Skyrim (Part 2); ME3 Preparations; Microsoft Promotions.

A week goes by and I cave. Not intentionally, mind you; I had assistance. My pal Apophus saw that I was thinking about picking up Skyrim and he was all “hey, I finished it on the xbox and won’t be needing it any time soon – want me to mail it your way?” Isn’t that nice of him? I thought so.

So now I’m a little ways in and yeah, it’s pretty. I haven’t gotten far enough to really say much more than that. I’ll let you know as I get further along.

On top of the pull to play Skyrim is, of course, not a desire to play Mass Effect, but rather a desire to have my Mass Effect 2 saved game exactly how I want it for Mass Effect 3 in a short few weeks. For those of you who are uninitiated in the ME franchise, each sequel allows you to import your saved game from the previous title, not for weapons and armor and such, but for the choices that you made in the previous game(s). Who lives, who dies, and how you reacted to certain challenges in the past remain to affect the present. This is all fine and dandy, but that means that for people like me, there’s some do-over stuff I gotta take care of in order to be where I want come March 6th. Sure, it sounds a little like work, but I think the payoff will be worth it to me. We’ll see.

Having played ME2 a few times now, I’m not worried about the time sink that it’ll be to burn through it. Even with the DLC stuff that I have, I don’t anticipate it taking that long. The game flows smoothly, easily connecting from one subplot to another, and is fairly simple to plan out in advance, once you know the game well enough. ME1 is a little more tedious. What with the extremely robust skills and inventory system, every fight and item collection turns into a meta-game of what goes where on whom, turning what should be a quick jaunt through the galaxy into a snail’s race. So it goes.

Also out this week was Warp, a really cute/violent stealthy-type game from Trapdoor Inc. I demoed at PAX East last year. You’re this adorable little alien who crash-lands on Earth and is picked up by the military. You wake up in a research facility and are undergoing all sorts of bizarre tests, when suddenly you decide you’re done with that BS and teleport around. Yup, turns out, unbeknown to your captors, you can teleport a short distance, even at times inside of objects and/or people. Yup, people. So far it’s fun, fast-paced, and surprisingly gory (in an adorable sort of way). I’m not very far in, however, so I’ll have to keep you all updated as I progress.

As if all that wasn’t enough, I received an email from Microsoft urging me to “Add Warp to your House Party” and I was all “what the shit are you talking about, MS?” and followed the link like a good little consumer. Turns out they’re running some silly promotion wherein if I purchase all four of these designated upcoming “House Party” games from XBLA, then I get like 800MS Points back or something. Fine, fine, but what kind of crap games are they including, you may wonder to yourself (as I know I did). Turns out, three of the four I was already planning on purchasing – Warp, Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, and I Am Alive (and just last week I was saying it wasn’t getting enough press – I AM PRESCIENT).

The fourth game is Nexuiz, an arena-based first person shooter that seems to be a mix between Smash TV, Halo, and Monday Night Combat. Will I give it a shot? Sure, why not? I mean, it started out as a Quake modification in the summer of 2001, became a multi-platform high quality FPS in 2005, and is now being remade with the CryENGINE 3 game engine. Of course I’ll check it out.

I feel that at this time it is important to mention that this post has been sitting in my queue all week, unfinished because I’ve been, well, playing Skyrim. More on that eventually. For now, the moral is – there are too many games in my queue. What a hard life I live.

PAX East, Day 3 – Quick Update; Recap.

Here we are, at the end of another PAX East, alive and whole (well, save for that little empty space in our heart of hearts that we feel at the end of PAX). I have a lot of thoughts to unload, but to form them in a reasonable and legible fashion tonight would be an effort in futility, so you’ll all have to wait.

“But wait,” you may ask, “for what are we waiting?” (See what I did there? Bite me, dangling prepositions.) Well, today I decided to approach the day (with the exception of checking out the Portal 2 video) from the angle of seeing, playing, and learning about games that I didn’t know about before PAX. I hit up a lot of the indie and/or first-release games on the floor, completely forsaking the Sunday panels. A few highlights:

• Super Giant Games‘ enchantingly beautiful role-playing action game Bastion
• Trapdoor‘s hilariously bloody Warp
• Does Nintendo’s 3DS work with people with Strabismus?
• Retro Affect‘s clever and addictive Snapshot
• 82 Apps‘ lovely Civ-meets-Catan-meets-Risk-like iPad game, New World Colony
• last but certainly not least, Owlchemy Labs‘ Smuggle Truck, an iPad physics/accelerometer game about smuggling immigrants into the US (no shit.)

I look forward to filling you all in on what went down over the weekend, uploading pics, and getting some discussion going. In the meantime, what were your favorite parts about PAX this year? Least favorite? Why? Let me know!