stuff in the last few weeks, and that's what counts.  I got a new big-screen TV to game on, and that's caused me to mix things up some, as well.
I had a slight Monster Hunter resurgence on the Wii, playing a bunch more online and encountering several new big monsters I'd never fought before.  It's a great game, and a lot of fun.  Why the hell is it shackled to portables and hobbled, barely-online enabled systems.  Why bother with huge fail bucket projects like Lost Planet 2 when an HD Monster Hunter would be a sure fire success in Japan at the very least, and could crack the west wide open for Capcom?

I also returned to Bayonetta one night last week, to pick up where I left off a few months back.  I was pretty confused, having forgotten a lot of how the combat system flows and how to handle different enemy types.  Mixing up the weapons I used helped some.  I only went through one chapter, though, and I'll be needing to see to that again soon, to continue on and hopefully finish the game up before New Year's.  Bayo is a really fun game, but I just have so much else I'm more interested in that it's hard to get around to.  Yeah, life is tough in these hard times.

I've been playing a lot of Fallout, also.  I'm more acclimated to it now, and I've made some good progress.  I actually completed the first major quest, which is to find a new water chip to replace the one in the main character's home vault.  You're given a deadline of 150 in-game days in which to accomplish this, or the water runs out in your vault, everyone dies, and it's game over.  In my travels to find a replacement, though, I started to wonder if living underground in vaults is the best thing for survivors in the wasteland.  There is definitely life above ground, dangerous as it is up there.  I half expected the water chip quest to be the entirety of the main quest line of the game, and after finishing that up the rest of the world just being there to run around in and do as you will, but no, there is more to it than that.  I guess this was before the days of open world games as we know them, now.  No, my next task is to hunt down whoever or whatever is behind the too-rapid growth in the super-mutant population, and stop whatever they are doing.  I believe I ran into some of this faction in my search for the water chip, but when I return to where I met them now, circumstances have changed, and I'm attacked on sight, so I'm thinking about going to someone else for help, perhaps the Brotherhood of Steel.  I'm definitely getting into this game.

Another game I've been playing a big chunk of is Dawn of War II.  I have no way of really knowing how far into the game I am, but I'm estimating maybe halfway.  I keep performing well enough on missions to deploy an extra time each day, which as far as I can work out, is allowing me to pursue optional objectives in addition to playing out the main campaign.  My squads of Space Marines are all around levels 12-14, currently, and Wargear drops are plentiful on each sortie. This game is a ton of fun to play, but the mission structure makes it a little too easy to stop playing.  The missions can get pretty intense when you are essentially controlling 4 individual Diablo characters at once against hordes of enemies and boss encounters.  It's too easy to just walk away after one or two quick missions, especially playing near bed-time, when I don't want to get too amped up.  I really, really like this game, though.  I already own the first expansion, Chaos Rising, and the next, Retribution, is a sure purchase next year.

The recent announcement of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim made me really want to go back and play some more Oblivion (TES IV), so I found myself re-installing it this past Sunday.  I still have all of the Shivering Isles content unplayed, and it may remain that way, because now that I've played the total conversion mod Nehrim, I don't think I want to go back to the vanilla game.  The Nehrim designers, who also made total conversions for TES III: Morrowind, I'm given to understand, have taken Oblivion, broken it down into its constituent parts, and reassembled from them an entirely new world with its own mythology, creating an almost all-new RPG.  Sure, all of the building blocks are familiar, but entire systems have been overhauled to address some of the more common complaints players of Oblivion had, and the result is a game that I feel comfortable in saying is just better, mechanically.

Oblivion featured some odd, almost experimental design decisions.  Everywhere you went, monsters and loot were basically level-synched to your character, which allowed for total freedom in exploring the world, but meant that you would never really find anything all that exciting when you did.  You never found a super bad ass sword that made you entirely overpowered, you only found the sword that was balanced to be pretty decent vs the enemies who were balanced to put up not too much of a fight.  This all meant that leveling up in general felt pretty meaningless.  If you leveled, so did everyone else.  You would run into situations where random bandits on the roads would be wearing the same high level armor that you were.  Gaining new abilities never seemed to make you more powerful, only give you more variety in what you could do.

Nehrim fixes this by just going back to a more conventional setup where enemies are assigned static levels, and areas are populated with enemies and loot of a certain range of levels.  All of the sudden, combat and exploration are both more exciting, making for a better game, overall.  It doesn't stop there, though, they have overhauled the inventory and standard UI, also, making them more functional and PC-friendly.  Oblivion was basically a console port, and the inventory, UI, and FOV really reflect that. Nehrim helps out in those areas.  The map in the original game was a real pain to use, and the guys behind this mod have done a lot to improve on that, too.  You can still definitely see Oblivion's flaws poking out, but Nehrim tries it's best to smooth them over.

So that's what Nehrim is mechanically, but how does it play, you ask?  Well, it's of course a first person RPG, like Oblivion, focused on melee/ranged/magic combat and character growth featuring an open world and a ton of quests, all optional after the first couple of hours.  The plot is that you are a monk who has grown up in an abbey, and you receive a mysterious letter telling you that your life is in danger unless you show up to meet the sender at an old abandoned mine, and to come alone and tell no one. Upon arrival, you are attacked by trolls living in the mine, fall through some floor boards to the lower levels, and have to find your way out again, encountering other recipients of the same mysterious letter, most already killed by the trolls.  When you finally find your way back to the entrance of the mine, you are alone, and arrive to find a powerful mage torching a pack of trolls.  This mage explains that he was the one who asked you there, along with several other candidates, but of course did not expect the trolls or for all the other candidates to be killed.  Turns out, a secret brotherhood of mages (secret to avoid persecution in the magic-fearing kingdom) have been watching you and these other candidates for some time, and have decided you are fit of character and natural ability to join them.  It's literally an offer you can't refuse; they'll kill you if you do.  You are given a forged letter announcing your conscription into the army of the kingdom for some far-off war, and told to give it to the head of the monks at your abbey, and then to meet with the mage again in a nearby village.  The mage disappears, leaving you to your own devices.  This is basically where the game opens up.  You'll have to do a few little quests before you can leave the encampment surrounding the mine, which is under attack by a rogue group of mages (different from the group that has just recruited you, by their robes), but after that you're free to go out and explore the world and do as you will.

I'm following the main quest line so far, with a few diversions into caves and ruins I've discovered, and random side quests to uncover more about my character's past pre-Abbey.  I've been playing for about 5 hours, so far, and really enjoying Nehrim so far.  If you have a copy of the PC version of Oblivion (retail or Steam, either way), and you want to breathe some new life into it, definitely check out this total conversion, which basically amounts to a whole new 50+ hour RPG, and completely free, of course!