Foreign Policy

I'm currently staying at my mum's while I get the last few bits of my move sorted out. The air bed is uncomfortable after a few hours, and the room gets cold in the mornings, but other than that it's very quiet and relaxing.

Marcos is planning to move to Spain and live with the family we have over there. He was also telling me about travelling the far east with an old friend from College who has already been once on his own. Apparently it gave him a great deal of perspective. Since it's his own choice I think Marcos might find it easy to deal with the changes; he certainly picks up languages very quickly. It's not something that I would be able to do.

Sam and I played some Gears of War. I hadn't previously realised that you can play Versus mode with just the one XBox 360, although one-on-one isn't ideal for Gears. Teams should probably be at least two-on-two so you can provide covering fire, suppressing fire, flanking manoeuvres, watch each others backs, etc. Having a team-mate to help you out of bleed-out time would also be really helpful since in one-on-one a single shot from the sniper rifle will leave you unable to move or defend yourself as your opponent strolls towards you at a leisurely pace, intending on crushing your head between his boot and the pavement.

I also played some Mirrors Edge. I can see why people said it can be likened to Portal, only (having only played a few levels of it) it seems like guns could have been removed from the game entirely (from the player, not NPCs) if the designers wanted to move into their own sort of genre. And the repetition of playing certain areas can get very frustrating. On the one hand, Runner's Vision is helpful in sticky situations, but on the other I find it distracting and almost patronising in most situations. The level design could have been more sandbox like Assassins Creed or Mercenaries with some linear stages branching off from the main areas. Or perhaps in the spirit of Beyond Good and Evil or Thief: Deadly Shadows with stages as well as a hub.

Still, I haven't played it myself long enough to make an accurate decision. Probably.

I've been following Sam's second or third play-through of The Force Unleashed, and while it's very cool, very smooth, and in some places refreshingly dark, it looks like more of an arcadey sort of game than a Star Wars game. The health and experience point "bubbles" that float into your character from every defeated enemy removed immersion for me, and although some of the split-second slow down sequences during combat are good at grabbing your attention, I think they're too frequent, to the point of there being a plethora of moments supposed to be "cool" therefore watering down the "coolness" of the entire experience. Little things like the lightsaber upgrades felt too "tacked-on" since they're never mentioned in the game and are only chosen from the pause menu. Getting the "bad end" made me think of Dark Heresy. If you've seen the unlockable costume from the "bad end" then you might know what I mean. It just has GrimDark written all over it.

Still, games like The Force Unleashed is where great gaming technology (like Euphoria for example) can really shine. Although, funnily enough, Sam hadn't actually noticed Euphoria in The Force Unleashed until I told him about it (and this was his second play through).

I've been reading through Nick's Eisenhorn collection (the Xenos, Malleus, and Hereticus novels all in one book) and on the other weekend I bought my own copy to peruse at my own leisure. I can't say I look on all of the contents as canonical (everyone has their own views and opinions as to what applies to the canon of a given setting) but I am enjoying the stories regardless. I also bought The Last Wish thanks to being influenced by The Witcher. That, also, is turning out to be a good read and the author's way of turning things on their heads has not so far been over-exaggerated.

Lastly I conquered my apprehension and played some of Condemned 2: Bloodshot. It's good. At first the changes in some of the characters made me think it was just going to be a cash-in on the first game's success (was it successful? I'm not sure I know...) and perhaps it is, I haven't gotten very far. But my opinion of the game was elevated when I came to the investigation and evidence-gathering parts of the second level. Absolutely fantastic stuff. Gone are the days of automatically switching to the appropriate forensic tool and sending evidence off to be decided on by someone else. Now you choose your tool appropriately, have to find the evidence yourself, make your own assumptions based on the evidence you are able to find, and then follow up with your own analysis. It's great! Of course, the third level began in a half-rotten corridor and a manikin standing at the end of it. A manikin. Condemned: Criminal Origins inflicted me with a terrible phobia of manikins and I immediately "took a break" upon spying the motionless model.