Unfortunately, I’m kind of getting bored of it already. The combat in it is actually pretty decent, in that it’s not just spray-n-pray; you have to conserve ammo, wait for opportunities, use the slo-mo ability effectively, not take on too many at once, etc… It’s just that the environments have been so bland so far. I’m something like four chapters in, and it’s just been either a bunch of office building hallways and rooms, or your typical industrial pipes and walkways. It’s not particularly scary, either. There are sudden flashes of other scenes, or you’re suddenly dumped in a ‘cutscene’ that obviously isn’t really happening, but none of it’s actually frightening. And you can tell where the story is going from a mile away.

I’ll probably play a bit more of it, just to see if it picks up any, and it’ll probably be short anyway, but if it doesn’t then I might just abandon this one.

Right after I finished the Mafia 2 main story, they released the first DLC pack, Jimmy’s Vendetta, which adds a bunch of free-roam missions like you’d expect from a GTA-ish game. It’s unfortunate that they’ve chopped the game up like this, but I’m invested this far into it, may as well get a little bit more fun out of it…

I’m about halfway through it now, and most of the missions haven’t been very difficult, but Paddy Wagon must have taken me 20+ attempts before I could finally beat it. You get mobbed by so many enemies, many with machine guns, that just surviving the fights is difficult, especially with enemies approaching from multiple directions. I eventually beat it by luring a cop car along with me to the final fight, and they helped thin out the enemies.

Overall though, Jimmy’s Vendetta feels…soulless. The missions are fun, and it’s nice to have more to do, but there’s very little extra voicing (just some generic environmental responses), no mid-mission chatter, nobody ever comes along or helps you out, the mission intro is just a page of text… It just doesn’t feel right.

WoW surprised everyone by releasing a bit of pre-Cataclysm content with an event in Durotar about the trolls retaking the Echo Isles. No real challenge to it, but it was still interesting, and I did it on both of my 80s for the achievement (and my 40 mage, but he couldn’t do the final quest for the achievement).

I briefly played Puzzle Quest 2, but only long enough to get through the tutorials in the first town. Not a lot seems different so far, but it’s been so long since I played the first that I’m fuzzy about the minor details that might have changed anyway.

And tonight I took another shot at VVVVVV on my Mac and surprised myself by managing to collect the final two trinkets. One of them wasn’t really that bad — I just hadn’t bothered to spend the time on it before — but the other was the infamous Veni Vidi Vici one, and it must have taken me over 200 attempts tonight to get it, not including all of my previous failed attempts. You have to let yourself fall through a bunch of spike-riddled screens, bounce off a platform, and fall all the way back through them, and it took forever to finally get the timing right. Getting the timing right on one screen isn’t really that hard, but you have to chain those successes all in a row to get through them all. Oddly enough, the return trip seemed easier than expected; the problem was mainly getting past that bounce successfully and consistently.

And that’s probably all I’ll do in VVVVVV, since the things still left over like the time trials and gravitron are just crazy-difficult.

Overall it continued to be a pretty good play experience. There was only one point where some grinding for cash was needed, but that didn’t take very long. I upgraded one of the DLC cars for the achievement, but there wasn’t really any point where a fast car really seemed necessary, another symptom of how much wasted opportunity the game has by being so short. The irritating one-shot deaths continued right till the end, but fortunately checkpoints seemed to be much saner, except perhaps for one part of the observatory.

I’m sure there’ll be more DLC though, as there are already Steam achievements listed for more missions. And yes, I managed to get all of the Playboy magazines…

In terms of the world, the city is very pretty, with lots of distinct buildings and landmarks and a great feel to the atmosphere, but there’s not much reason to explore it beyond what you need for the missions. The handling on the cars takes some getting used to, but that’s fairly understandable for the era of cars involved here.

The plot is pretty basic mob cliches, but I think it does a far better job of taking itself seriously than GTA4 did, as it sticks to a fairly small scope and doesn’t get unrealistically wild and crazy (so far, anyway). Combat has a great feel to it, with enemies running around and stumbling and trying to find their own cover, much like you’d expect in a chaotic battle. Combat has been fairly limited too, happening sparingly rather than non-stop battle from start to end of a chapter. There’s even one chapter that I think didn’t involve a single fight.

The most irritating things so far are that you can get hit by unlucky one-shot kills, forcing you to suddenly and unexpectedly restart at the last checkpoint. The checkpoints are mostly plentiful, but the foundry battle in Chapter 8 was particularly annoying since there’s a massive, long fight and only one mid-battle checkpoint. And what made it extra-annoying was that I had to redo that chapter in order to pick up a couple Playboy magazines that I had missed due to being distracted by the frustration of all the insta-deaths… (I had to redo chapter 4 for the magazines as well, but that one wasn’t nearly as bad.)

I’m still enjoying it a lot, but at this rate I should easily finish it tomorrow.

I probably played Picross 3D the most, picking it up and knocking off a puzzle here and there to kill time, and a couple days ago I finally finished the last tier of the hard puzzles. I didn’t get 100% of them though, as you have to be some kind of savant to finish enough of the hard ones in time to get three stars. And I’ve still got a bunch of downloaded puzzles to keep me busy for a while yet.

I picked up a game called Puzzle Dimension on Steam out of sheer curiosity, and it’s kind of interesting. You roll a ball around a tiled map (it’s actually turn-based, with discrete moves), picking up the flowers on the level, and getting to the exit. Complicating things are squares that can only be traversed once, icy blocks that you slide on, fire blocks, gravity effects, jumping, etc… I’ve completed the first couple of ‘worlds’ so far, but there’s still plenty more to come.

I caved in and bought Victoria 2, though I haven’t really played a proper game of it yet. I did my usual introductory game as Hawaii, watching how the rest of the world unfolded, and it was actually a bit more challenging to keep things together as you couldn’t just set up the sliders and then do nothing the rest of the game. There were weird things afoot in the rest of the world, too, as Britain wound up swallowing up all of China, Egypt got picked on by nearly everyone and eventually eliminated, the US never even tried to get California back from Mexico, the UK never released any of its dominions… There’s still a lot of rough edges to it like the rebel hordes that run amok and the crazy ways that capitalists (mis)manage factories, so I’m putting this off until another patch or two.

Not much has happened in EQ2 as people have continued to be unavailable. I did at least hit level 55 and can finally use the nice reward charm I got for finishing all of the Lavastorm collections (20 to all stats, 100 health and power, and a healing proc).

Worms Reloaded was released, and I figured I may as well give it a shot. It seems to be a decent successor to Armageddon so far, though it’s a bit disappointing that teams and players are limited to 4 each. Some nice new weapons though, and I’m about halfway through the single-player campaign, though I haven’t tried multi yet.

I started playing Mercenaries 2 as my potential next game, but it’s still kind of early to judge. The graphics are a bit poorer than I expected, and the interface a bit awkward, but I’ve only done a few missions so far. I’ll give it a bit more of a chance to grow on me, at least.

And when I finish that, or it doesn’t work out, I think Mafia 2 will be next after that. I never played the first one, but it got decent reviews, and word-of-mouth on this one is pretty good so far. It’s apparently not as open-world as, say, the GTAs, but I’m okay with it being somewhat more linear and shorter. I’ve still got plenty of other games waiting…

I did wind up caving in and buying Victoria 2, though. I was initially hesitant to; I liked the first Victoria but didn’t play it much since the UI is rather weak and POP management gets fiddly, but Paradox games are typically somewhat…troubled on initial release and need at least some patches and an expansion before they really shine. The word-of-mouth about V2 was very positive though, so I wound up getting it anyway, and it is indeed a pretty decent game. There are still some troubles with the economy and things like way too many rebels popping up mid-game though, so I’ve shelved it for now until we see how well the next patch helps.

Otherwise, I’ve been thinking of getting back to some of the FPSes on my backlog, to counterbalance the ultra-long RPGs. I can probably burn through a bunch of them fairly quickly and at least free up some drive space. So far I’ve played through Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter, a remake of one of the more old-school shooters. The gimmick here is that there are tons and tons and tons of enemies in each level, keeping things at a frantic pace. Unfortunately it was a bit too frantic for me, and I turned the difficulty down one notch to Easy midway through. I could probably finish it on Normal, but it would take a ton of reloads and I just want to run through these games as fast as possible, not master them.

Puzzle Chronicles is one of the games I grabbed in the recent Steam sale and…I’m kind of regretting it. The art and story are terrible, even if they aren’t really relevant to the gameplay (I wish it would let me name my guy Pouty McPouterson). The gameplay is weird, though. It builds on the usual match-falling-blocks, but they fall horizontally, and you fight for control over board area with the opponent. It’s hard for me to visualize combos that way, and there’s a ton of different gem types to complicate things further. Not really what I was expecting.

I played a bit more of Joe Danger, getting through the second series of challenges. I finally discovered the trick to racking up scores (doing, well, tricks), but it quickly becomes a lot of stuff to keep track of while you’re trying to do tricks, avoid obstacles, hit the goals for the track, etc. It’s still a good game, but I’m just no good at it.

Cuboid got a bit more play due to checking out the Playstation Plus benefits, which adds some extra levels and an editor. I didn’t get Plus, but I played it for a bit anyway, getting to about two-thirds of the way through the beginner levels. Things are getting complicated now, with things like weight-sensitive switches, teleporters that split the block into two, ‘health’ pickups and move limits before you ‘die’, etc. I’ll have to get back to it again at some point when I have more time and brainpower to dedicate to it.

In Borderlands, I cleared out the rest of the quests for New Haven and Rust Commons East, which puts me at the start of the Krom’s Canyon area. Our group hasn’t really played together much recently, but hopefully we’re not too far apart now that I’ve caught up a bit.

And in an effort to clear out some older games, I tried the expansions for Quake and Quake II, but couldn’t get them to work since they crash immediately. It would be better to use them with a modern engine port anyway but…it’s just not worth the effort to me.

One thing they did show me though was that there’s an easily-reached red weapons crate in the Knoxx starting area of T-Bone Junction, so I spent some time (a little too much time…) farming it. The stuff from it is too high-level for me now, but they’re worth a lot of money and I’m now maxed out on cash.

And although we’re still too low-level for Knoxx yet, we did figure out how to unlock the new Monster vehicle there and can now roam the roads freely — even if we do get squished almost right away…

Overall, I enjoyed it a lot. The plot was familiar-feeling, with an extremist ideologue villain and someone with a dark past and of questionable trust helping you along, but it added enough twists to keep it interesting. The ending felt like a satisfying payoff, even without a traditional Big Bad Boss Fight. There were some pretty good set-piece fights and escape sequences, though.

Combat was a lot more chaotic than it was in the first one. I preferred the drill and electric shock combo a lot in the middle sections, but fights became just a frenzied blur. Towards the end I started relying on the machine gun and rivet gun along with the bee swarm most of the time, for a more traditional ranged fight. It worked well enough that I never really bothered to try out the other weapons like the spear gun and launcher very much.

Of course, now I should play through again on hard to get the achievement for that (now being free to use the Vita-Chambers) and see what happens when you go the evil route. But…time is limited, so I think that’s enough BioShock 2 for now.

I finally started Bioshock 2 a little while ago, and this time I’m playing on Hard and going for the achievement for not using any Vita-chambers. So far the main struggle has just been to avoid running out of ammo and money, which are in scarce supply. Otherwise, it’s still a pretty familiar-feeling game and that’s perfectly fine considering how good the first one was. I’ve only made it to Pauper’s Drop so far, but I’ve fought one each of a Big Daddy and Big Sister, and the fights were fairly tense. The Big Sisters in particular are going to be tough, being as quick as they are.

In EQ2, we’ve mainly just romped around Everfrost some more for the last couple weeks, finally reaching the NE and NW corners and finishing a handful of quests, including the HQ for Tobrin’s Mystical Eyepatch. I also did a bit of soloing on my own to clean out some of the simpler quests and pick up collection items.

The city of New Halas was also finally released, and I immediately moved my shaman there to be with his barbarian brethren. It’s a really nice city too, with almost everything within fairly easy reach (the dock is a bit farther away though) and the tradeskills all clustered near the bank. The housing is really nice, and I finally upgraded from the starting apartment to a five-room house, which feels a bit sparse even with 160+ items in it now. I also started up a new dwarven warlock character, but haven’t gotten very far into the Halas newbie zone with him yet.

And I’ve played a bit more of Forza 3, but I’m not as enthusiastic about it as I was before, as now I’m pretty much just trying to grind credits and fill out the event chart. Maybe I’ll look at something like Blur next…