Game Update

Now that the holidays have come and gone, I'm almost caught up on my list of things to play.  Almost. My birthday was a couple of days ago, so a few more games got added to the list. I guess if you're gonna choose to have any problem in your life, having too much to play and enjoy isn't a bad problem to have.

In the online world, MW3 and GOW3 have still been occupying a majority of my time. Both have their issues, but not big enough ones to stop playing, just big enough to rage quit every now and then.  MW3 is what it is, and it's usually a safe bet because I'm almost always guaranteed to have someone online to play it with.  Gears is really only fun when you've got a group working through it together (in Horde or Multi) so that one usually takes the backseat.  I still own Battlefield 3, in hopes that maybe someone besides my brother will pick it up, but with so much on my plate anyways, not gonna do any persuading to other people to buy it.

In the single player world, I've been playing quite a bit on my 3DS.  I finished Ocarina of Time 3D, as well as Mario Land 3D, and have been chipping away getting all gold cups in the new Mario Kart.  On the big screen, Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword has been quite the treat, and I anticipate in a month or so I'll probably end up doing a full write up on that.

I've also been playing through a couple of the Professor Layton games that I missed.  The Layton games are awesome, for those that don't know, and anyone with a DS looking to kill some time, these come highly recommended.  Professor Layton, they famous puzzle professor, and his young apprentice Luke, work their way through strange mysteries and mishappenings.  The characters are charming, the animation sequences are top notch (very reminiscent of The Triplets of Belleville for those animation buffs out there...) and the gameplay is simple and straightforward - puzzles!  The puzzle selection is fairly diverse as well, from logic puzzles, more simple math equations, riddles, kinetic puzzles, etc.  My only real problem with Layton, which is really more of a preference is how they end up ranking the puzzles.  Each puzzle is given a quantity of "picrats" to earn depending on it's difficulty, but due to the puzzle diversity and how different people use their brains, a hard puzzle for someone might be very easy for someone else.  The touch screen can also inhibit some of the puzzle solving here... Point and click adventures worked very well on PCs because the mouse cursor could change as something new could be interacted with. When the DS uses this mechanic, there is no "hover" feature that lets the player know what they can and cannot interact with, leaving them feel lost and confused. Most of the time when I can't think my way through a puzzle, the beginning of my confusion could be traced back to the limits of controls. Or maybe I'm just making excuses for a puzzle stumping me good.

In any case, it's been nice to get back to gaming in a variety of genres.  I also finished Uncharted 2, which was a long time coming, so I didn't feel like that was worth writing much about.  That game is just too long.

I'm gonna start my day off now, and spend the rest of it exploring Skyward Sword until someone invites me to play something online.  This was kind of a lazy post, just felt the need to write something. Out.