Diversifying

So for the last couple months, most of what I've been playing has been Command and Conquer 3 and the biggie, WoW. Together (mostly WoW, to be honest) they've eaten up most of my fairly ample gaming time. A little Okami here and there, and a nostalgia-filled play-through of Warcraft I & II, but not a whole lot of variety. That does seem like it's going to be changing.

Aside from starting to edge towards WoW-burnout and wanting to stave that off, there are far too many good titles to ignore. I broke down this afternoon and bought the Orange Box. I don't know why it's orange, but it has Portal and Episode 2. Portal has been recommended to me by more people than I can actually remember at this point, and anything that Yahtzee actually can't come up with an insult for is at least frightening and at most promising. Plus, I need to figure out what the hell all these references to cake and companion cubes are all about.

Which reminds me - anyone who'd like a copy of Half Life 2 and/or Episode 1, let me know - thanks to the Orange Box I, like Andy, now have a spare copy of each.

Heck, even C&C3 has me excited again - Generals may have been very far astray from the series to that point, but C&C3 brings it back and does a pretty good job with the storyline, enough that I'm actually excited to find out what happens next. It'll probably get shelved for a while after I beat the single-player campaign, but that's what happens with me and RTS games - I'm not much for multiplayer of that sort.

But the game I'm really excited about is Hellgate: London, the NDA for which has finally been lifted. I managed to get invited to the beta fairly late into it, unfortunately, and have by this point been invited six times, four times to the US one and twice to the EU version, so if anyone would like a beta key just let me know - only problem being that the servers go down on Friday. Anyway, I started off and I was a bit skeptical, what with somewhat disappointing performance on my machine and the fact that I'd given up waiting excitedly for this game almost a year ago, which was almost a year after I first got excited about it.

But I've been pleasantly surprised ever since. The gameplay is fast-paced and a very pleasant change from what I've been doing lately, plus it has the authentically capitalistic instant gratification of Diablo. Loot galore, and lots of shiny things to keep you occupied. There's even a crafting system in place to augment existing items and built new ones, all of which require a variety of items, which you obtain by breaking down unwanted items. And since I'm a packrat who loves collecting resources and reagents, hoarding all the runic shards and tech components has me extremely happy.

So normally I'd say you should all go out and try the demo, but I hear that it's actually worse than the beta and is quite crappy. The beta itself is still somewhat buggy. I don't know what's normal for a beta, but this seems pretty status-quo so I'm not exactly worried. Hopefully it'll be improved substantially in the next week before release, and I know that at least one big patch is on its way. I've already pre-ordered it and I'm still happy about that, now I just hope it gets here on time. It looks to be damn fun. So far it isn't perfect, but if you liked Diablo, you'll like this too. Ooh, plus, there's one class that plays best from a first-person point of view which is quite interesting. So at the moment: flawed but extremely fun and promising. If I'm allowed, I'll say more after the patch.

And good news, everyone! I get to stop bitching about the school not giving me benefits - starting January 1, I get more hours and benefits, which includes the ever-popular health insurance. Everything else in my life is pretty damn dandy too, so huzzah and good night to all!