Just in time for my birthday, I picked up a copy of Disgaea 3 last night.  So far, it's right on the money with that same blend of quirky humor and addictive SRPG gameplay that made the first two great.  The jump to the HD era hasn't made too much of a dent in the game's graphics, which are still decidedly PS1 era, but at least it's nice to see it in widescreen and higher resolution for some of the story artwork. 

But really, who plays Disgaea for lush photorealistic graphics?  Nobody.

Anyways, I'm not too far in but Xavier and I had a blast playing it together last night.  My only annoyance so far is that I hate the voice acting for Mao, the main character, but the rest of it is quite well done.  Of course, out today is Tales of Vesperia, and Mercenaries 2 on Sunday, so hopefully D3 won't be a casualty of the imminent game crunch.

I guess I'm on a PS3 tear lately -- still trying to finish up Metal Gear Solid 4, and I try to do an episode of Siren every night when I can.  I'm doing it one episode at a time and reading along in parallel with the Game Diary series Tom Chick did on it over on Fidgit which is a lot of fun.  More on Siren later maybe, but so far it is right up there with my favorites in the survivor horror genre, which I totally did not expect.

Paradox has announced Hearts of Iron 3!  I'm cautiously excited about this... the Hearts of Iron series (and particularly HOI2) is probably one of the strategy game series I've logged the most hours of over the years, right up there with Civilization.  Heck, I keep being tempted to post AARs of my ongoing HOI2 games here -- I still play fairly regularly. 

However, I'm pretty worried about it.  Paradox hasn't exactly had a stellar track record lately -- their great stuff has typically been in expansions -- Doomsday / Armageddon were great, and In Nomine really turned the mediocre EU3 into a decent game IMO.  But their big new first releases, not so much.  EU3 is just a worse game in almost every way than EU2 I feel, particularly without the expansions.  EU: Rome just didn't grab me, though at least I did like some of the concepts they were trying for.

But the worst is their insistence on using a 3D engine for a game genre which is clearly better suited for 2D in m opinion.  None of their 3D games look as good as their 2D games, and they get very few of the traditional advantages of 3D, such as good animation support, fancy particle effects, lighting models, camera movement, and polygonal throughput.  Those things are all just irrelevant.  I'm not getting my hopes up for a return to 2D in HOI3, really... I guess I'm just lamenting what seems to be technological "progress" that really isn't an improvement at all.

Nevertheless, I'm sure I'll buy HOI3 from them as a Day One purchase.  Paradox may no longer be at the top of their game, but they are still easily the biggest fish in this particular pond.

Whew.  We spread it out over two days, but Elise and I finally finished the "Endless Setlist" in Rock Band.  I was on Guitar, and her on Vocals.  I admit, I was cheesing a bit, since I've beat the campaign on Expert, but I was happy to have a little extra fudge factor in there.  Once or twice we would "duet" a song when I knew it much better, particularly a lot of the bonus campaign songs.  Also helping out a bit on "drums" was Xander. 

This seemed like a good weekend to try and finish this off, what with Rock Band 2 coming in a few weeks, and the fall steady stream of games starting up in earnest next week with Too Human and Tales of Vesperia...

Here's a picture of Xander and I proudly celebrating our accomplishment...

World of Warcraft recently rolled out a new recruitment initiative, which gives some very significant new bonuses when two accounts are "linked" (via one recruiting the other).  When I saw "triple quest XP", that got my attention.  I enjoy the leveling game a lot more than the high-end game in WoW, but I'm trying to get a new character up to 70 before the expansion so I can effectively change class.  So the idea of getting to level 60 at least (where the bonus stops) at triple speed was too good to pass up.

Thus, my new adventures in "dual boxing" in WoW, playing two accounts at the same time.  This is old hat for a lot of people but a new experience for me, and I have to say it is pretty darn fun.  It has totally re-energized my interest in the game.

Here are some details on the mechanics I posted over at QT3:

I've been trying two different setups, one at home and one for a little lunchtime play at work. 

My two main goals:

1. Be able to actually *play* two characters, not just have one follow mindlessly while I otherwise solo.

2. Do not use any external applications of any kind, for maximum "keep it clean" factor, preferably no mods at all that might in any way smack of "botting".

It's working pretty well.  Basically I have a primary (Warrior) and a secondary (Shaman).  The secondary has a bunch of macros that target the primary for healing, assist the primary for combat and for enemy targeting.

At home, I play with a laptop and my main gaming machine.  So basically this gives me two keyboards.  At work, I play by running two instances of the game, both in windowed mode.  The primary one takes up maybe 60% of the screen, while the secondary is like about 33% of the screen, up in a corner.

Typically the Shaman follows the Warrior around.  I charge something with the Warrior, then while building up a bit of rage I'm casting some opening spells and dropping totems with the Shaman.  Then I'm cycling between some combat abilities on the Warrior and follow up DPS spells or heals from the Shaman.

It's a very different, and more intense experience than soloing.  So far I am enjoying it immensely.  Not only are the rewards crazy good with the triple XP, it means if I pull several enemies (not uncommon when using that fire totem from the Shaman), I actually can handle it with a little more skill.  It certainly maps the region of possible encounters to something which has a larger skill component than just a stats component.

Honestly, the hardest thing about it is just situational awareness -- it can get tricky when you are mentally flipping between two different points of view.

I'm no power leveler, but the biggest weakness in the system seems to be whenever I have to do any traveling.  XP is crazy good when actually adventuring, good enough I think I will be able to entirely skip a lot of zones I usually do when leveling and just stay focused on zones with good quest hubs.

Being stuck home yesterday on account of a stomach bug, I had a great opportunity to immerse myself in Braid for a solid afternoon.  With so many games competing for my time, it's relatively rare I have a large block available to dedicate to just one game, but Braid was totally engrossing.  It's not the longest game, but it delivers a great experience -- particularly if you are into puzzles and time travel (two of my favorite topics).  The "story", such as it is, is kind of interesting as well, told in a very spartan style yet I'm quite interested to see how it all comes together in the end.

It's also the first game in a while with a unique enough control flow that after my long session of it, I was in a kind of trance, seeing every motion I took as some sort of semi-reversible pattern.  Kind of funky, and just showed how into it my brain was.  The first time (that I can recall) having that sort of "out of game" experience was after some Doom 2 all nighters and my brain kept telling me to strafe around all the cars in the parking lot as I stumbled out at 4 AM.

Anyways, Braid is up on XBLA, and it's totally worthwhile.  Check it out.