Enginerd

I mentioned that I was playing Dead Space 2, right? Well I'm really loving it. The zero gravity sections are fantastic, and somehow manage to not be confusing once there's no longer any up or down. But one little thing that made me laugh was this. See, you play as a fairly normal dude, not some amped up Space Marine. In fact, you're some kind of Space Engineer. And at some point in the game you're talking to this girl (I know, right!?) and he says, "no I'm not with the Space Marines, I'm an engineer." To which she replies "Heh! Nerd."

Love it.

PS3 explosion

In the last week or two, I've acquired several new PS3 games. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, Little Big Planet 2, and Dead Space 2 are the new ones, and Fallout: New Vegas has only been on my shelf since Thanksgiving. Add that all up and I'm spending a lot of time with a Sixaxis DualShock3 in my hands. Between those (and using the PS3 for netflix blue rays and streaming) I've gotten so used to reaching for it that, other than a quick glimpse into Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 on XBLA, I haven't turned any of the other systems on. Well, unless you count my Android/iPod distraction with Words With Friends. And I don't.

New Vegas took hold of me slowly. I got bored in the much hated Freeside for a while, but after that I sort of found my groove with it. I was even ignoring my Gamefly game for one that I owned. Something I try not to do, since TIME IS MONEY when it comes to rented games. Speaking of that, I think I'm cancelling my GF account at the end of the month. As I looked over my queue, there's just not much I'm really excited about in the next year. And there's always the infernal USPS that hates me.

LBP2 is one of the few games that my wife asks to play with me. In fact, if I ever played it without her signed in as player 2, she'd probably divorce me. I don't think she could stand it if she knew I was collecting new costume pieces or changing my sackboy outfit without her.

Dead Space 2 is fantastic so far. I loved how polished and tight the original was, I figured this wouldn't disappoint either. I'd forgotten how bloody and gruesome it is though. Good thing there aren't any impressionable little eyeballs around when I play. As a bonus (and the main reason I got it on the PS3), Dead Space Extraction came included on the disc. I had that in my queue for the Wii anyway. It suffers quite a bit only using the PS3 analog stick instead of a real pointing device though. Maybe I could be convinced to buy a PlayStation Move if I can find any other decent software to play with it. Suggestions?

Finally Uncharted, the game that's been on pause for the last 20 minutes as I typed this. I was a bit worried that it would feel dated and wouldn't live up to the stellar quality of the sequel that my archives tell me I played about a year ago. No such worries should have bothered me. It's still a top notch PS3 game, so it looks and plays great. Fun stuff.

AssBro

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood looks great, and your character moves fluidly and intelligently. It's very closely related to Assasin's Creed 2, which was great, if not a little tedious at times. Too bad this one felt more like work than fun.

I think part of my problem with this one was that I was always a bit confused on what was the main storyline. I was dumped into the middle of a huge open world map (Renaissance Rome) with icons everywhere. I think the main storyline involved taking control of about a dozen Borgia towers, but I wasn't even completely sure of that. Taking control of these smartly combined stealth assassination of a certain person, then climbing a tower (and burninating it). This combines two of the main things you think of when Assassin's Creed is mentioned. But there were so many of the damn towers and they were spread out all over the place. I also seemed to spend way too much time fleeing to lose my wanted level before I could do just about anything. Another similarity to AC2 was my general confusion and lack of interest with the storyline. Go here, kill that guy, repeat. Whatever.

So, some of the new features of this one were the ability to command a group of assassins to do your killing for you, and an odd mix of stealth and speed for the multiplayer. I played for several hours, but didn't make a whole lot of progress towards the first, and got frustrated with the game before I got to the multiplayer. Sorry, AssBro multiplayer, I hear you're cool, but I couldn't stick around long enough to care.