just finished red dead redemption.... fuck thats one bummer of an ending...

and Guildy... know what you mean about ACII, im still on the Rome mission and i just cant be arsed to finish it... let alone buy any of the other ones...

same

So I had a big post written out, & went to push post not noticing that the router had restarted itself. And now its gone. But I'll summarise, or try. I sort of see what you mean. I just finished Assassins Creed 3 today, never finished Brotherhood (I'm sure I got reasonably close but lost interest. Some neat things but it just seemed pointless really), didn't even touch Revelations. And I think that's me with the series. For the foreseeable future at least. Maybe I'll come back to it with Assassins Creed 4 assuming that's 3 or 4 years down the line, but if there's new Brotherhood/Revelations spin-offs then I'm out, despite the fact its my old man who buys all these games. He loves them. Think AssCree3 is the first not pre-owned game he's bought since Uncharted 3.

In other gaming news, I got Tropico 4 in the Steam sale & it is a hell of a lot of fun. And I need to finish episodes 4 & 5 of The Walking Dead sometime soon. And actually I think I should finish Arkham Asylum which I haven't touched since my 360 RRoD'd about 18 months ago. At least it feels like 18 months, maybe it isn't quite that long. I intend to get X-Com at some point down the line. And Mass Effect 3. I have no idea why I haven't played Mass Effect 3 yet, I fucking adored Mass Effect 1 & 2. I've not gotten the new Football Manager, because well, I don't see the point. I'm still playing FM12, so buying 13 just because it is out seems redundant. Usually I'm burnt out of FM by August/September & then have a couple of months off before the new one, but not this year. So that's great.

Right now the main things I play are Tropico 4, FM12, World of MMA 3 & Pro Cycling Manager 2011. 3 of those are sports management games ffs. One is an city builder type thing.

I need to finish Sleeping Dogs at some point, it was a really good game, lots of fun, & I'm sure I'm only 2 or 3 missions from the end of it. I stopped because I was getting annoyed by a mission but that was a nearly 2 months ago so maybe I can reappproach it. And that's my gaming digest. Fuck, this was initially just going to be a quick note on AC3

3 is Desmond's end-game in the same way that ME3 was Sheppard's end-game but there's still a lot of room for characters to come in. This probably doesn't spoil that much, but the biggest thing I disliked about AC3 is that Desmond never really became an Ezio or Altair, he had a set role but not an /interesting/ one.

I'd skip Arkham Asylum and head straight to City, it is so good it's not even funny, and speaking as a guy who can rip through a good single-player action game in like 2 days, City took me like a week?

Actually, the biggest bang for my buck that's not a rigid RPG that I've bought is Mass Effect 3 and that's because the side-quests have actual incentive. Not that Saints Row 1 - 2 bullshit where I had to do side-missions to get the story through with, the side-missions in ME3 had actual ripples with the main story and gave me closure with characters from the previous 2.

Every month or so I get into a WMMA binge where I go back to my British Cage Fighting promotion and just start to book.

Lastly, fucking Kenny.

It's not much of a spoiler alert, but let me say that his arc while long-winded felt like it closed too quickly. Not the hastily written ending that other games had, and the ending wasn't quite bad, it just felt wrong for the series in terms of direction. Like writing yourself into a box. But yeah, the marketing and all of the developers had basically said, AC3 will be the last Desmond game, in the same way that ME3 was hyping up the Reapers' arrival as Sheppard's last stand and Halo 3 as Chief's (even though we all knew that was a fucking lie.)

In terms of how much more complex AC will get, I would say not much. I really liked ME because it had a very hardcore sci-fi fanbase that allowed it too fully explore and do whatever it wanted in terms of sci-fi. AC taped more into the action gamers, people coming over from Uncharted (which is the absolute best series) and so on, so I don't think it'll be getting anymore complex or convoluted than it is.

One thing I really liked about AC3 is for the first time in the series, I understood just about every little thing. There's like a 7 minute (UNFUCKING SKIPPABLE) recap of the entire series that was really necessary. Also it closes a lot of character arcs, like Lucy's. That one surprised me, it turns out:



Arkham City seems too big but every piece works and there's several "Arkham Asylum" like structures within the map.

Bought a PS2 again for Persona 4, of my favorite games

Then I remembered that I have a grand total of 2 hours of free-time during the week, and the game's introduction is like an hour long.

I just sent them out to make money so I could buy new swords

Anyone heard about THQ's Humble Bundle? They are giving away Metro 2033, Darksiders, Red Faction: Armageddon and three different Company of Heroes games for the PC all for however much you want. You can pay as little as $1 for all of them! Or if you pay over the average amount of everyone else, you also get the new Saints Row game!

They're doing it all for charity and you can reclaim it all for only 12 more days. It's a bargain, to buy them all separately it would cost $190.

http://www.humblebundle.com/

The online isn't too bad. It's just wave-based multiplayer.

So I've been back to Crusader Kings 2, quite likely my game of 2012. Started a game with the Byzantine Empire to have a gander at the DLC game out for it a couple months back fleshing out the Roman empire. Taken back a large part of what was Roman territory, including southern Italy upto & including Rome, I've got 4 of the 5 patriarchs in place, just need Palestine. Which is a shame because the Fatimid caliphate is a terrifying looking beast. I've been able to take back a lot of territory in Anatolia from the Seljuks who have spent nearly 30 years in a civil war, but the other major Muslim power refuse to collapse on themselves & that is presenting me with problems. Despite my large stack of mercenary I'm outnumbered by the Fatimids.

I was confused with the Seljuk civil war for control so ended checking the ledger & it isn't even the longest on going conflict, there's been war between the Count of Nantes & the Duke of Brittany from 1081. It's now 1113. Madness