Weekends just fly by, don’t they? I get home from work on Friday night, turn in a circle 2 times and its Monday morning. Magic, of the darkest, bleakest kind.

Gaming-wise, I was all over the place this weekend; I’m not even sure I can remember everything I did. I signed up for Wizard 101 and played that for a while. I did some mellow deed grinding in LOTRO on one character, and some solo questing on another.

I played more Fable 2, which is proving to be as much fun the second time through as it was the first. I’m a lot more erratic this time, trying things to deliberately put my character off balance. I’ve stolen from shops here and there when they’re left untended (which is a lousy way to make a living, btw…they don’t have a lot of cash-on-hand). I’m a lot less hesitant to fight and kill. I slap male villagers who try to flirt with me (I’m playing a woman this time through), causing some townsfolk to fear me a little. My inner-13 year old can’t resist stripping my hero in the middle of Bowerstone to see which NPCs love her more, and which hate her more, when she’s in her undies. The jeweler turns out to be gay and likes it a lot when I strip, to the point where she’s ready to marry me. I don’t have the money to buy a house yet though.

I also checked back in with The Witcher, which I’m both enjoying and finding a bit frustrating. It feels pretty slow-going (probably a lot of this is psychological as sometimes a week goes by between sessions) and I really really wish I could remap keys and moreso, mouse buttons. The right mouse button fires your selected spell, and the middle mouse button activates mouse-look. In every MMO I play, I set the right button to mouse look. So I keep firing spells when I really just want to look around.

But, the mood of the game is delightfully grim and I’m playing it as “honest” as I can. I had an encounter with a woman being accosted by a group of thugs as she made her way home from the tavern where she works as a serving wench. I gave them fair warning, but they were spoiling for a fight. Soon enough they were all dead. Then I offered to escort the young lady home to her grandmother’s. We were accosted by barghests several times, and I drove them off several times, but then the lass fell too far behind me and when we were attacked, I didn’t get back in time to save her and sadly, she was killed.

This being a single player game, I could’ve reloaded my last save point. But I didn’t. I want to, as best I can, live with the consequences of the mistakes I make. I won’t re-start from the beginning if I die, mind you: I’m not *that* hardcore. And I’m sure there will be some “primary quests” that I have to successfully complete in order to drive the story forward. But otherwise… living with the consequences.

Anyway, The Witcher is pretty decent so far. I wish they hadn’t put a Poker-Dice game in it though (what we used to call Bar-Dice when I was young) because I spend far, far too much time gambling instead of adventuring!!!

Let’s see, what else? Oh right, I played some LittleBigPlanet. I kind of feel guilty about this one…it’s a great game but I just don’t find myself getting around to it very often. I think I really need some kind of narrative to draw me along in a game, and honestly LBP has no narrative. It’s just a big playground. And as previously blogged, I played a game of Hinterland on Saturday night. Oh, and Nile Online throughout the weekend.

See what I mean? I was all over the place, and that was BEFORE the 2 expansions launched. I’m pretty content in letting Warhammer lapse for now; it just wouldn’t make fiscal sense to be paying for two subscription games, based on how erratic my gaming habits are these days.

So what about everyone else? What’d everyone play this past weekend?

Haven’t done a ton of gaming so far this weekend so haven’t had a lot to post about. I did fiddle around with Nile Online a lot yesterday, but that meant checking in on my city every couple of hours. I’m still enjoying that game quite a bit.

One of my PS3 hard drives was getting pretty full so I spent some time cleaning that up. I watched episodes three through six of Qore, the online magazine on the Playstation Network. It’s an entertaining product, but I’m still unconvinced its worth the price, *unless* you’re all about getting into betas. If it gets you into one beta you’re really jazzed about, then the ~$25/year is probably worth it. (My math there is that the product itself is probably worth $15/year and getting into a beta you really really want to get into is probably worth $10 to you.)

In Warhammer, I put all my characters except my Witch Hunter to bed, mentally. I cleaned out their mailboxes, organized their inventory. In the case of my Shadow Warrior I pushed him to the next Rank so he could wear a cloak I’d sent him from another character. That way he’ll look a bit snazzier when I come back to him in a month or two. Everyone is in a camp now, drinking ale and waiting for my return. Everyone, that is, except my CoW character, who I’ll continue to play right up to the cut-off day, though honestly knowing the account is going to expire soon makes that feel a little sad. At the same time I’m already a little excited about the improvements that will be in the game when I come back to it.

Probably next weekend I’ll fire up the EQ2 account so I can get re-familiarized with things before the expansion lands on the doorstep. Hmm, actually that doesn’t bode well for playing Warhammer next weekend, so maybe this will be the last week for my Witch Hunter.

I played some of The Witcher last night. I bought this game a year or so ago and it wasn’t too good, but they released an “Enhanced Edition” a couple months back and offered a free “upgrade” mega-patch to all registered users of the game. I started a fresh game just before the Fall tsunami of new game releases hit. I’m not very far into it but my conscience has been nagging at me not to lose track of it. I started playing it once on release, then restarted for this enhanced version. I know myself enough to realize that if I totally lose touch with the game and have to restart a third time, I never will.

And it seems like a pretty good game now. It feels a little like a cross between Fable 2 and an MMO, actually. It has a skill-based progression (though with ‘generic’ experience so you don’t sculpt your character via actions like you do in Fable 2), action-ish combat (left click to melee, right click to fire a spell, melee chains via timed button presses) like Fable 2, an alchemy crafting system similar to what you’d find in an MMO (with you getting components from foes you slay), NPCs offering side quests and an apparently huge, MMO-sized world. Anyway, we’ll see. I need to get back to Fable 2 today!

So what’s everyone else been up to this weekend?