barely fatal

Saturday I started Anno 1404 (aka Dawn Of Discovery) after six months of not touching it. If you know me, you know I like me a proper destruction simulator. If you know me well, you know that building big things out of small things is something I like spending even more time with. I’ve always wanted to finish that one open-ended game. However I started a new scenario map (of course, duh).

Anno has this nice feature, you get a reminder to take a break after every 2 hours of continuous game play. “Maybe it’s time to grab a coffee.” Not intrusively, just a kind reminder. After eight hours it says “Too bad we can’t hand out a medal for that”, and after ten … your wrist starts to hurt. I just can’t put it down, there is always one more thing to do. And these things get more and more complex as the game progresses. It gets really hard to balance space constraints and resource availability. You ship stuff north and south and back, assemble things here and there and then deliver them to your city and you ever-demanding citizens so they advance to noblemen some day. Then you run out of stones. Or hemp. Or coal. Or all of those.

For a completionist like me, or a borderline OCD person this game is both a curse and a fulfilment of all dreams. Then and again I just like to watch. There are so many details.

Check the next screenshot, nothing spectacular, but do you see the rainbow in the waterfall?

You only see these little things if you zoom in really close – and you hardly ever do that. By the way, these shots are made in “post card” mode, you don’t get the blur in the normal view.

I can watch cows farms all day, or a public, err, execution punishment in the market place … The orient also ain’t bad. Makes for a good desktop background.

20 hours later I’m working on building the very last resource chain. Now I gotta start beautifying my metropolis. No more check board  layouts for top efficiency.

I have no idea. I’ve played Bad Company 2 for quite a while now, in total more than twice as long as Modern Warfare 2. And I thought I’d get better. Uh-huh. Maybe everyone else is getting better, too, only faster than me? Yeah, right. But only the guys on the other team; the guys on my team were all born cross-eyed and brainless. Sure, keep driving over me while I try to repair your tank. Storm the room I just – and very visibly so – threw a grenade into. Stand in the doorway and slowly move backwards while firing in wild panic. And when I hide in a bush, trying to play sniper to get out of your ways, walk up next to me and start shooting like crazy to draw all the attention. Oh, and hold up high the “kill him” sign when we walk in a group of four, as for some reason it’s always me who dies – first and alone.

I don’t get it, some rounds end 18:3, others 3:18. Ok, no beer when playing, I do understand that. But still. Sheesh.

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Zombieland is a GREAT movie. Woody Harrelson. Bill fraking Murray as Bill fraking Murray … zombies … awesome. Is it me, or did they steal from Left4Dead? Or was it the other way round?

I won. I won Bioshock 2 and the promotion/press pack including the soundtrack. It came in a big box which looked like a cage. The post banged it up pretty badly, though. I won it on GamersGlobal.de, they had a big lottery in which you could invest their artificial currency to buy tickets. It’s a pretty clever system, you get experience points and level up for nearly everything you do on the site, like adding comments, or filling in your profile. The higher the rank, the more you can do, too. Like writing and posting news and videos. You get currency when you gain “achievements”, i.e. medals, for example when you enter 50 games to your library and so on. But even if you don’t do much (like me) you get enough to participate in the lottery – and I got lucky (as many others). I usually never win anything, cool.

Pandorum could have been a pretty good sci-fi movie. With a better script and editing. It starts out so good, it’s a shame. It tanked at the box office and will be forgotten very soon. Okay, it’s far from being overly original, but if you like Alien, Solaris and the like, you might like this – or despise it even more for being almost good.

Lacking a PS2 I never played any of the God Of Wars – blasphemy, I know. Now I rented God Of War 3, I’m about half way through (I think). After dying three or four times in the very first bigger fight I restarted on Easy (which really is easy). I don’t have time for endless repeats of the same button mashing. And quick time events, man, I guess I’ll never warm up to those. Just not my kind of gameplay. Visually easily the most stunning thing I’ve seen on PS3 so far, including Uncharted 2 and Dirt 2. Most brutal, too. This game lives and dies with the great sets, not the elaborate gameplay. You cannot skip cut scenes, a deadly sin in my book. It’s a joyride of awesome or it could be, if it wasn’t for the fixed camera. I mean, is that GoW standard? It makes me curse a lot. Thanks goodness it’s so darn pretty and loud.

BBQ season has started. Chocolate fountains are great. Way too many calories in one weekend …