I’ve been in a really strange place, gaming-wise lately. It’s like I’m holding my breath, waiting for the deluge of holiday titles to hit.
I haven’t been playing any PC games (including MMOs) because of an RSI-ish injury to my arm. Keyboarding for too long starts to hurt a lot, and sadly I have to save my ‘good hours’ for work. I went to the doc yesterday and he gave me some drugs, so hopefully that problem will be in the past soon enough.
Over in console land, I picked up Need For Speed: Shift for the PS3 but (yeah, I’m whining at this point) the same arm injury causes my fingers to go numb (in a skin-deep way) on my left hand. I think because they’re numb I jam the shoulder buttons too hard when I brake (which you do a lot) in Need For Speed: Shift. Whatever the cause, playing that game for a weekend left me feeling like I’d crushed my finger with a hammer, so THAT was off the table.
So I moved on to Halo ODST on the 360, which I can play as much as I want to… but I’m just not feeling it. I jump in and play for 30 minutes or so and jump out. Put it this way… everyone says the campaign is 5-6 hours. I got ODST on launch day and haven’t finished the campaign yet. I know people love this game; I’m just not one of them. At least not yet. But then, I didn’t love Halo 3 either. I guess when so much emphasis is directed at multiplayer, the single player campaign is gonna slip some.
Anyway, I have gaming ennui!
/emo
Why? Because next week, Demon’s Souls is coming out for the PS3 and I’ve been looking forward to it since a friend played, and raved about, the import version. It’s supposed to be a pretty difficult game, which honestly isn’t often my style, but this time I’m ready to embrace the challenge…for a week.
Why for a week? Because the following week Uncharted 2 and Brutal Legend both come out. I loved Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune and the reviews of the sequel have been universally positive. I can’t wait to play! And after sampling the Brutal Legend demo, I’m eager to play it, too. Though I’ll admit, part of why I’m buying this at launch is just to support Tim Schafer, who finally seems to be getting the recognition he deserves.
And then the week after that (the 20th?), Borderlands comes out. With a high co-op factor, it is again a game I want to play at launch. It’s no good playing a co-op game 6 months after it’s come out, right? Either no one will be playing, or everyone that IS playing will be uber compared to you. So I gotta get that.
But that’s 4 games in 3 weeks. That’s stupid… there’s no way I can play games that fast. And yet I’m still gonna do it, budget be damned. We’ll just go without heat for a few weeks. We have blankets!
And then there’s Dragon Age: Origins coming out on November 3rd… and that looks like it’ll own me for a while. I’ll need to clear my calendar for that one. Heck, I was thinking I had some breathing room in there but I guess that’s just two weeks after Borderlands. /sigh
I guess if there’s a good time to not be able to game on the PC, we’re coming up to it (though I had planned on getting Borderlands on the PC, I guess I’ll go Xbox 360 instead, given the circumstances). I just wish next week would arrive so I can get going!
In the meanwhile, I’m finding I really miss Fallen Earth, of all the MMOs I play. Maybe because I was in full swing playing it when I had to curtail PC gaming? Or maybe it’s just an unpolished jewel? Not sure, really.
A whole bunch of holiday titles slipped into 2010, and there are still this many great games coming out (I certainly haven’t mentioned them all). Can you imagine if they’d all launched 4th quarter 2009!?
So what’s everyone else buying between now and, say, Thanksgiving. Any plans?