Massachusetts Can Bite Me
I wasn't really a fan of Virginia and I really hated Maryland, but Massachusetts is giving Maryland a real good run for its money. This place is way too goddamned expensive, and everyone here seems to be woefully self-absorbed. Given that my place of employ has moved much closer to Boston proper, I now have to take a much busier route to go to/from work and I'm convinced that my chances of dying in a traffic crash are now several hundred times higher. Note: they were not low before. People here really can't drive for shit; must be an east coast thing.
Probably the only redeeming factor of where I live is having three Lego stores within driving distance--assuming I don't die on the way there or back, mind you.
Fun With Lego
One of the side effects of not crunching like crazy is that I've had a lot more time to pursue different hobbies, the most time consuming of those (so far) is building with Lego again. If you haven't seen my flickr stream, you should go go there right now. It's OK, I'll wait. Unbeknownst to me (though I really should have figured) there's a huge online Lego builder community and I've been able to pick up a lot of fun techniques from them. It all came to a frothy head at Brick Fair in August. It was very cool and not just because I won a trophy. I'm hoping I can get back there next year and am in the very early stages of building a presentable piece. Wish me luck!
Gaming
Other than Lego (and drinking) I played a lot of games, some of which were very good. Most notably, I finally broke down and bought an Xbox360. This is largely because my PS3 was bricked by one of Sony's firmware flashes which killed the Blu-ray drive. I got the PS3 as a gift so I suppose I shouldn't be so pissy about the $150 they want to replace the drive, but it's the principle of the thing. Anyway...
Torchlight: ***
Recommended by a bunch of people so I picked it up. It's a very pretty Diablo-like hack&slash kind of game that looks a lot like World of Warcraft. This isn't a coincidence since it's a lot of the same developers. I sort of view it as a distraction--pretty with nice explosions but lacking any real depth.
Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter: ***
Serious Sam is usually my first rebuttal when people say "you can't just make a doom-like shooter anymore" which has been en vogue since Half Life first came out which I guess makes it old-skool. This is the same as the original game only polished up for the current generation. As it turns out, the intervening eight years have encompassed a lot of technologies! It's pretty much the same game as I remembered only I'm a lot older and slower. My aim isn't what it was and even then it wasn't all that. I'd probably rate it higher if I had retained more of my FPS skills but I found it to be very frustrating in places.
Mass Effect 2: *****
Bioware seems to have fixed most of the major issues (stupid inventory system, maddening difficulty curve, etc.) but seem to have left some of the awesome on the cutting room floor. I was hoping to get through the game again now that I've picked up all the DLCs but dumping half a diet coke into the gaming rig kind of puts the skids on that. The short: some things streamlined very well, some things streamlined too much, and some pretty awful plot points. You can read all about it on them thare intarwebs so I won't rehash, though I'm hoping that ME3 strikes a happier balance.
Knights of the Old Republic: *****
OK, so Mass Effect is pretty awesome but it's the first of the Bioware games I'd played. Let's fix that! KoTOR was the next one and holy crap, I'm sad I missed this when it first came out. The graphics haven't aged well but the story holds up exceptionally. It's got some very memorable characters (HK-47, Mission Vao, Bastilla Shan) and probably the best plot twist in all of gaming. Definitely one of the best RPGs I've played.
Knights of the Old Republic 2: ***, **** w/mods
I mean, why not? Unbeknownst to me, Obsidian has quite the reputation for starting big but ending flat on their projects which is probably why I had such a hard time finding a copy. The beginning of the game is exceptional from the twisting plotlines to the character development. The ending of the game is a travesty where most of the interesting bits are dropped on the floor and the opportunity lost. Luckily, the fan community has come to the rescue with a number of mods that make the game seem a little more complete. I have to wonder how awesome the game would have been if it had been released in a more completed state.
Bioshock: ***
I'm late to the party as usual. It's a pretty good shooter with some interesting plot points, but overall I wasn't all that thrilled with it. There really needed to be more reason to use the other plasmids and I never had enough ammo. It was very pretty but it was also frustratingly dark a lot of the time. I'll probably grab the sequel at some point, but I'm not in any huge hurry. Interesting fourth wall busting.
Supreme Commander 2: ***
As much of a Supreme Commander fanboi as I might be, Supreme Commander 2 really didn't do it for me. It really lacked the depth of the first and the single player campaign had a very brittle twist. I played the campaign through, did a couple skirmishes, and really didn't give it more thought than that. Very sad-making
Vanguard: *****
Very few people played Vanguard at release. I caught it about six months in and it was already on its way out. This summer, my MMO "friends" decided to pick it back up again and I have to say that it's still all that and a bag of chips. On good hardware most of the perf bugs are gone and the game has been somewhat streamlined from the bad old days but it still has most of the depth it had the last time I played. Alas, it isn't really a solo game and since my "friends" stranded me there...again....it didn't make sense to keep the sub up. Vanguard is really the last of a dying breed: the involved MMO--the kind I really like. It's sad that there aren't more like it being made and even more sad that I can't find reliable people to play with. Vanguard remains the only MMO that I really want to play more of but can't. It remains one of the best MMOs that no one plays.
Minecraft: *****
If you've escaped the torrential flood of Minecraft on the intartoobs, you must be living under a rock or something. It's a spiffy little game that is terribly addictive hitting all the magic buttons of "exploration", "building", and "abject terror". The exploration bit is well played by a very organic terrain/cave generation system. Even in its unapologetic blockyness the generated landscapes can be very beautiful. Just about everything in the world is rearrangeable and people have built some very nifty structures. The part of "abject terror" is played by monsters sneaking up behind you and then hearing "....sssssssssss***BOOOM****" as it explodes stranding your nifty diamond equipment a billion miles away, doomed to decay before you can get back to collect it. Pretty amazing game, all things said, and it well deserves all the publicity it's getting.
Civ V: ****
Terribly broken in a lot of ways, but still the same old Civ in others. I'm a little more forgiving than many due to having gotten an unexpected credit on it (I did work on it, just not for very long). I think the game is less strategically interesting than, say, Civ IV, but the tactical combat is a lot more interesting. I played a bunch of it, found the One True Path To Victory, and then promptly lost interest. I'm a little disappointed that it could bring my beefy gaming box (RIP) to its knees.
Halo: Reach: ***
This is actually what made me buy a 360, finally. I am an unabashed fan of the original Halo on the original Xbox. I played the crap out of it. Halo 2 was kind of a letdown--on top of being very short, it seemed to leave the story in a really crappy place. In the intervening, what, five years there's been a lot of Halo on systems I didn't have, so when the reviews of Reach started rolling in saying that it was a spiritual successor to the original, I had to pick it up. The good: pretty much just like the original Halo in regards to gameplay. The bad: pretty much just like the original Halo in regards to gameplay. The weapons feel "right" which is nice, but it has the typical trope of going through an area one direction and then back through the same area in the other direction at a later point. It also suffered from Halo's typical "there's way more going on than I get during the game" which kind of sucks. There's soooo much backstory that it's sad that they don't deem to show us more of it. Also, as a particular bad point, none of the other spartans on your team seem all that interesting--sort of cardboard cutouts that die one at a time to mark your progression through the game. Enjoyable, if dated, but it really left me wanting more.
Halo: ODST: ****
After Reach, I didn't really have high hopes for ODST which is probably why I liked it so much. It was short, like Reach, but had much better storytelling. The game is mostly character based with you picking up the roles of various people in your squad and it was fun to see part of how it tied into the events of Halo 3. I thought it was, anyway, until I played Halo 3 and saw how tangential it all was. So I suppose I like the tie-ins that I made up in my head rather than the ones that were actually in the game. Still, a very enjoyable playthrough, if a bit short.
Halo 3: ****
I really did play them in this order. It turned out to be pretty difficult to get Halo 3 which I didn't expect. I don't know if it's because I've been playing so many Bioware games or what, but I thought that the storytelling kind of fell flat in Halo 3. A lot of it seemed very sudden and most of the big events were all too predictable. I'm also kind of let down by the ending.
Red Faction: Guerilla: ****
This one is sort of a love/hate thing for me. On the one hand, this is the guy that bricked my PS3. On the other hand, having been lent it for the X360 and actually been able to play it, it's a really fun game. I don't know why it flew so low on the radar because it has a lot of really awesome things: fun driving, fun shooting, and being able to destroy just about anything in the world. Building in the way? No problem! In fact, the hardest part is deciding whether you want to run your vehicle through it, kill it with explosive charges, or (my personal favorite) go to town on it with your trusty sledge. Decisions, decisions!
So there you have it, 2010 in review.
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