I’m torn.  I want to keep playing, but I also don’t want to invest a bunch of time into a saved game that will never be fixed.  I’m not sure what to do here.  Blech.

I had my ass handed to my by a Super Mutant Behemoth right outside of the Galaxy Radio headquarters.  That guy scared the crap out of me.  A rocket to the face, two grenades, and a shotgun to the head and I still didn’t bring him down.  In the end he crushed me with what I think was a lamp post.  Sigh.

If I got exactly what I wanted, why am I a little disappointed?  I think it partially comes down to unjustifiably rosy memories of Oblivion.  Oblivion was a game that kept my interests far longer than most, but it was deeply flawed.  The characters were indistinguishable, due largely to repetitive and campy voice acting.  This led to the game feeling bland at best and confusing at worst.  Adding to this was the problem of character animations and models.  Perhaps for their time they were good, but they look incredibly dated by todays standards, and the movement (facial and body) and AI were often SO BAD that they destroyed whatever sense of immersion the environments managed to create. Also, item management was a chore particularly for someone like me who has some degree of obsessive compulsiveness.   When you can pick up (and sell) just about anything I can’t help but pick up everything.  This usually means that half the time my Oblivion character has an inventory full of silver cutlery.

The characters in Fallout, despite having unique voice actors (as far as I can tell) still seem to be bland and indistinguishable.  Thinking back on it as I write this, the only one I can remember is the Sheriff of Megaton and I think I only remember him for his fine hat.  Character models/animation/AI still seem like a relic of 2006 and they’re still incredibly distracting.  Itemitis is still a problem for me, although silver forks and goblets have been replaced with empty cola bottles.  For instance I spent a good 30 minutes exploring the Super Mart near Megaton and all I ended up finding were some cans of food.

All the same, I put about 100 hours into Oblivion and I enjoyed it a great deal.  Despite my complaints about Fallout I still look forward to playing it some more.  The sense of freedom more than compensates for its shortcomings.

On the topic of the collectors edition, I’m really quite happy with it.  The extra stuff they give you for $20 seems like a really good deal.  I look froward to using the lunch box, the bobble head is cute, and the art book is very nice.

Last night after Lexy went to sleep I sat down with a goal of putting the skeleton of a level I wanted to make together.  Previously I had gone into the “Create” mode only to see that it was there - no real effort was made.  Well, after an hour and a half of hacking last night… I still basically have nothing.  I have some better idea of what it is I need to do but executing them with those tools is pretty painful.  The carving in particular is quite difficult… I find it hard to imagine that they put this game together with those tools.

My copy of Fallout 3 still hasn’t shipped from Amazon.  The new delivery estimate is the end of November. What’s up with Amazon lately?  Virtually everything I order is inevitably delayed.  I can’t remember the last item I ordered that was delivered on time.  I called the local EB and they have 7 copies of the collectors edition that I wanted so I just canceled the order.  I’ll go fetch it the old fashioned way, by hand.

It’s not perfect.  In fact, as a platformer, it suffers from some pretty serious flaws (jumping distance, skittishness, difficult Z axis maneuvering for starters).  Despite these flaws it’s an absolute blast to play. It’s gorgeous - better looking than any other console game I can think of - and fresh.  So very fresh.   Guh.  I want to gush.  But if I do, that’ll take too much time away from LBP.

I feel like I should also mention World of Goo.  We picked this up over the weekend and it really is an excellent game.  I should say more about it… but I can’t.  The timing is so wrong.  I’ll need to revisit it in a month or so.  Maybe.

LittleBigPlanet… delayed… WTF?  Do they not realize that some of us MAY DIE FROM THE TORMENT?

Not only is Fat Princess pretty damned offensive, so is the gasbag who wrote the above. Ugh. Why must the majority of gaming sites be so bloody juvenile?

The experience is very streamlined - a lot of the resource/citizen management you need (or get) to play with in other Civilization games is absent as is tedious road building.  They’ve distilled the experience down to its core and it’s SLICK.

I cannot own this game.  I cannot afford the time.

Last night I somehow managed to finish the 20+ hour beast that is Half Life 2. I’m not sure how I did it. For a shooter, the game is monstrous - if I played less than 20 hours I’d be surprised. What’s more, I’d actually seen the game play to the end before in a speed run so there weren’t exactly any new surprises for me as far as settings/plot were concerned. I loved it all the same. The game offered some of the best level design I’d ever experienced in a game (behind Resident Evil 4) and managed to mix the styles of play up often enough to make it feel that I was playing a bunch of different games. I think that’s perhaps how it kept my interest. Just as I was beginning to tire with a particular gameplay mechanic it would change things up and I’d be doing something different (be it driving boats/buggies/swarms of insects).

It wasn’t all positive, of course. The PS3 port of The Orange Box deserves all of criticism it received for slowdowns, jitters, and abominable load times. It’s a monstrous cock-up of a port if there ever was one. I’m looking forward to playing through Episodes 1 and 2 all the same.  The quality of the game itself has won it a great deal of leeway in my mind.