Whoo. So, as of yesterday, NaNoWriMo is over, for me. That, and the writing load at work’s getting quite a bit lighter – it’s hectic, sure, but there’s not nearly as much of it to do, so that’s a good thing.

Been playing a lot of the 360 lately – mostly Gears of War, but I’ve tried to go back and play some games that I’d put down, like Tomb Raider: Legend, Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, and Splinter Cell: Double Agent.

TR:L is a good game. It’s one of those games that’s not made for next gen from the ground up, and it shows in some places. The main character’s model, for instance, is much higher poly than the supporting characters, which though sensible, is really quite odd looking in practice. Still, Crystal Dynamics really kicked some butt with this, and turned around a dead franchise. Kudos to Eidos for finally realizing that Core wasn’t up to the job. Some of the puzzles in the game can be kind of convoluted, but still, the exploration’s fun, and the story feels properly epic. I’ve heard it ends rather abruptly, but we’ll see – I’m currently about 70$ through the game and enjoying it quite a bit. My only real complaint so far? It’s very dark. I know that’s to make the light on Lara’s belt more important, but dag, yo, it’d be nice to see something every once in a while.

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance is fun stuff – basic beat-em-up nonsense, but with a good use of the Marvel license. They really scoured the map to get as many ties to the Marvel Universe as they could. The game’s fun – mindless fun, but well-executed. I was hoping there’d be more folks from TGF online with it, but Gears of War really dominated people’s Live time in the last month or so. The one thing that Marvel: Ultimate Alliance does show, though, is that for me, I’ve definitely outgrown 99% of comic books. Not that the *medium* has anything wrong with it – I still love me some Sandman, and Sin City – but there’s no denying, for me, that a lot of the stuff in the Marvel Universe just feels … dumb. And man, the spelling mistakes – in two spots, HYDRA was spelled HYRDA, and that’s not the first bunch of errors I’ve seen.

Splinter Cell: Double Agent has an even more egregious spelling error, which I’m just astonished made it through all their rounds of QA. One of the main, repeated text balloons, which talks about gaining and losing trust tells you you have to be somewhere by a certain time or you will “loose” trust. Augh! I wanted to pull my hair out. The rest of the game is beautiful, tense, and quite interesting. The more “open-world” design of the HQ missions, where you have a variety of tasks to accomplish and a preset amount of time to do them in, but the methods are entirely up to the player, are really fun. The problem for me, though, is that Splinter Cell has always been about trial and error. The HQ missions avoid this in large part, because they’re not totally linear. But the “standard” missions are chock-full of trial and error. I want to play it like a spy, where I don’t kill anyone, and I just sneak around, but to do so requires either moving *so* slowly, or basically knowing where everything is already. Which means massive amounts of trial and error. The set pieces are beautiful, the graphics are excellent, blah blah blah, but the single player’s difficulty is brutal.

Splinter Cell, to me, ever since Pandora Tomorrow, has been about the multiplayer. In DA, the multiplayer is quite different, and unfortunately, with Gears of War, there haven’t been enough people who have picked up DA to get serious multiplayer games going. But one of these days, I really want to give the new, pared-down multiplayer a shot. We’ll see.

Anyway. Other than that, not really a lot going on. I’ve gotta start getting to the pool again. We’d been really good in the first few months of the year, but the last few months, I’ve been lucky if I get my ass to the gym once every two weeks. NaNoWriMo has obviously been a huge part of that, in terms of never feeling like I had free time, and the other part has been the time change and the shorter days, but I’ve just gotta fight through the dark, and get up earlier, and get to the gym before work. Else, I’m just wasting money, getting fatter, and being a lazy buffoon.

When I was swimming three times a week, I was getting in noticably better shape. It wasn’t hard, I just had to do it. Now, it’s the same. I just have to get off my ass and do it.