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.

From that point on it was mainly a matter of economics, trying to get as much money and research as I could. Around the 1460s I finally got the Quest For The New World national idea and started colonizing North America, beginning around the Newfoundland and Nova Scotia territories. It’s slow going from that point on though due to colonial range restrictions and slow colony growth.

At that point I started a new game and flipped things around out of curiosity, playing as the Huron instead, with a goal of just seeing how long I could survive as soon as the Europeans arrived and what the state of Europe was at that point. It was tougher than expected though, since they start off next to the Iroquois, and it wasn’t long before we found ourselves at war.

Beating the Iroquois militarily wasn’t that tough, but what makes combat among native tribes annoying is that they can take over territories instantly, turning it into a game of whack-a-mole as they take over a couple provinces, you beat them and take one back, they retreat to another province and take it over, repeat… And then even once you’ve beaten them, the revolt risk in the captured territories remains high, and the instant any rebels appear they reset the revoltrisk-raising nationalism flag on that territory. It took a lot of luck and reloads before they finally settled down and I’d fully assimilated them into the Huron nation.

It was calm from that point on, and once I hit around 1530, I finally noticed the border of another new nation nearby, though it’s still an unknown territory and they haven’t yet revealed themselves.

Both games are still in progress though, as there’s still a long ways to go until 1820…

Crash Time III: The hook of this one is that you play as a pair of detectives and chase down crooks in kinda-realistic police chases. Only ‘kinda’ though, since I’m not sure real detectives use robot drones that drive under the criminal’s car and blow it up, or cause horrific chain crashes… It’s better than I thought it would be, but the difficulty is a bit uneven. One of the first missions unlocked is unbeatable with the cars I have now — even accelerating flat-out, the crook can’t be caught up to and gets away.

Hearts of Iron III: Semper Fi: An expansion that supposedly fixes a lot of the problems with the original HoI3. Unfortunately the performance is really uneven, with a lot of sudden long pauses and jerky map scrolling. And some dumb stuff still seems to occur: Japan couldn’t even make it into northern China, it still seems to have trouble with making landings, etc.

Dark Void Zero: A retro-8bit-style platformer game with a jetpack. It’s pretty well-done, but damn, it’s hard. Enemy shots seem really hard to dodge while you’re using the jetpack, and the levels feel huge. I’m not even sure what to do to pass the first one yet, if I can even survive long enough.

In EQ2, our weekly group was postponed until tomorrow due to one member being sick. I worked on tradeskills a bit more, provisioning and woodworking in particular. They’re about the only useful ones since it’s hard to keep up with our class levels now so equipment and spells aren’t much use, but any food or water is better than none, and the woodworking stuff is all unique. I also used my ebon cluster to resume the Bone Bladed Claymore quest and now I have to kill 1000 sentient monsters. That’ll probably take a while…

I got back to Forza 3 for a bit, starting the R3 championship and doing a few other series in the meantime. I find I have to turn on traction control and bump the AI down to easy for the R3 races though, as they’re hard to control otherwise. I’m kind of unenthusiastic about it at the moment though.

Our EQ1 group on Tuesday went and visited the Lake of Ill Omen for a daily quest and then popped into Mistmoore, where we got mobbed and wiped. We haven’t really been following ‘proper’ pulling and crowd control techniques, but they’re less important now and we’re just out to have fun anyway.

And finally, I messed around with Hearts of Iron 3 a bit. I played as Panama and turned off fog of war and just sat back to see how the rest of the war would unfold, and it didn’t quite go as expected. The USSR attacked Germany but got stomped, losing everything even way past Moscow; the US tried landing on the NW tip of France but failed to break through after years of fighting; Britain was barely involved in the European war and went around conquering Africa and South America instead; and Japan was stopped short by Nationalist China, so they never got around to taking over the rest of the Pacific.

HoI3 has a bit of a bad reputation among the strategy game purists, and I haven’t even delved into the mechanics properly yet, but it’s fun to goof around in it so far. I’m tempted to start a game where I try to turn Canada into a nuclear power before anyone else…

Not much has happened in EQ2 since the holidays have interfered with most everyone’s plans. We finished up some Butcherblock quests and picked up the starter quests in Zek, and then worked on the first stages of the Glowing Black Stone quest. My illusionist alt is currently level 30 and working through the BB quests as well.

I played through Pixeljunk Shooter over a couple of days. It’s short, but pretty good, reminiscent of the old scrolling shooters like Zeppelin and Fort Apocalypse. Your main goal is to rescue scientists and collect diamonds, but to get to them you have to manipulate various fluids and gasses by shooting passages that let them flow around, interact with each other, and so on. I’ll be looking forward to a sequel.

I played a bit of Europa Universalis Rome: Vae Victus. Since I’m still new to the EU series I started out with the Pictii, a minor province in the Scotland area. Unfortunately it’s a rather slow way to learn, as it takes quite a while to get the funds, population, and civilization rating to actually start expanding, and I kept getting overrun by barbarians. I started another game as Carthage, which is much more advanced, but haven’t done much with it yet.

I picked up DiRT 2 for myself over the holidays, and played through all of the rookie-level events. It is, of course, much like the original DiRT, except that the rally raid mode seems different (point-to-point, whereas wasn’t the original’s on circuits?), and there are no hill climb events. The difficulty seems inconsistent, too — I can do certain events like rallies on casual and beat the pants off the AI, but raids and rallycross on casual are only just barely beatable.

And last but not least, a friend got me Borderlands for xmas and that’s what I’ve primarily been playing the last few days. It’s basically Diablo crossed with an FPS, and the variety of weaponry you can find is tickling the loot whore in me. So far we’re level 16 and have done most of the first couple starting areas.

My games haven’t gone too well so far, though. In one, I was immediately given a demand to either let another person take over my province (which is an instant game-over since you no longer have a leader controlling anything) or go to war, and the war is almost impossible to win with your starting military. In another, I was doing pretty well for about 10 years (the total length the game covers is around 400 years), but made a choice that wound up getting me excommunicated by the pope and everything spiralled downwards from there. In another nearly everyone close to me wound up getting sick or dying, and my wife went insane. And in yet another, nothing interesting is really happening, as the duchy I chose was just too small and irrelevant. I have yet to get a really good, stable game going, and it doesn’t help that it crashes every once in a while.

I did also get back to WoW tonight, finishing off a handful of more quests in Icecrown, and I think the main remaining non-daily quests are ones I need a group for. I also started doing the initial quests for the tournament area in the north-east corner of Icecrown, including things like jousting. I might be able to earn some better equipment there.

I picked up a bunch of the Paradox strategy games in a sale a while back, but this is the first time I’ve really taken a good stab at one. Following the guide to Chile here, my first attempt didn’t go so well as I flubbed up the timing of purchasing some essentials and it was taking forever to get industrialized. I took another stab at it tonight and had a much easier time of it, especially thanks to getting the Gold Rush event almost right away.

Although the scope of the game is pretty broad, I’m still new at it and just wanted to focus on keeping the economy afloat and growing for now. I soon had enough gold to promote some capitalists, and they soon started building factories and railroads sooner than anyone else in South America. From that point on it was mainly a matter of making sure factories had the right population types to work in them, trading for the right resources to keep them supplied, balancing the budget, picking research options, and sucking up to the neighbours so they wouldn’t attack me.

(There’s a lot of time spent waiting for stuff to finish and watching some interesting developments going on in the rest of the world. Texas got clobbered by Mexico very early on; the US managed to delay the civil war until 1869; the German Empire formed without Bavaria or Lippe, leaving a little dot right in the middle of Germany; Russia got gangbanged when it decided to take on Germany just before the Crimean War was about to break out, and when the dust cleared the UK wound up owning half of Denmark somehow. And around the same time that the US civil war kicked off, Mexico was suddenly invaded by the UK, France, and…Canada? It was so cute watching their just-barely-formed single little division running around amid all the big UK stacks. “We’re helping!”)

Unfortunately none of the trophies were awarded retroactively, but it turns out that I wouldn’t have gotten very many anyway. A lot of them are for fairly rare or tricky things, and I spent a while working on them. I mainly worked through all 100 floors of an item world while in the Land of Carnage, which got me a trophy for doing so, a bunch of the pirate trophies, and a couple for mystery floors seen along the way.

I have around 1/3rd of the trophies so far. I’m not sure how much time I’ll spend on them, since some of them require just plain luck in tough spots.

So, now the only place really left to fight in is the Land of Death. This time, I managed to find a boat there, which made getting around and scooping up loose loot much easier. I finally found the last obelisk, which netted me a map that I can give to one of various different people for a reward (sounds like the best reward for me is a bunch of runes if I give it to the not-yet-rescued elven queen).

With a few bumps to my leadership (now around 10,500 at level 22), and a bit more exploration of the Land of Death, I now have some places where I can find appropriate-level fights, so the outlook doesn’t look so bleak anymore. I’ve also managed to build up some decent cash reserves again, so I’m not in immediate danger of running out of troops anymore.