Vintage

Merry Christmas all, its been an… interesting year. In an effort to turn negatives into positives, I’ve been able to experience a variety of jobs through the temporary services, I’m on my second semester in school working on my associates degree in business administration and as always, have a wonderful family.

My son has earned about eight more badges this quarter in Boy Scouts, and has maintained good grades, and a good attitude overall despite otherwise being a typical monosyllabic fourteen year old.

On the game front, both I and my wife have thrown off the MMO shackles once and for all, in my case the battle of the acronyms of OCD vs. ADHD vs. WoW is over, with ADHD having a narrow margin of … ooooo shiny….

The WoG GURPS game is still going strong, the young knights are becoming point-bloated monstrosities, but its all fun.

PC Gaming had a couple of bright spots for me this year:

Dragon Age: Origins is as excellent as I hoped it would be, the story is serviceable with few real surprises but never quite feeling cliche, the voice acting is excellent, and the character interaction beats my all time favorite in the category - Jagged Alliance 2. If I have any complaints, its that any length would be too short. They’ve put out some DLC and there is another one due out ‘this holiday season’, but it will add maybe an hour or two tops. Out of necessity, the game is very story driven, which means replay is more about discovering new interactions and little nuances of the different race/class combinations, rather than take the story off this way. The ending can be drasticly different, but my ADHD addled ass hasn’t been able to do another complete playthrough while my wife is on her third.

League of Legends: Demigod is fun, but I can’t ever get an online game working. LoL (heh) is easy to find a game, the free version works out fine, with you able to ‘buy’ most characters/enhancements with points earned in play, or the rich bastards can, just like in real life, buy everything with real money. Visually its roots in Defense of the Ancients is obvious, and its a good thing. While I’m not sold on balancing, the character design and feel is excellent, with a hell of a large variety.

Torchlight: A rock-solid addictive action RPG. Titan Quest may have finally been beaten in my collection, while TQ has far more options with their character classes, TL has (semi-)random dungeons, making later playthroughs less of a chore. What do I mean semi-random? Well, the main dungeon ‘theme’ is the same five or so levels at a time, starting with mines, to tombs and so on, and the levels are sometimes repetitive. The visual style is old school Warcraft, cartoony, but in a good way, and the effects are great.

Onto the consoles:

We’ve been milking out a Gamefly subscription this year, in lieu of our MMO subscriptions, and as of this Christmas we’ve got all three consoles in the house.

PS3 Highlights

Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice: A Keeper. A zany story, funny characters and massive amounts of tactical goodness bumped Final Fantasy Tactics out of my top spot.

Borderlands: Pure gun porn. FPS/Action RPG with randomized loot tables that put diablo to shame, its been lots of fun, my son and I have played split screen and separately, and he’s dabbled online. DLC is starting to come out with The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned back in November, and Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot due for the PS3 in early January. I hope it has legs, the random loot and four characters is promising, but the maps and quests never change, so we’ll see.

Uncharted 2: My son opted for this one on his gift card, and I was sucked in immediately when I realized Steve Valentine and Claudia Black voiced the two rogues that recruited the main character, both of them were stellar in Dragon Age: Origins. It’s very cinematic in all the right ways, and so far a lot of fun.

Modern Warfare 2: While it EITHER needs to be Call of Duty

5

OR just Modern Warfare 2 its apparently CoD 4 MW 2. That’s as stupid as the X-Men 1.5 DVD my wife bought… that aside, it looks good, the campaign is fun, and we get our asses kicked online.

Infamous: Solid game, lots of fun open world-ish wandering around, but again with the laughable morality choices? (its been done to death elsewhere, google it)

In the We Rented and Mean to Get eventually category:

Batman: Arkham Asylum: A great ‘hybrid’ look to the characters, with a real love of the lore, and voiced by the Batman: The Animated Series alumni - what the hell is not to like?