So, I just got home and my plans to jump right into Aion: Tower of Eternity have been temporarily put on hold while I wait in a queue to get into my chosen server. Right now the wait time is sitting at 22 minutes, but it said something similar about 10 minutes ago, and when the number changes it's not always moving in the right direction. Anyhow, since I can't play just yet I figured I'd post an early impressions-style reviews blog entry about the game. And, since I'm having some trouble accessing the reviews blog right now, it's gonna end up here instead - at least for the moment.

In case you're unfamiliar with Aion, it's a new MMO from NCSoft that's been available in Korea for a while, but which officially goes live here in North America tomorrow. I preordered the game several weeks ago, so I was able to get in on the "headstart" launch that went live at noon yesterday. After seven or eight hours of play I'm still only level 12, but I'm starting to get a good feel for where the game is headed I think, and so far I'm liking it a lot. And here's why, in an easily-digestible bullet point format:

• Character Creation
  Aion's character creation tools are extremely powerful - like, EA Sports powerful. Sure, you can just pick a head, a body, and a hairstyle if you don't really care for this stuff, but if you want to recreate Pygar from the movie Barbarella, you have the option to tinker with just about every facial feature imaginable. The flipside of the character editor is that it gives you the freedom to make unrealistically proportioned characters with, for example, heads that are far too small for their bodies, or with tree-trunk arms and legs bolted onto a puny torso. Save for some presumably PVP-minded players opting for the tiniest character they can come up with, though, most people appear to be opting for something that at least resembles a human being.
• The Launch
  Perhaps it's not surprising given that the game is already out in Korea, but queues aside, Aion's launch has been an incredibly smooth one thus far. I was able to get into the game around 10 minutes after the announced midday start time, and although I was disconnected about 10 minutes later, I've experienced no problems since. With new players descending on the starter areas like a swarm of hungry locusts, content was getting devoured quicker than it could respawn, but getting quests completed was rarely a problem.
• Combat
  So far the assassin that I've spent most of my time playing as is a lot of fun - somewhat similar to a rogue in World of Warcraft, but with less emphasis on stealth. There doesn't appear to be a combo system as such, at least not in the WoW-rogue sense, but you can chain attacks together and, rather than having to map every move to a different button, every move in a chain is mapped to the same button. So, for example, after I perform my "Swift Edge" attack, I then use the same button to perform a "Soul Slash" and, when I reach level 22, I'll be able to press it a third time for a Rune Slash. It's been done before, but after sinking so much time into WoW and into organizing dozens of different buttons, it's a feature that I very much appreciate.
• The Visuals
  Even if I end up posting a dozen of these blogs before I'm ready to write a full review of Aion, I think I'll find it tricky to ever do so without mentioning how great it looks. The aesthetic is somewhat similar to that of Guild Wars, but with superior animation and the CryEngine under the hood. I posted some new screenshots, taken on my relatively modest home PC, to the gamespace today - definitely worth checking out.
• Flying
  Perhaps the most unique thing about Aion is that, from level 10 onwards, your character has angel-like wings that you can use to fly. Initially, you can only sustain flight for one minute, but my understanding is that increases as you level up. Also, you can only fly in certain zones, which seems a little odd, but is necessary so that you don't just bypass enemies and stuff completely.
• Gathering & Crafting
  Although I've trained as a weaponsmith, I've yet to spend much time crafting - there are a lot of materials that need to be purchased in order to work with metals it seems, and I came close to bankrupting myself long before I was able to craft a simple steel dagger. Gathering is interesting in that, rather than having to train in order to learn how to pick things up off the ground, everyone can do it. So, providing you take the time to pick flowers and fruit early on, you'll find that you're able to mine iron and gather other higher-level resources later on. Bag space is an ever-present concern, of course, but these things seemingly stack in massive numbers (I have 110 of one resource right now), you get big bags (known as "cubes" in-game), and there's a bank/warehouse system with both character-specific slots and account slots that can be accessed by all of your characters on the same server. I'm a pack-rat by nature, so bag space is always a "thing" for me, but right now it's not taking up nearly as much of my time in Aion as it always has in WoW.

And, with that it looks like I'm ready to get back into the game. Be sure to go and check out those screenshots, and expect more Aion coverage from me in the near future.

Cheers

I said I wouldn't, but I did. This weekend I started playing World of Warcraft again. Rather than get back into endgame stuff with one of my level 80 characters or push my 70-something death knight to 80, I opted to start a new character. I've never leveled a Horde character past level 30-something, but after just one weekend my new warlock is at 22 and, because Blizzard continues to make the game easier on new characters, he already has a mount.

I'm not writing a blog to bemoan the current state of the game though, nor even to talk about my disappointment that Cataclysm is going to effectively destroy much of the original game's content for anyone who's five or six years late to the party. No, I felt compelled to write here because, while fishing for sagefish in the Hillsbrad Foothills, I was shocked to find that the river is now full of garbage. I'm not sure if it's the residents of Southshore or Tarren Mill that are to blame, but in the time it took me to catch just 6 raw sagefish I also filled my bags with the following:

1x Rumsey Rum Dark
1x Watertight Trunk (containing leather and woollen cloth)
1x Empty Rum Bottle
5x Sickly Fish
9x Weeds
10x Driftwood
10x Tangled Fishing Line
10x Tattered Cloth
0x Other Fish

That's just crazy.

I could sit here and write more, but there are other games that I need to be writing about right now. Please though, next time you're out for a picnic, on a hike, or killing quest-givers in an enemy town, take your trash with you.

No, that's not a typo. GameStop, it seems, has become just as interested in offering its customers exclusive content as we at GameSpot have. Store-exclusive content is nothing new (Shaun White's "Target" mountain will forever be a favorite), but while shopping around for preorder deals earlier today I was amazed at the number of games that now offer additional content if you purchase them at GameStop. Among the games I preordered today, for example, were Forza Motorsport 3 and Tekken 3. Ordinarily I'd probably have ordered these from Amazon, or just swung by a Best Buy on my way home from work on the day of release, but on this occasion I caved and took the GameStop option so I don't miss out onbonus cars and a cardboard tube samurai skin for Yoshimitsu, among other things.

Aion is another game that I preordered recently and, while shopping around for the best deal, I noticed that (slightly) different in-game bonuses are being offered depending on where you purchase the game. I opted for the Steam version in the end, but Amazon and GameStop also have preorder deals with in-game bonuses.

Taking aquick look at GameStop's front page today, it's immediately apparent that these exclusive content deals are something that the retailer is really pushing this holiday season. Below is a list of games (I'm sure there must be more as well) that, if I end up preordering them, I'll probably end up getting from GameStop rather than anywhere else. Yeah, I know, I'm part of the problem...

Champions Online -"Insectoid Airfoil" bonus in-game vanity item.
Marvel UltimateAlliance 2 - Unlock "Juggernaut" character.
Batman: Arkham Asylum - Bonus "DemBones" Scarecrow challenge map.
Dragon Age: Origins - Bonus undisclosed "in-game items".
Assassin's Creed 2 - Two bonus maps.

I don't really care for free posters or t-shirts like those that GameStop are giving away with preorders of Metroid Prime Trilogy, so I can understand why GameStop wouldwant to offerfor more compelling bonuses. I'm not sure that I like this trend though, because (as with day one DLC) it often feels like regular content is being stripped out to serve this purpose. Was the Scarecrow challenge map really created exclusively for GameStop customers, or is it merely being removed from the game for everyone who chooses to shop elsewhere? Will the rest of us have an opportunity to download it at another date? And if so, how much will we be charged for the privilege?

This blog entry isn't intended as a call to action or anything like that, how could it when I'm clearly voting the wrong way with my wallet? I guess I'm just curious to hear what the rest of you think about this stuff. I've always been a sucker for collector's editions and that sort of thing, and I have no problem with them whatsoever, I don't much like feeling like I can only purchase them from one retailer though--especially when in-game items that I definitely don't want to miss out on are involved.

Finally, I get it. For months I've been wondering what all of the fuss about Fallout 3 was, and now I know. I was excited enough about the game prior to its release that I preordered the crazy Amazon-exclusive special that, in addition to the regular special edition, shipped with an extremely cheap and breakable lifesize Pip-Boy 3000. Playing the game for the first time, though, I got incredibly frustrated with the combat and, exactly as I did the first time I played Oblivion, I quit just four or five hours in.

The recent arrival of the Operation: Anchorage DLC got a bunch of people in the office excited for Fallout 3 again and so, since Wrath of the Lich King is no longer occupying my every spare moment now that my hunter has tamed Loque'nahak (don't ask), I figured I should have another crack at it. I feel better about the choices I made when customizing my character this time around, and since worrying about inventory space tends to be something that I let ruin games for me (WoW included) at times, I made a real effort not to pick up every single item that wasn't nailed to the floor. The real reason I'm enjoying Fallout 3 a lot more now, though, is simply that I'm using the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System (VATS) that I mostly ignored previously.

Call me crazy, but when I played Fallout 3 for the first time I was under the impression that I should play in real-time or using VATS. It never occured to me that these two very different systems, neither of which is good enough to use exclusively, could become something quite special when used together. Long story short, I'm about eight hours into the game now and loving every minute of it, and that includes the hour or so that I've spent in Anchorage.

So, now that I'm getting into Fallout 3, it looks like I'll be neglecting the rest of the games that I've been playing lately. I'll still be finishing Afro Samurai at some point, I'll inevitably end up visiting Knothole Island in Fable II sometime soon, and my death knight will become my third level 80 character, but for the moment I'm all about the Fallout 3.

First come first served:

X360: FRK8G-HCG4Q-4VDPC-Q2C44-HM9G6

PS3: P7LA-K4BD-LG2L

PS3: BJF2-A2B4-PCF6

I offer no guarantees as to the quality of these downloadable games, but two out of three ain't bad.

This is cut-and-pasted from our reviews blog.

So, last week I told that you that we were launching a new reviews-related feature, and about five minutes ago we did. After the Fact: Reviews Revisited is a way for us to update our reviews (without actually changing the original text or score) as games evolve after their release. This is a response to us noticing that our reviews, while accurate on day one, are becoming outdated as patches and game "updates" become more common.

For example, we mention in our Battlefield: Bad Company review that the game doesn't have Conquest mode--that's no longer accurate, since it was patched in at a later date. There's now an After the Fact entry to reflect this on the review page and, if you look around the site, you'll find that we've got the ball rolling with updates for several other games as well. This is just the beginning, of course, and while we're not planning to post entries for every single update that's released for every single game, we're definitely planning to cover stuff that we think potential buyers of games need to know in order to make a well-informed purchasing decision.

Oh, and if there are any updates worth covering that we haven't yet posted an After the Fact entry for (there are a lot right now, of course), feel free to let us know via our new afterthefact@gamespot.com email address. We'll get to them as quickly as we can.

(This post contains FABLE II SPOILERS.)

I've been playing a lot of Fable II lately. As is invariably the case when I pick up one of these black/white, good/evil, hero/villain, dark/light games for the first time, I've been making "good" choices from minute one. As a result, my hero in Fable II is revered as a saint (complete with halo), his nickname is Chosen One, and last night he officially became the most famous person in all of Albion. It's not all sunshine and rainbows, though... my hero has contracted two STDs after engaging in extramarital relations and, last night, he unwittingly became a bigamist.

How do you unwittingly become a bigamist? I'll explain.

As much as I love Fable II right now, the game is certainly not without its problems. I've yet to encounter any bugs that have brought my progress to a halt thankfully, but my in-game families have been nothing but trouble.

Family attempt #1: Early in the game I chose to marry one of the mob of generic-looking females that was following me around Bowerstone. I moved her into one of the few crumby houses that I could afford and we had a son. Everything was going ok. She never really liked living in our marital dump, but I was sending her more than enough money to make up for it. One day, when she suggested we take a romantic walk somewhere, I agreed. Taking said walk through bandit country, though, was a mistake. They attacked, she died, our son was taken away by the authorities before he was ever big enough to make it out of his crib.

Family attempt #2: Bored of the Bowerstone women, I decide to look for my second wife at the gypsy camp. She's a real looker, and I'm confident that she'll appreciate the high standard of living that I can now afford to give her. We move into the most expensive Bowerstone home that I can find, we have a son, and we're incredibly happy together. Then, without warning, she disappears without a trace. Our infant child is left alone at the house, and though I visit often and keep sending money, my gypsy wife is nowhere to be found.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that, for a short time before she disappeared completely, I was able to trigger wife #2's appearance at our marital home by inviting other women into our bed there. She never suspected a thing despite encountering many of the women as they left, but I never really felt good about using adultery as a way to keep our marriage going. Plus, it stopped working after I'd done it three or four times anyway.

Eventually, I decide to go and look for her at the gypsy camp. There's a clone of her there with the same name, but it's not her. While out on a quest days later I was informed via an insensitive pop-up window that she had divorced me and that our son had been taken away by the authorities. I never saw either of them again.

Family attempt #3: By now I'm at a point in the game where I know time is about ready to advance 10 years, so I hastily find myself another bride in the hope that, one day, I'll get to see one of my kids grow up. The well-dressed Bowerstone jeweller, she'll do. I give her a ring, I take her home, we make a baby girl, and I immediately head out on a quest that will keep me away from my new family for almost a decade.

Upon my return to Bowerstone, I eagerly head back to the house expecting to be greeted by an excited family. The wife isn't working at her jewellery stall, so I assume she's waiting for me at home. Nope. She's nowhere to be found. My daughter is now nine years old, but she's incapable of doing anything but standing where her crib used to be and staring blankly at the wall. Have I failed to do something I was supposed to as a father, or has Fable II simply failed to do something it was supposed to as a non-broken game?

I return to the house countless times in the hope that my little girl will have come back to life, or that her mother might be around to explain her condition to me. It's not to be, and because my family is technically still living there (but can't be interacted with in any way) I'm unable to sell the house or rent it out. Checking my hero's stats it appears that two of my three wives have died--I assume number 3 was one of them since she hasn't been seen in years, so I head out for:

Family attempt #4: Of the three failed marriages that I've had so far, I think the gypsy woman was my favorite, so I head back to the camp to find her clone. She's one of those girls who's easily impressed; I woo her with my "thumbs up" action, and moments later she's asking me for a ring. Not a problem, I always carry several around with me.

Family #3's home is still a no-go area, so I purchase another, equally nice house in Bowerstone, and waste no time moving the new wife in. We have a baby daughter, I visit as often as my busy heroing schedule allows, and everything is great. When my daughter grows up, it becomes apparent that she's black, which neither I nor my wife are. No worries, I'm sure she didn't cheat on me or anything, probably just a skin pigmentation gene that skipped a generation or something.

At this point, I consider family #4 to be a long overdue success story. We've been together for a while, their demands on my time aren't really interfering with my quest, and I think I'm sending them more money than they could possibly spend. It all went a bit pear-shaped last night, though, when I returned to Bowerstone after what I can only assume was some kind of update via Xbox Live.

Upon arriving in town I'm greeted by my excited daughter and some of her friends. Great! This is exactly what I was promised when Peter Molyneux showed off Fable II families for the first time all those months ago. My daughter is white now, which is a little strange, but since she's the first of my offspring to make it beyond the cradle I'm not gonna complain.

I visit the wife, give both her and my daughter the gifts I found them on my latest quest, and then, in the hope that I might finally be able to do something with the house that family #3 was residing in, I pay it a visit. The wall-watching daughter appears to have gone the way of her mother, which is to say that she's vanished without a trace, so I figure I'll finally be able to move a tenant in and make some money.

Before I can reach the front door, my missing-presumed-dead daughter runs in to greet me. There's still no sign of her mother, and as awful as it sounds I have mixed feelings about the little girl's showing up alive and well. Given the absence of her mother I guess I should really have stayed to look after her, but ultimately I decide that just making sure she has plenty of money should suffice and then head out on another adventure.

I don't get far before the missing-presumed-dead wife, her mother, shows up as well--as if nothing had ever happened. She's missed me, she has a gift for me, and she's blissfully unaware (as was I at the time) that I now have two wives living in the same town. That fact didn't go unnoticed by everyone, though, because wife #3 also has a note for me. It's a blackmail letter from someone who knows I'm a bigamist and is demanding 2000 gold to keep his mouth shut.

So that's it. I'm a bigamist. My reputation and my halo are intact for the time being, but now that I've paid the blackmailer his 2000 I'm just waiting for a note demanding an even bigger sum of gold somewhere down the line. I think I'll have to move one of my families out of the city to a farm or something--seems like I own half of Albion at this point, so I have plenty of properties to choose from.

Tune in again next week for the tale of how I accidentally got engaged to one of the traveling game masters and had to lure him into the woods and shoot him to stop him following me around and sarcasitically congratulating me on my marriage to the gypsy clone. Actually, I guess that's the whole story.

Oh, and if you're interested in seeing what my hero looks like, he can be seen killing ghost pirates at the end of our video review.

Our review of Wario Land: Shake It! will be appearing on the site in an hour or two. In the meantime, you should definitely check out this video of the game in action. If you haven't already seen it I promise* you won't be disappointed.

*OK, I can't really promise that. It's a neat video though - make sure you don't give up on it too early.

When I was a kid, and when I wasn't playing games on my Commodore 64 or Amiga, I used to spend countless hours painting Citadel Miniatures purchased from the local Games Workshop. My friends and I used to get together on weekends and paint together, we used to compare notes on different types of paints and brushes, we used to read (and mostly look at pictures in) White Dwarf magazine, and just occasionally we'd try to use our painted figures to play games with. Blood Bowl and Space Hulk were my favorites, but Warhammer and (later) Warhammer 40,000 also got a look in from time to time. I've been out of that scene for longer than I care to remember, but to this day I can't walk past a Games Workshop without poking my head in.

Needless to say, EA Mythic's Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is a game that I've been keeping an eye on for the past couple of years. After seeing it at countless events and flirting with a beta version recently, yesterday--when the game went live for Collector's Edition customers--was the first time I've really sat down with it for any length of time. This post isn't intended to preempt our upcoming review, particularly since I won't be the one writing it, but to give you some idea of whether or not I had a good time I'll tell you that I started playing when the servers came online at 9am and didn't stop until almost 1am this morning.

After checking out several of WAR's character classes in the beta I eventually settled on a Black Orc. I've never really played a tank class in an MMO before, and now seemed as good a time as any to give it a try. I'm only level 10 right now, so I'm by no means an authority on the class, but so far I'm having a blast! The characters I've played in other MMO games have generally been those that deal their damage from range or from stealth/behind, so it's really refreshing to be the guy who can charge into the middle of a fight and soak up damage like a sponge with rusty nails sticking out of it. I've already learned a couple of skills that can prevent damage intended for my buddies from being inflicted upon them, and I feel like I'm hitting enemies pretty hard to boot. I can even kick them in the happy-sacks and make them less skilled with their weapons for a short time, but that's a story for a day when I have an accompanying screenshot.

Around 16 hours in, I've found lots to be impressed by in WAR, and very little that has disappointed me. The launch was exceptionally smooth, at least from my perspective, and the only bug that ever impeded my progress temporarily was one that caused the icons above quest-givers' heads to disappear. I think perhaps my favorite features of the game at this point are the public quests and the Tome of Knowledge. Public quests are team efforts that you'll stumble on as you explore and are free to drop in and out of at any time. At the end of a public quest, any loot drops are rolled for automatically and the players who have contributed the most get bonuses added to their scores. It's a great way to share the spoils, because standing around and doing nothing while others do all of the work simply isn't an option.

The Tome of Knowledge feels like an encyclopedia of sorts, except that almost all of its pages are blank at the start of the game. As your adventure gets underway, it gets filled with information on the locales you visit, the creatures you encounter, the enemies you kill, and stuff like that. Statistics that you wouldn't even think about are tracked in there as well, so while turning a page and learning that you've killed 315 dwarves might not be surprising, it's cool that you can see exactly how many of those were other players and even which classes they were. There appear to be plenty of things to unlock via the tome as well, though to date I haven't acquired any of the tangible trophies or fancy-looking capes that other players have. I've got plenty of titles to display under my character name to choose from, some of which feel like trophies in their own right. Before leaving for work this morning I earned a new title for completing 25 crafting sessions in my chosen trade skill, for example, and I have another one for successfully littering the Warhammer world with unwanted items from my backpack--that one I'm especially proud of.

I could sit here and write pages and pages about WAR right now, about things that I like and things that I don't, about features that distinguish it from World from Warcraft, and about why I chose to cultivate seeds rather than butcher animals when it came to choosing a profession. That kind of talk is best left for a full review though, and ours will be forthcoming in a week or three when we've spent a lot more time with the game. In the meantime, we plan to post pre-review impressions in the Under Review blog. WAAAAAAAGH!!!

After 2.5 weeks spent working and vacationing in Germany and England respectively, I'm back in San Francisco and even further behind with my gaming than I was when I left. The pile of game purchases that I've yet to actually play for any worthwhile amount of time just keeps getting bigger, but that didn't stop me buying both Castle Crashers and Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise this week.

The former I've only spent a couple of hours with in single-player mode thus far, but I'm liking it a lot. The latter I only picked up from GameStop last night (shortly after the store had closed actually, big thanks to the unusually cool GS employee at my local branch for letting me in), but I managed to get a few hours in before going to bed and again before leaving for work this morning. I'm liking it a lot, and honestly I think just about every other game I'm trying to play right now (with the exception of WoW, and work-related stuff) is gonna be taking a back seat for a while. I'm determined to get a full 1,000 achievement points from the game, but doing so is clearly going to be much harder than it was with the original--I only have 1 of the 50 so far.

I'll be getting at least 1 more this evening when I get home, for scanning in a card that, as I understand it, will instantly add items to my collection. I've got plenty of cards to choose from; there's one printed in the instruction manual, there's a double-sided one that came with the game, there are a handful that I grabbed at E3, and then there are plenty online. I'll scan the physical cards in to share with you all here sometime soon (there's a gorilla named Rick in the mix, need I say more?), but in the meantime here's one that I found on MSXBOX-World. They're running a competition to find 23 different ones scattered throughout their forums, a neat idea for sure.

EDIT: Looks like this lost some quality when I uploaded it. I doubt you'll be able to scan it from here, but you'll find the original version if you click on the link above.

Why do I do it? Every single time I manage to kick the World of Warcraft habit something happens and I get sucked back in - often only days after my cancelled account has expired. Yes, I'm playing WoW again, after what must be at least three or four account cancellations. I'm not even attempting to sink the kind of hours into the game that I used to when I was raiding regularly, but that doesn't mean that I'm any less hooked.

I realized that when, yesterday, the tickets for BlizzCon went on sale. They're $100 each, which certainly ain't cheap, but I'm determined to go again, and this time my girlfriend (level 70 shadow priest) wants to come too, so I'm really looking forward to it. Only problem is, the area of the BlizzCon website where you're supposed to be able to buy tickets was pretty busted yesterday and, at the time of this writing, has been down for maintenance for, I think, a little over 18 hours. I've gone ahead and booked myself a hotel anyway, since those appeared to selling out fast, but I'm starting to wonder if tickets for any event are really worth this much hassle - I don't even like the look of the exclusive in-game polar bear mount that they're giving away to attendees this year.

World of Warcraft isn't something I've ever been able to enjoy the way that I enjoy most games though. When I'm into it, I'm into it, and even when I'm not playing you can bet that somewhere in the back of my head I'm thinking about a quest, or a raid, or a cool pet for my hunter, or, you know, that Wrath of the Lich King expansion that I'm trying to not to spend too much time with.

I'm also thinking about Blizzard's new Recruit-a-Friend program, which I both love and hate. Interested in checking out WoW? Let me know (I'm serious, you'll see why...), and I'll send you a code that you can redeem for a 10-day free trial. If you decide to keep playing after that, for at least two months, then I get a Zhevra (you'll never guess which real-world animal it looks like) mount for one of my characters. Maybe I'll never use it, but I'm cursed with a condition known as completionitis, the upshot of which is simply that I must have it.

Also, if we play together there's some weird stuff where we can earn experience at three times the normal rate or something. Honestly, I think that sounds kinda busted - if it's your first time playing why would you want to rush through to the endgame content and not enjoy the journey?

UPDATE: Awesome. By the time the the Blizzcon site was updated, just a couple of minutes after I posted this blog entry, the tickets were already sold out - apparently the World of Warcraft site got updated to say that they were on sale again about 15 minutes earlier... I'm speechless.

UPDATE 2: Awesomer. They appear to be back on sale again, but the site isn't letting me log into my Blizzard account. That's the same problem I had yesterday before they took the whole site offline.

UPDATE 3: Awesomest. Five minutes later. Now they really do appear to be sold out.

I think one of the things I like most about writing reviews for GameSpot is that it forces me to beat games that I otherwise might not make the time for. It's a double-edged sword, though, because some of these games seemingly don't want to be finished. Right now, for example, I'm plowing through Deadliest Catch: Alaskan Storm on the Xbox 360. I've sunk more hours into it these past few days than I care to remember, but at some point during these past 12 hours I think the game realized what I was up to and set about dashing my hopes of getting through it this side of the weekend.

Last night, as my third crabbing season came to a close, a console-freezing crash cost me around three hours of progress. Yes, you can manually save the game at any point, but up until then I had no reason to believe that mid-season saves were necessary. Then, this morning, my third season was again cut short by a similar problem. The game didn't freeze this time, rather two of my deckhands got into a comical looping animation while attempting to stack pots on deck. Deckhand A was trying to walk into/through one of the pots he'd just pulled up, and deckhand B was trying to get past him without any luck. Both would occasionally fall over owing to the storm that was raging around them, but still neither could break the cycle and refused to stop trying even when I offered them breaks or asked them to remove ice from the ship. I don't think even Captain Sig has ever had to deal with a season as frustrating as my third--hopefully it'll be third time lucky when I try to complete it again this afternoon.

Oh, and the last time one of my deckhands fell overboard, his shipmates were too busy sorting through crabs and manning a crane to help him out of the water. RIP Tico.

Expect a review soon.

Has it really been over two months since I wrote anything here? Wow, it's amazing how time flies when you're both having fun and extremely busy. So, what I have been up to since my last blog? The biggest news is perhaps that I found a superb Indian restaurant that delivers pretty close to my apartment, but since this is GameSpot I guess I'll spare you my tales of chicken tikka masala and talk about some games.

Right now I'm still playing Grand Theft Auto IV whenever I can. I wasn't able to use my own gamertag when I reviewed the game, nor was I able to play at the perhaps overly sedate pace at which I've enjoyed previous entries, so now I'm savoring every minute as I slowly but surely progress through the story again. When presented with them, I've gone out of my way to make different decisions this time than I did on my first play through, and I've been pleasantly surprised by some of the consequences. I've also managed to find a lot more pigeons to exterminate and a few more bonus mission characters to interact with this time. I've been neglecting the multiplayer stuff recently, but I'm sure I'll be taking part in races and Mafiya Work games again soon enough.

Other games I've been playing recently include Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit (for review), Arkanoid DS (for upcoming review), Carcassone (I keep going back to it), UEFA Euro 2008 (loving the new Captain your Country mode), and GRID (I was initially unsure about this one, but now I'm really enjoying it). I was hoping to add a couple more games to that list this weekend, but it looks like Metal Gear Solid 4 (my preordered copy shipped yesterday) and Age of Conan (new PC arriving Mon/Tues next week) are gonna have to wait. I guess I could play Age of Conan on my current PC if I really wanted to, but three frames-per-second at the lowest settings available (yes, I tried it) just isn't that much fun. I have an unopened GameFly copy of Lego Indiana Jones sitting at home right now, so maybe I'll give that a try.

These gratuitous GRID shots show one of my favorite features of the game so far--the demolition derby races. Psygnosis' Destruction Derby was the first game I bought for my original PlayStation back in the day, and while GRID lacks that game's bowl arenas, this is the closest any game has come to scratching my Destruction Derby itch.

Until next time.

Just a quick heads-up that earlier today we launched Under Review - an official GameSpot blog where our reviewers, myself included, plan to write about some of the games that we're working on ahead of posting the reviews proper. You won't find any early scores, and right now there's not much in the way of content, but I'm confident that this is one you'll want to bookmark at some point.

In other news, I'm playing far too much WoW at the moment - taking a break from the level 70 rogue that has pretty much become my main character at this point to level up a holy priest. I've also just started playing Crisis Core, which I'm enjoying a lot, though I must admit that the whole DMW thing has me baffled.

Oh, and I finally found a decent (though not great, maybe a 7.5/10) pizza delivery place close to the apartment that I moved into a few months ago - I endured all kinds of tasteless grease-covered crap along the way, but ultimately the journey was worth it.

In case you haven't heard, Mr. T (famous for such works as The A-Team, Rocky III, and that World of Warcraft commercial) was recently (ok, I think it was 2003 actually) voted the fourth "Greatest American" in a global poll organized by the BBC. I can't imagine who the top three were, but I do know that the likes of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Franklin D. Roosevelt didn't make the cut.

I'm a big fan of Mr. T, so when UK-based Mohawk Media sent me a press release a while back announcing a limited advance edition of the Mr. T graphic novel, I wasted no time ordering one. Honestly, I haven't read it yet, so I can't tell you if it's good or not. Comic writer John Layman certainly approves though, this is what he had to say:

"Don't just buy this book! Don't just read this book! Don't just treasure this book! Take it wherever you go and keep it close to your heart. This graphic novel would take a bullet for you, if it could!"



The story doesn't end there, though, because last Friday I was sent a press release, embargoed until today, announcing a series of Mr. T "Versus" crossovers. The first title to be confirmed is Mr. T Versus Dracula, but the cover mock-ups below suggest that vampires aren't the only ones in trouble.

What does Mr. T think of his opposition in the upcoming Versus series?
"All these suckers with their fancy powers! They need a reality check, and only one guy can do that, and that's me, Mr. T!"

So there you have it. This is either confirmation that potentially the greatest comic crossover series ever is in the works, or the cruelest April Fool gag since the BBC reported a bumper spaghetti harvest back in 1957.

EDIT: Oh, and yes, I'm aware of the "Mr. T versus" Internet phenomenon that spawned such classic works as Mr. Bean, Ali G, the Cybermen, and Half-Life, but I want to believe.

My repaired Xbox 360 arrived back at the office today, which means tonight will (hopefully) be the last time for a while that I have to make my commute with a console on my back. My 360 (I believe it's the same one) looks to have taken a couple of light knocks during the repair process, but it's definitely running quieter than it used to. Its return is a few days later than I would've liked, but it's still quite timely because I plan to be online a lot tonight, checking out both of Dark Sector's multiplayer modes ahead of tomorrow's review.

I finished up the single-player mode this morning and, without wishing to give away too much about the upcoming review, I enjoyed it a lot. The multiplayer modes titled Infection and Epidemic look pretty fun too, and since both are designed for exactly 10 players the game automatically fills empty spots with up to eight bots. There haven't been too many people online today so far, but I'm hoping to get in some bot-free matches this evening. If any of you have the game already, please feel free to join in the fun.

This was news over a week ago, so apologies for bringing it up again. I borrowed an office 360 this weekend (mine is still away being repaired) because I've been really looking forward to Bully: Scholarship Edition ever since it was announced. I was going to play the original PS2 version of Bully last year, but by the time I was done with the other games I was playing at the time the Xbox 360 game had already been announced. I figured the achievement points, the additional content and the improved visuals would be worth the wait.

And they might be. I'll let you know when the wait is over, because right now the Xbox 360 version of Bully: Scholarship Edition has been little more than an exercise in frustration for me and I'm not going anywhere near it again until the promised patch (sorry, "title update") is released. Twice this weekend I sat down to spend some time with the game, and twice my session was cut short by a console-freezing crash that cost me at least 30 minutes of progress. Yes, I know you can save anytime you visit your bedroom, but I resent having to go there to sleep every night as it is. And don't even get me started on the loading screens...

I don't want to hate on Bully too much, because I hear it's a good game. I can't help but wonder if a game would ever have been allowed to ship in this broken state if it weren't for the fact that companies now have the ability to fix console games after release, though. I like downloadable content as much as anyone, but I'd gladly go without that functionality in return for games that always work as intended right out of the box.

I won't bore you with the details, but my Xbox 360 fell victim to the red ring of death this weekend. I've had the console since launch so I guess it had a pretty good run. I'm still bummed, though, not least because I was supposed to be playing something for work last night. Oh well, hopefully Microsoft won't take too long replacing/repairing it - I'd rather not have to carry office machines to and from my place anytime I need to play something.

In other news I'm playing World of Warcraft again. I was pleased to find that my preferred hunter and rogue classes haven't changed too much since I quit, but surprised to find that certain parts of the game have been made much easier. Not only do you require less experience to move up from level to level now, but you get more experience for completing quests. Furthermore, a lot of the quests themselves are now easier because relevant NPCs are highlighted on the minimap and quest items that you have to "find" (such as plants or piles of dirt) now sparkle very obviously where they mostly used to blend in with their surroundings. I'm mostly running battlegrounds with my 70 rogue right now, but when losing to the horde or playing alongside honor-farming AFKers gets too much, I'm leveling up another hunter. And yes, he already has three supposedly "rare" pets - Star Wars Galaxies started my obsession with those, and I don't see it going away anytime soon.

Last but not least, my PSP is seeing a lot of action right now, courtesy of Patapon. More about that soon.