I lament, often on an almost daily basis about the lack of co-op support in our modern gaming society. So lo and behold what do the Valve Gods gift us with? An up to 4-player co-op game for free! Alien Swarm was originally an Unreal Tournament mod released in 2004. This release was actually developed by the original team after they had been scooped up by Valve (according to Wikipedia). It’s a top down 3rd person shooter with a sci-fi flavor. There’s not a whole lot in terms of plot, but that is not important. The only facts that need be known are that there are waves of aliens to kill on a space ship with your real life buddies.

You see folks, this why I can never ever run a serious, as in, "professional" gaming blog. I'm just never current on anything that isn't World of Warcraft, The Sims or the one or two other games that I am interested in enough to pre-order and actually post about before they go out of style (I also never post, but that is a different issue :P). But that aside:

Assassin's Creed was a good game, not great by any measure, but good; It just failed to live up to the massive amount of hype constantly being pushed out at the time. I think the most disappointing aspect of the game wasn't necessarily the repetition (though the repetition was pretty bad, I had to force myself to complete the game), but that it felt half-assed. Most people compare it too a tech demo, demonstrating the crowd reaction engine and I think that is for the most part an accurate assesment.

Job related content or rather, the distinct lack thereof has traditionally been a huge gaping hole in every single Sims game. Normally your sims choose a career path: Medical, business, food, whatever. In terms of gameplay, that career consists of little more than vanishing into a building for about 8 gameplay hours 5 days a week. Assuming that all of your sims have a regular job/school, that is almost a fourth of the game per sim spent doing almost nothing.

Ambitions is good because it allows to you to actively control your sim at work. I won't bother explaining the details for all of the new professions because that has already been done and uuuh I haven't played them all to be honest. The new profession objectives are fun, though fairly typical in what you would expect from the Sims style click based gameplay (run around, click, do something, repeat). I like the stylist and the architect professions because they affect the outward appearance of the town and its people (it is fun giving people pink mullets :P).

Whoops, this post (which has been sitting in my temp stack for two months like well all of my posts) turned into a mish mash rant of sorts. So a history first: A close elementary school friend actually introduced the Final Fantasy to me while we were in day care or something. I had received Final Fantasy I as a birthday or a Christmas gift that year or something and it was the most awesome thing evar. I actually fell in love with the series in high school/early college. That is when I more or less ultra binged on 6 through 8. I have Final Fantasy VIII wall scrolls, posters and action figures burried somewhere. My dorm room was like a shrine...

You will either love or hate Final Fantasy XIII; It's just one of those divisive games, granted most opinions seem to lean towards the hate side. There's a fine art to tutorial balancing that Square Enix obviously does not understand. At all. I mean, a 15 hour long tutorial, really?

Three years is a record. Three years without spilling on, trashing or utterly destroying yet another keyboard; All to be ruined by one morning cup off coffee. But I digress, the Gods laugh and Keiya gets an excuse to purchase yet another toy.

The Logitech G110 is exactly the same as the Logitech G19 minus the color LCD. The keyboard that I ruined was the old school G15 (the older one with more buttons and adjustable screen). I used to use the LCD to monitor system stats while I gamed. But since switching over the Windows 7, I prefer to use the desktop widgets docked on my secondary monitor, which are a lot better anyways particularly since there are widgets specifically for Riva Tuner, NVIDIA, etc. The only real use that I have for the LCD nowadays is to see who is speaking on Ventrilo, which isn't worth an extra $100.