Just as a way to get rid of the pile of angst and anger that was my last journal entry, I'm posting this.

Next week is finals.  Meaning only three more days left of the semester.  Also meaning that I will be busy after today until Thursday afternoon.

Once I'm off school, I need to start looking for a job.  Which is lame, but necessary.  I wish I was better at interviews.

As I'm going to be busy for the next week, I have the motivation to work on all my stuff that has nothing to do with school. Hopefully, that carries through, because that means I'll actually get some work done on things.  This includes working on the OE game and my other Nobody game, perhaps some work on PoH, and maybe even a bit of work on those L4D maps.  Don't hold your breath, though.  I'm known to lose motivation the more time I have to work.


In other news, I feel like talking about games.

Assassin's Creed Revelations: I'm honestly not all that impressed with this one.  It's a good game, but I felt like it was lacking something.  Especially compared to its predecessor Brotherhood.  I feel like Brotherhood had a lot more in it, and the only problem I have yet to call Brotherhood on is how many missions that desynchronize you the second someone notices you.  Even if you kill them before they can point you out to anyone.  Revelations, on the other hand, I have issues you with all over.  Bomb Crafting and Den Defense take up a lot of space in the side-quest category, and I don't like either.  They replaced collecting flags with collecting little shiny pieces of data that obviously weren't there when Ezio was, so it lost the feeling.  Plus, there's no real incentive to keep collecting them after you get 30, except to get the achievement.  I haven't done the tombs yet, and I feel like that will help me to like the game a bit more, but there's only 2, unlike the 6 in each of the last two, plus any DLC secret areas.  The bank system is glitched, which is annoying as I should have thousands of akce at this point and I have 800 that I got from looting.

From an outside point of view, I don't like that they changed the controls.  I understand if you want to keep updating the controls to fit the game better and make it easier.  But if you have a clear set of rules governing the controls for 3 games straight, don't suddenly change them for game 4 with no explanation as to why.  That was one thing that I really liked about the games was that each button was assigned a different body part, and that body part did set actions, and this was made as a specific part of the in-game animus that Desmond is using to control Altair/Ezio.  So a control change should have been explained in the animus, in my opinion.

As for what I did like about it, the hookblade was a nice addition and I'll miss the ziplines in colonial America.  I also really enjoyed the crossover of all three characters, and I felt very satisfied with the ending, where Ezio recognizes and speaks with Desmond (in the presence of Altair's remains).  I actually felt like "yes, this game is over, there was a nice resolution, I am happy now" whereas the past games left pretty much everyone going ".....what?"  And I liked being able to play as Desmond and seeing his story, though I would have preferred a third person obstacle course kind of thing rather than the trippy first person whatever that was.

Kingdom Hearts Re:Coded: Okay, so.  I guess I'll go simple on this one: Better than I initially expected? Yes. Good game? Not really.

Its got an interesting storyline, and since that's what people seemed to be criticizing it for the most, I'm going to have to say I support it and don't know what you people were going on about.  This game was almost necessary, in fact, in order to continue the series past the end of Kingdom Hearts II.  It reveals the existence of all the connections in Sora's Heart and drives everyone to move toward righting all the wrongs of BbS and Days, which is going to be the plot of the next two games, or so I've heard.  So the story was definitely a plus.

Unfortunately, the story is about the only plus.  They didn't waste much effort in upgrading it from a mobile game.  Other than a few scarce real cutscenes, the scenes that place as about 6 stills for each character and dialogue boxes.  The original gba Chain of Memories had better cutscenes.  The camera cannot be freely rotated without using the sylus, meaning you can't move and change the camera at the same time.  You can only change the view to whatever Sora's looking at, so you have to constantly readjust the camera.  The other controls are mediocre at best, moving and battle and such.  The panel system from Days returns in a much more convoluted manner, and I'm not sure why.  The command levelling and melding system works a bit strange and I don't really like it.  I prefer the BbS method much better.  And each world has its own gimmick to finishing, each one more annoying than the last.  All in all, I'd say read the story on the KH wiki and leave it at that. Maybe watch the cutscenes online.

Fallout 3: Only just started playing this one (meaning I've put 4 hours into it).  I can already tell that its a timesink.  I've never played one of these free-roam kind of games before, unless you count the little bit of Red Dead Redemption's Undead Nightmare expansion that I got.  It seems actually really fun.  However, I stopped playing and I haven't picked it back up yet.  Assassin's Creed still tops it.


Uh, yeah.  I think that's it. .3.