Fus Ro Dah!

The beauty of neglecting to update your blog with any sort of consistency is that when something exciting happens there's no real drive to follow any thin veneer of consistency.

Skyrim:
Skyrim is rocking my world. Much like it's rocking the world of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of other people.

This image no doubt depicts a character in Skyrim having a friendly chat with an undead sorcerer. "Chatting" has lethal results when you talk in dragon speak. The player can learn to speak in dragon language and these "words of power" all have unique magic-like effects and where from slowing down time, or summoning animal companions to, my personal favorite, unrelenting force. This causes your character to project a powerful shockwave throwing anyone unfortunate enough to be in front of you while you scream nonsense words into the air. Ideally, the unfortunate enemy ( or friend, or horse, or bunny) will be standing on the edge of a massive cliff, but one can't always be so fortunate.
     Excluding the chronic poor choices of playing various MMOs, Oblivion (precursor to Skyrim) is the game that holds the title of Most Hours Played (in a single play through anyway), so I was eagerly awaiting the release of Skyrim. I queued up at my dubious local GameStore I looked upon dozens of crazies who came out to pick up a video game at midnight! Get a life! So I got my copy around 1 AM. And what a night I had!

Skyrim has delivered in every way I wanted to, and more-or-less no ways I didn't want it to. The previous Elder Scroll games were very micro-manage-y about how you built your character and you could "screw up" your character by poor choices leveling and allocating skills. Skyrim has simplified the system quite a bit. If I absolutely had to lob a criticism it would be that through their attempt to simplify the leveling system we lost some of my favorite skills, such as acrobatics (jumping really high) and athletics (running a long time and fast). And I'm not trying to convey this as some mythical "perfect game". It's buggy as hell. I've encountered some disappointing boss fights where what should have been an epic battle (with me dying alot) turned into the boss running around like a maniac, but refusing to actually attack me as I planted my sword into his head over and over again. All in all though, this has all the trappings of being a new favorite game for me.

Infection

I've not posted in a week or so because I had to prepare for finals. Also, coincidentally, I haven't had much to say about gaming. Now that finals are over I bought and have been playing Prototype like it's my fucking job. I rented Prototype about a year ago and played through it super fast. I thought at the time that I played it so obsessively because it was a rental, and had to go back in 4-5 days. I realize now that I played through it so fast because it's addictive and incredible.
     I feel a little strange bit of guilt saying that its so great because it was a big deal when it came out. It shouldn't deserve the hype it got on it's release because it's little more than a Grand Theft Auto clone. A clone that has super powers. Don't misunderstand me though. I love this game. Activision essentially took their Spider Man 2 game, which was total crap, and over hauled it to make Prototype. Prototype is so derivative of other games (GTA and Spider-Man) that I feel like it should have no merits of it's own, but I cannot stop playing it. And this is after already playing the game to it's completion. Not to belabor the point, but Prototype has so much working against in my mind that the fact that I'm giving the game a virtual "Thumbs up" should communicate that this is an amazing game. A little short, but unadulterated fun!
     Other than that I want to blab on about a couple up coming games. This year is going to be a big one for games that make me excited like a little girl. Mass Effect 3 is supposed to be out near the end of the year! Some people poo-poo ME and ME2. Those people are fucking dumb-dumbs. If YOU didn't like ME or ME2 than I'm including you under the dumb-dumb umbrella. Mass Effect 2 might be my favorite game ever. And I'm putting that up against titans such as Chrono Trigger and Metal Gear Solid. Needless to say, I'm highly anticipating Mass Effect 3. Another big 'un is Skyrim: Elder Scrolls V. I only got into the Elder Scrolls series in the last 4-5 years. I played through the majority of Morrowind and loved it, I played the fuck out of Oblivion and it took Morrowind and kicked it in it's dated-graphics ass! I don't have anything more to say about it. Finally, a game that is already out: Portal 2. I want it so bad it hurts. If anyone reading this has $60 to spare send it to me immediately and I will buy Portal 2. I hope against hope that there will be a tie-in to Half Life 3 because ***SPOILER ALERT*** Half Life 2 Episode 2 had Aperture Science show up at the very end ***END SPOILER ALERT*** Regardless, I got to play a little bit of Portal 2 last week and it certainly delivered on the Awesome-ness. Rant Status: Over