Maybe I should have played Vice City before playing The Godfather: Don's Edition, because that game totally spoiled me. It had a nice distribution of checkpoints during missions, but most importantly the entire property acquisition portion of the game wasn't nearly the chore that it is in Vice City. Sweet mother of god.

- Finding properties to buy is a bit of a pain...would have been nice if they were marked on the mini map.
- Once your property starts kicking out money, you actually have to drive around to pick it up. Woulda been handy if that just went straight into your bank account. Real, real handy.
- Properties are expensive, so you get to do a lot of driving around picking up money. Normal missions don't pay out worth a damn :(

Peeked at a walkthrough and it looks like I only have two storyline missions left to go, but I need to apparently buy all of the property I can before those missions unlock. Meh. Going to try to finish the game up tomorrow (if that's possible) so that I can move on to playing some Left 4 Dead 2 with my buddies and maybe some more Gothic 2 (since it's pretty damn awesome).

It's amazing how different my opinion of this game is this time around. Before I ragequit around the 2hr mark or so while this time I plugged right on through (it took me until ~3-4hrs to feel remotely comfortable with the controls) and had an absolute blast. Make no mistake, the controls still present a steep learning curve and are never exactly what I'd call optimal (certainly not intuitive), the voice acting is AWFUL and the translation quality is fairly low, but the adventure it contains is some real serious gold.

The overworld map isn't terribly large, but it's all one giant flowing level. From the highest point of the old town to the depths of the swamp to the orc camp in the far north and the new camp in the far east, it's all one giant, smooth experience. You'll hit loading screens before delving into the mines or the old temple, but beyond that, it's pretty impressive and immersive work, particularly for the time that it was released (2001).

Another thing I really appreciated about the game was the actual role playing. The stats were kept fairly light; they were there and they were necessary, but they weren't nearly as confusing or complex as something along the lines of Baldur's Gate II or Fallout. There was some real freedom in choice, too. That first chapter was totally open ended as you explore the prison colony and find your way around. You can decide to join any of three camps with actual ramifications from your decisions resonating throughout the rest of the game. There's so many unique people throughout the game (you can tell who's meaningful and who's filler based on if they have a name or generic title...and a ton of people have actual names) that it really helps the world feel totally alive.

Hell, you can kill anyone you want at any point (assuming you're powerful or cleaver enough), completely breaking scripted quests if you're not careful. I didn't really go apeshit with the slaughterfest until the end of the game when everything was winding down and I was settling some scores...which then turned into me just being hungry for blood. If you ever play the game, as you walk around old camp, imagine it being littered with bodies (inside the castle and out). That's what I did, baby. Slaughtered every last person with my flaming blade of justice.

I'm really looking forward to playing Gothic II in the future (the ending to Gothic runs right up into the intro to Gothic II), but I think I'm going to play some inbetweeners. Maybe give Torchlight a shot or take another stab at Jedi Outcast.

Work has been murder, but I've been able to clear out Borderlands (~20hours-ish?) and get some real headway into my next game. Borderlands, despite its flaws (oh and it has plenty of them), was pretty fun. The ending came out of nowhere and it really had that feeling of "oh shit, we need to ship this before Modern Warfare 2 comes out!", but I enjoyed the ride.

Currently 7 1/2 hours into Gothic, a game that I've rage quit early on in the past over its terrible controls. The game has an awesomely realized game world and people like to ramble on about how great the game is, but the controls were such a massive pain in the ass that I've never really gotten further than an hour or two in the past. This time I nearly quit at the 2hr mark out of frustration, but I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt. I mean, I spent 6 hours on Demon's Souls, the least I could do is give this game the same chance.

Eventually everything kind of clicked and I'm really having a hell of a fun time. I wish the mapping system was more player-friendly and I wish the quest log was more versatile, but after coming to grips with the game's control system (hint: don't bother using the mouse, just play keyboard only), it all really opened up for me.

If you do decide to take a chance on the game, avoid nearly every enemy early on. Just run quests involving wheeling and dealing until you gain your first level, then train in one handed weapons. Had I done that at the start, I would have gotten into the game so. much. quicker. Makes the sword slashes flow more smoothly and the lesser enemies become far, far easier to defeat (though at this point I'm pretty much rolling over them anyway).

Still haven't left chapter 1...I think I may be getting close? Not too sure. I think I'm going to stick with the dudes in the Old Camp, though. The guys in the New Camp are a bunch of dicks and the religious cult in the Sect Camp is full of weed smoking druggies. Hell, they even tried to get me to sell their weed in the New Camp (to which I obliged, but only because I really needed the ore and experience). My D.A.R.E. instructor would not be proud.

Oh! and I'm playing Gothic on my shiny new laptop! Only $630 pre-tax at Best Buy and includes pretty much everything I need in a laptop.
- 500gig HDD? Yes!
- 4gigs of RAM? Golden!
- Windows 7 Home Premium? There!
- HDMI output? Solid!
- Intel GMA 4500MHD chipset? Hell yea!
- 12cell battery for about 5 hours of gaming time while traveling? Ding!
- Core 2 Duo 2.2ghz? Can you say: Full speed DOSbox?

I know Intel graphics chipsets have always gotten slammed a lot in the past, but between the low power consumption, low price and fairly solid performance (for what I need), the 4500MHD was something I really wanted to have (vs ATI and NVidia's power hungry offerings). Really excited to be using Windows 7 right now, though since I didn't spend a whole lot of time with Vista, I can't say what makes it better than that. I can say that it's a bit of a learning curve coming from XP on my desktop.

Got a bunch of my GOG catalog and some of my Steam catalog installed and ninite made getting my commonly needed apps downloaded and installed a cinch.

PC version is as buggy as ever and I'm still having fun chipping through all of the missions I can find. Keyboard still gets locked out randomly, forcing me to unplug it, plug it back in, exit the game and open it back up. Game does not like alt+tabbing (insta crash!). Game does not like going back to full screen from windowed mode (hang!). UI is as awful as ever (it'll never get better!).

Despite that, I'm like 13 hours into it and can't wait to sneak in another little session before work tomorrow.

A friend only on level 8 needed some help with Bone Head outside of the first city. I hopped in his game, dropped a ridiculously overpowered sniper rifle with a low level requirement, and let Bone Head wail on me while he took shots from the upper platform. It's amazing how little damage a level 11 character does to you when you're level 25. Sadly, I underestimated how much damage my turret would do to him, so I deployed it to hold Bone Head's attention while my friend went for the kill and accidentally stole the glory. Given my level and the way the xp scales based on your level vs enemy's level, I got a whopping 14xp. Woops.

Told my buddy to just go back in there in a few minutes with a car and run everyone over for some cheap XP.

Got my Buy 2 Get 1 Free in the mail today from Best Buy! Uncharted Greatest Hits (!! I haven't seen the actual GH packaging for the game until now !!), Godfather 2 (PS3) and Fable II. Should have a lot of fun with those and I'm unusually excited for Godfather 2 based on how much I just enjoyed played through the first game.

Still can't find a cheap copy of Ty the Tasmanian Tiger for PS2 :(

it's recommended that you don't play a public game unless you want to ruin your character.

So yea, I've been stuck playing in nothing but single player. It's fun! It's no STALKER (not by a damned longshot), but it's still got plenty of good moments. My biggest beef has to do with the annoyance factor of weaker creatures the more powerful you get. They still spawn like rabbits, they're only giving up 1xp per kill and you pretty much have to waste ammo killing them or else they'll keep attacking you as you run to your destination. Thank god you can drive around as much as you can.

Heard there's a teleport ability that can be unlocked eventually. Can't wait.

Bought Torchlight and wound up getting a few guys at work to spring for it as well. Figures that as soon as I came home from work, I saw an email from GOG announcing that Divine Divinity was available as of today for $6 as well. Always heard good things about this and Sacred but never got around to really putting them through the paces. Apparently Beyond Divinity (which comes out soon on GOG) wasn't all that hot, though.

This month has not been cheap. :(

Borderlands is absolutely one of the most consolized games I've ever played. Like, until this game, I never REALLY understood what consolized meant, but holy shit. The UI is absolutely terrible. Without hacking the INIs, you can't enable mouse scroll to read through text boxes. Instead, you're expected to use the page up and page down keys to scroll. There's no buttons for Confirm/Cancel, just text descriptors of the buttons that you're supposed to hit ([esc], [enter], whatever). Sometimes clicking on them works, most of the time it doesn't.

Not being able to toggle vsync outside of ini hacking is a pretty big oversight as well and I'm not much of a fan of having to use Gamespy for multiplayer. I'm more than a little upset over not being able to use Steam for that. Not having an aim toggle irks the fuck out of me, but there's an INI hack and an AutoHotKey script to fix that....though the INI hack breaks some other things since, hey, they never thought to include such a functionality. Oh, and i LOVE how you can't swap the Y-axis camera for when you're driving vehicles. How 1998!

There's some extremely nasty bugs lurking around, too. Scripting issues that break the game (there's a well documented one that happens within the first 10 minutes of gameplay, even), an annoying quirk where the keyboard locks into forward running and refuses to accept any further input until it's unplugged/plugged back in, save game corruption (and since it autosaves, you're pretty much fucked when that happens), unreliable multiplayer and an issue where players' abilities are randomly stripped from them (and since it autosaves, when that happens you're pretty much fucked).

It's a shame, because the game is fun as hell. It really is Diablo with guns and it really is addictive as hell. When everything is going smoothly, it's extremely easy to lose an hour without noticing it (as happened to me last night when I really intended to go to bed a bit earlier than normal). If you buy the game though, do yourself a favor and buy it on 360. The PC version is such a blatant afterthought (despite what the Gearbox PR shill stated in the past) and the PS3 version is apparently a bit troublesome as well (though nowhere near as bad as the PC one).

Honestly, I kind of wish I'd bought Torchlight on PC instead and just spent the extra dough on buying Borderlands for the 360. Apparently Torchlight is the fucking bomb. :(

The Witcher Enhanced Director's Cut is down to $20 on Steam again if, like me, you haven't gotten around to picking it up yet. Heard way too many people say it was one of their favorite RPGs of the decade, so I pulled the trigger on it. Maybe you will too!

Fair Warning: Requires 14.5gigs of hdd space.

In other news, Borderlands on PC is buggy and very clearly consolized all to hell (most obvious by the awful UI navigation in the PC version), but good god is it fun.

- Beat Finny the Fish with something like 3 hours and 20 minutes on the in-game clock. Tack on an extra 10-20min or so for failures and reattempts. Could have been a pretty good game with a little bit more work. Control could be awkward thanks to not having a separate camera control, not to mention the clumsiness of trying to eat fish or break lures, or even something simple like swimming faster.

If there had been a health meter for the fish you were eating so you'd have a little more feedback on your actions, if the in-game tutorial or instruction manual had better covered how to hop up streams, if the game had either an independent camera control or more intelligent camera and if the herb items didn't decay quite as quickly, Finny the Fish would be a total hidden gem. As it is, the difficulty level is completely uneven and the game is far too frustrating for its own good.

Youtube videos of the last boss fight and ending+credits will be going up in the next day or so. Maybe someone more motivated than me will input the credits into Mobygames and GiantBomb to help flesh out the databases.

- Played through the main storyline in the PS3 version of The Godfather between Saturday and Sunday. Could not stop playing despite the game's many flaws. Graphics were pretty awful for the PS3 (it really looked like the PS2 version rendered in a higher resolution with some additional effects thrown in), it had plenty of technical quirks (especially in the audio department) and the fisticuffs control is a mess (like watered down Fight Night as far as it could possibly go) and the SIXAXIS controls were terrible, but the core storyline was fantastic and driving around the world was a blast. As far as campaigns go it doesn't hold a candle to Mafia, but the sandbox aspect of it reminds me a lot of Just Cause (only more interesting and fun).

They did some pretty neat stuff with the save system that really helped the game out. Missions have some pretty nice checkpoints throughout them, so dying doesn't force you to lose too much progress (only a minute or three most of the time). You can always run back to a safe house and save (assuming you've bought more of them; if not, you're in for a long drive back to Little Italy), but there's always that urge to give it one more shot until you finally clear the mission out. Really addictive and even the more difficult missions towards the end of the game are bearable thanks to it.

Post game content is mainly restricted to taking over rackets/finding film reels/extorting businesses/etc, which is all fine and dandy for a while. A lot of the buildings are more or less the same with only some rearranged fences or crates to govern the flow, so your enjoyment of that phase of the game is pretty much restricted by how much you enjoy the actual gameplay. I had enough fun playing the game that after I cleared the storyline, I spent two hours taking down warehouses and inciting mob wars. Hell, I'll probably go back and play it a bit more throughout this week as I try to take care of all of the different families in the city.

Add it to the list of "good licensed games".

- Finished Dawn of War. Pretty simplistic RTS; worth checking out if you're new to the genre or if you're apeshit crazy about 40k...everyone else, steer clear. Apparently Dark Crusade and Soulstorm have a really neat, risk-like campaign mode instead of that laughable mess that was in the core game.

- Finny the Fish is god damn frustrating. There's no separate camera control (and it loves to go apeshit crazy when you jump out of the water), the movement is all digital, eating other fish is a total chore, herbs degrade too quickly, etc. This game is not for kids. Any kid that got this back in '05 will probably forever remember it as "My First Rage Quit"

- Got in on a Borderlands 4-pack on Steam with a few guys from Shacknews. ~$35 for the game? Fuck it, why not? I'm down for a little Diablo-style action that doesn't at all involve top down click-click-clicking.

- Beat Batman: Arkham Asylum. Loved it, though it took me a bit to get used to the controls and really appreciate the combat. By the end of the game I had it down pretty well and was racking up 20hit combos with decent regularity. Going to have to go back and hit up more of those challenges and stuff.

- Somehow sunk over 8 and a half hours into Dawn of War, getting up to the 8th mission in the campaign. There's really nothing terribly special about the core game...it's more or less a run of the mill RTS with a mix of weak AI and minimal tactical play, but I love the 40K setting and that's enough to keep me playing. Kind of reminds me of the Starship Troopers game in its simplicity.

The storyline is pretty crap (it's a laughably bad attempt to tie the four races together in a single story), the realtime cutscene direction looks about on par with Quake movies released 5 years earlier, there's a persistent fog (separate from the fog of war, mind you) that (poorly) hides the terrain outside of a set range, and the camera's maximum zoom out mode is still too tight (a complaint I had with Earth 2150, released five years earlier)...but hey, the license does it for me. Oh, and Blur's intro.

Looks like I'm about 2/3rds of the way through the game, so I guess I'll wrap up the rest this week and then get started on my next project. Assuming the game I currently have sitting on my desk is actually going into my PS2 when I'm done with this, my next game is tentatively planned to be Finny the Fish & the Seven Waters.

Please don't hurt me.

Random tangent - While grabbing links, I saw that Starship Troopers was done by Blue Tongue Entertainment. You might know then from de Blob or maybe even Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis. You know what I think of though? Fucking El Tigre. God. Damn it.