It's Friday my nutty, groggy pals...

[Gusington]

Finally bought my new rig from Tiger Direct and a new monitor, speakers, etc. from Amazon. Hopefully everything will arrive by this coming weekend to set up.

[JasonPratt]

I have a vague plan of playing through the Arkham series a final time (for a while) in one career stretch, and in parallel finally playing the Metal Gear Solid series. (Probably not MG1 and MG2, though, since I'm unsure if I have the proper copy of MGS2 or MGS3 to play them from.)

Concurrent with this plan, I finished Origins last week and its extended DLC epilogue Cold Cold Heart this weekend; then I started Metal Gear Solid [1] yesterday and based on the walkthrough I should be somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 done already. As most people already know, the game itself is notoriously short -- in fact to get certain achievements you have to beat the game under two hours -- but Kojima likes to flesh things out with massive amounts of plotting.

Frankly I'm glad I'm almost half done already, because while I appreciate the history involved, both in-series and in terms of gaming development history (the game ships with a decent summary of the first two Metal Gear games as if written by a talented 10 year old  ::) , so I'm probably not missing any plot that way, and previous plot connections are being referenced in line with the summaries) {inhale}...

...the weaknesses of the game, even at the time, are painfully apparent, and made much worse today by both game design advancements and graphics. Clearly the game was pushing hard on having a constantly rendered 3D gameworld from around the time of Doom or (a little more pertinently comparable) the first Space Hulk, but I can feel it clawing my eyes out. With my mind.

Matters should improve drastically when I get to the first PS2 era game, which I think I've bought a PS3 HD upgrade for. (Otherwise I'll have to break out my archived PS2 system. The PS3 can play PS1 games natively, for some pointless reason, but not PS2 anymore, also for some pointless reason, unless Sony or whoever deigns to convert it, which they rarely do.  )

Anyway, I'm excited to finally be catching up with all the gamers who have lauded the series, and affectionately made fun of it, to the skies (both in equal measure sometimes). It has been on my to-do list for ages.

[Kushan]

I finished the CMANO scenario I was working on and got a few matches of World of Warships in on Satruday. Spent last night installing VASSAL modules onto my Surface Pro while I watched my Packers beat Seattle.

[MetalDog]

Another weekend of nothing, but MGSV. I haven't even turned my computer on over the last few days!

STOP MAKING SENSE!!!