Going to be a bit of an odd daily review, since I've been playing three games...and its been a few weeks since my last posting. Mostly due to work and weird schedules, but also due to the fact that I've basically been playing the same three games, and really have nothing new to say about them each day.
Most of the time, I'm playing:
Currently: Up to 6 star village, still need to clear some 5 star.
The game is still great, I marvel at how different having a different full set of armor makes combat feel, and how easy it is to swap between various sets and weapons without ever getting locked in. You have so much storage space you never feel you -have- to get rid of armor to make room. Every hunt still feels like a new challenge, so much so that I do research on the wiki's before trying it, mostly to preserve my sanity of a half hour quest that ends in me croaking and gaining nothing. It is a very stressful game still, the quests never become easy even if you go down ranks to farm so old materials. I can not imagine playing this on the bus, though I may try on occasion when I come back from my morning classes. (Either that or a long walk to muse about my tabletop game). The only oddity I noticed is that often you will meet for the first time a new monster....yay, new armor set! And then immediately you'll get a quest to kill the offshoot version, which gives the same kind of armor from its pieces, just slightly better. Weird design choice, but doesn't really hurt the game itself. Some of them are true variations, so its not always bad (Garuga, while being basically a palette swap of a Yuan-Kut-Ku, has wildly different weapons and armor from its body parts). Still, its stressful enough that sometimes I need to play something more relaxing and easy:
Currently: Actually finished Inferno, so Completed! Still playing of course.
Which I can't say is necessarily easy, I kinda died my way through the last bits of inferno then did a group for Diablo himself. I've gone back to Act 1 with the new Monster Power feature they added to farm gear. Always nice to have the 'shiny thing drops and fun times' mechanic to relax too, but it is a bit of a guilty pleasure now. Really not a game you'll ever finish, just get slightly better gear, and I know I should be playing other things in my spare time. Still, its easy to load up, do a quick run for the new keys for the uberbosses, and hop off and head to work. Much less of a large block of my time.
And when my wife is not on the PS3 and I get the urge to:
Currently: Completed a long time ago, trying a hardcore character for a 'Master' run.
I love this game, unabashedly. It has its flaws in some rather buggy parts, but I just can't get enough of playing it or watching my wife play it (and squeal and hand me the controller when she sees spiders). Still, I completed it a while back, and I don't consider the harder difficulties true difficulties, they just add more hp and damage to the monsters. That's it. So instead to have another reason to play, I decided to try playing a hardcore character. No reloads, if you die you stop playing the character. Otherwise playing the game normally and avoiding abusing bugs. Makes it actually rather stressful, because when that dragon drops down and snaps at you, that might be the end of things right there. Playing a Khajiit thief/archer, with a sword/shield for backup when bandits come swinging. My first hardcore died around level 11 to 'not noticing the second giant'.
