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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As I stood in line at Gamestop in a queue of thirty plus people at 11 AM, I knew Activision had another hit on their hands. Furthermore, the thirteen year old kid trading in his copy of Battlefield 3 to help pay for the game was almost a metaphor for how the upcoming battle between the titles might play out.

Call of Duty has now become officially a perennial franchise, with a new installment out literally every fall. This causes critics of the series to poke fun at it, and make unflattering comparisons to Madden, where only minor tweaks and adjustments are put into each new year’s release.

But even with these jabs, it was still the case that each of the titles in the Call of Duty franchise were at least new games. Sure, the differences between Modern Warfare’s 1, 2 and last year’s Black Ops were hardly colossal, but there were notable changes that made the games feel like a somewhat new and exciting experience each time.

With Modern Warfare 3 however, the clock has run out. In its current format, it’s becoming clear that Activision has squeezed almost every drop out of this series that it can manage. I’ve always laughed along with the jokes about new COD games being glorified $60 map packs, but in the case of MW3, it’s an undeniable, factual statement.

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A week down of Battlefield 3, and a week to go until Modern Warfare 3 comes out. What will happen when the two collide? Will Modern Warfare squash Battlefield like a bug, and allows its servers to finally breathe as it steals 80% of its players? Will Battlefield hold strong and knock out the giant as it relies on the same tired tactics?

That’s probably the subject for the next installment of this series, but for now, I’m just going to focus on my experience with Battlefield over the last week. What I’ve found is a great game that’s doing everything in its power to prevent me from enjoying it.

I have never played a game with this many issues in its first week of release. The first three or four days after launch, the game was literally not playable during peak hours after dinner. The servers would crash, and Twitter would be flooded with a hundred messages a minute about how shit EA’s servers are. When they did go back online? The problems are far from over.

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Welcome to the first installment of a new journal-style series that will ultimately build up into a full-fledged review of Battlefield 3. Unlike most game outlets, I don’t have a deadline to get my review up on Metacritic the day of launch, and so I can actually take my time with a game, and play it the way it was meant to be played, over time.

Battlefield is uncharted territory for me. I’ve never once played another installment in the series, and therefore come in with a blank slate when it comes to expectations. This new game has a large amount of hype due to its rather insane graphics and the fact that it is positioning itself as a direct competitor to the Call of Duty behemoth, a series that has really never had a worthy adversary in the last few years.

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(Read journal #1 here first)

Yeah, I know, another journal already? I’ve never done a day one and two back to back before, but I’ve been playing a LOT of L.A. Noire and I have too many thoughts not to share, so I decided to come back with another installment.

My time with the game so far has been a rollercoaster of love and hate. What you’ll find below was written over the course of a few hours playing the title, and my emotions swing from immense frustration to complete satisfaction. What will I think tomorrow? Who knows, but the more I play this game, the more I’m appreciating it. It’s not without flaw, but I’m learning from my mistakes.

The next journal starts below, and I’ll try to at least hold off a week or so before I get the next one out.

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It was my birthday last week, and I requested and received the only game out right now that I thought might be worth owning rather than merely giving a rent.

L.A. Noire is being heralded as a shining star for Rockstar, a blend of incredible technology and unique gameplay that’s different than anything we’ve seen before. Deciding to see for myself if these claims are true, I’ve set out to beat the game over the course of the next X amount of days, reverting back to my old “journal” style installments as I do so. You may remember these from some longer titles I’ve reviewed in the past, and it’s actually my favorite way to talk about games as your experience with them often changes as you go.

It’s the end of day one, I’m a few hours in and already 7 missions through the 21 that make up the story. The game is one of three discs, but with only 21 total missions, I’m wondering if they start to get longer, or if they just need a ton of space for all the dialogue and cutscenes in the game. I’m guessing the latter.

You play as Cole Phelps, the exact opposite of a traditional Rockstar hero like Niko Belic. Phelps is a war hero turned cop who is determined to be the only honest officer in 1940s LA. He wants to rise in the ranks of the police force, and to do so he has to get promoted through the departments. I believe there are three; traffic, vice and homicide. I just finished up my final traffic case, and have now made it into homicide where I expect things to get hairier.

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