It’s time for another piece of my Diablo 3 review, now that I’ve had more than a single day to take it all in. It’s a game that takes months, not days to really understand, and as such, you’ll probably be seeing these journal reviews for some time to come.

It’s been about ten days since the game was released, and in that time I’ve put in (oh god) about 55 hours across two characters. I have a level 51 Barbarian that I used only to quest with a very specific friend with a similarly powerful Wizard, and a level 27 Witch Doctor that I play whenever I feel like. Which is increasingly often.

If you can’t tell by my current play time, the game is addicting. Impossibly so. Even when I’m not playing, builds and item drops race through my head. I’ve been able to keep a balance in my life despite this fact (hooray gym and girlfriend), but yeah, it’s pretty bad.

I suppose since I’ve now beaten the game about three total times, it’s worth mentioning that yes, there is some vague semblance of a plot. Unfortunately, it’s about the worst excuse for a story I’ve ever seen in a game as it kills off major characters left and right without so much as a head nod in their direction, and the dialogue is some of the most inane I’ve heard since I was a bad enough dude to rescue the President. Continue Reading »

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If any game ever deserved a journal installment style of review, it’s Diablo 3. I’m not exactly sure how other outlets are running full reviews already, even with early access. It’s all about “the long game” with this title, and even though some crazies already have beaten the game in seven hours, you’ll have to get up to at least a hundred before you can fully make a judgment.

But this isn’t truly a “Day 1″ start. I did play the beta, and previously shared my thoughts about it here. But the truth is, the beta is only about eighty minutes long, and I’ve blown way past that mark already in day one.

I’m currently nearing the end of Act I. Or at least I think I am as I’ve already fought two sub bosses and have to be heading for some kind of dramatic conclusion. The acts are quite long, I’ll give them that, and I supposed they would have to be now that there are four instead of the usual five. Continue Reading »

After a long deliberation process and probably a bit too much internal (and external) debate, I finally decided to take the plunge and get Star Wars: The Old Republic.

I’ve never been an MMO man myself, not because I have anything against the genre in particular, but more due to the fact that I have an addictive personality when it comes to games, and I was a bit afraid that in a few months I could be one of the news stories you see about the guy who died after playing World of Warcraft for 36 hours straight.

But I’m a bit more grown up now than I used to be, and I believed I could keep my compulsions in check. And I have, so far, and am ready to report my findings on my first stretch of playtime with the highest budgeted video game of all time.

I’ve got two characters right now, so that I may balance both the light and dark side of the force, and also experience different play styles between ranged and melee. Thus, I have a level 14 male Jedi Knight, and a level 11 female bounty hunter.

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Read Journal #1 here first.

Well I did it. After thirty hours, adding on to probably a hundred more I spent on past titles, I’ve saved the universe. I think. Probably.

The grand finale of the Mass Effect series is both epic and frustrating, and though we’ll discuss it later, right now it’s time for some talk about everything that came before it. I could have squeezed in another journal installment before this one, but I saw the finish line, put my head down, and just went for it.

Usually I’d do a follow-up entry after this where I report what it’s like playing through with my hardassed renegade female Shepard, but this is one time I don’t think I’m going to do that. Why? Well, outside of the fact that she’s just kind of a dick, there are no real “opposite choices” to be made here, with the only important one being in the game’s closing moments, and I could just reload that segment and pick another option if I really wanted to. Not that it would really matter.

No, rather being a Renegade or Paragon doesn’t have nearly the implications it used to. Decisions you made in past games will have big repercussions here, but as this is the “final” installment, there aren’t really many opportunities to make choices that matter, and often times the game forces you into a “Renegade interrupt” as the only way of saving your own skin or that of someone close to you. The fact is either path leads to the relatively same conclusion, it’s a bit frustrating that the illusion of choice existed in this series at all.

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Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither are Mass Effect 3 reviews. I can only play so much of a game on day one, and judging by my 40 hour save file from ME2, it’s going to be a long journey.

This day one journal installment will just give you a taste of what I’ve experienced in the first six or seven hours, which isn’t much because as always, 80% of game time is wrapped up in dialogue. I’m a “pursue every conversation tree” kind of guy, and the story and characters have always been my favorite part of the game over combat, which is the focus of most similarly themed titles.

It’s been about three years since we last saw Shepard, and despite his insistence that the sky was falling (that was literally one of the DLCs, wasn’t it?), the universe is stunned when the Reapers finally invade and start wrecking everyone’s shit.

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It was a combination of extreme boredom and the nagging itch to level up in something that drove me back to the wilds of Skyrim for one more adventure. I’ve spent the past week or so with an entirely new character, and in the process, tried to get a different perspective on the game I’ve pretty much talked to death already.

This was my third such venture. My original character, a beastly Nord barbarian, got all the way up to level 40, clad himself in Daedric armor, and was the savior of the land from world-eating dragons, master of every guild and collector of every Daedric artifact after a hundred hours. My second effort, a female high elf mage, got less playing time, as I grew tired of the cumbersome spell switching process, and once I discovered how easy each school of magic was to level exploit, I got bored quickly when all my stats shot to a hundred in an hour or two.

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Read the last two journals here and here first.

WHAT YEAR IS IT???

A hundred hours of Skyrim. That’s how much I’ve played, so much so that it’s been almost disorienting in terms of my ideas of time and space. It’s sure made the last three weeks fly by, but at long last, I think I can say that my time with the game is nearing an end. Probably. Maybe. Possibly.

Since my last installment, I’ve beaten the main questline with my main bludgeoning-specialty character, and then for the hell of it, I started a Mage just to see what that was like, and view the game from an alternate perspective.

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Alright, it’s time for me to emerge out of the dark cave I’ve been living in playing Skyrim for the past week, and write another installment about my findings. Let me just check the save file here and let’s see, oh wow, 45 hours in.

That’s triple how much I’d played after my first journal segment, and now I should be a bit better able to comment on some of the larger aspects of the game rather than pure first impressions.

I’ve spent the last two full days of gameplay time doing a mix of missions from the main questline to the various guilds around Skyrim to the assorted random missions that seem to crop up with each new person you talk to or area you discover.

My melee character sword and shield is now level 30, and has evolved from a relative wimp to a medieval tank almost incapable of death. Find a few pieces of quality equipment, level up your stats the right way, and I don’t know, but I’m feeling a bit overpowered at the moment, and I’m not sure I like it.

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Read Journal #1 here first.

Despite what you’re thinking, this isn’t an angry post. The last time I wrote an “I Quit” installment to a journal, it was for Dragon Age: Origins, a game that was such a frustrating experience, I returned it to the store in a matter of days.

That’s not what’s happening here. This is a post born out of pure exhaustion and boredom, and me finally realizing that I’ve grown out of a series I used to love.

I spent my entire last journal entry for Modern Warfare 3 detailing how similar the game was to MW2, right down to the exact same menus and loading screens. Even though that’s exceptionally lame, It’s tough to berate Activision and (what’s left of) Infinity Ward for not changing much, as when you have a formula that sells $400M worth of product on day one, you don’t really want to mess with it.

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I’m not sure there’s been a more daunting video game than The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. It’s intimidating to step out into the world, walk around for three hours and open up the map to see that you’ve explored approximately 0.1% of this realm.

Skyrim is perhaps the most involved single player game you can find; the closest you’ll get to an MMO, albeit with a finish line at some point a thousand miles away. There is simply so much to do in Elder Scrolls games between exploration, side quests, leveling and so forth, and Skyrim has done the impossible and expanded the series to a degree never before seen.

In turn, this is going to be the first of probably many, many journal installments. Most games I can review in a single bound, and some require a few journal entries as I progress, usually no more than two or three. But Skyrim? Oh lord.

This was a busier weekend than I thought, so I “only” got to play the game for maybe 15 hours or so. That would be enough to 100% most games, and I could have played the Call of Duty or Battlefield campaigns three times over, but Skyrim laughs in those game’s faces. I’m level 15 I believe, and have completed maybe two or three of the main plotline’s quests. The rest of the time? I’ve been wandering around doing side missions, exploring places I shouldn’t and simply just existing in this colossal world.

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