E3 Roundup Explosive Extraveganza! Gaming Remains Pretty Exciting

Over the past couple of months, I've had to take a bit of a break from gaming. My play sessions had been reduced to starting a game, poking around for about 10 minutes then quitting again. As bad as it is to admit this on my GAMES BLOG, I didn't miss it. I reacquainted myself with books, reading all of the 'A Song of Ice and Fire' novels (great!), caught up on television (not so great) and watched the sports season wind down (SPORTS!). It barely registered that the neon-lit, bass emitting monster of E3 was just around the corner...

Well the beast appeared, offended nearly everyone, offended everyone else, and left. The end result, I'm excited about Video Games again!

I would be dong a disservice to my loyal readers, all 11 of you, if I didn't extend a cursory nod of the head to the new consoles. One is $500 and has a camera that watches you all the time. The other is $400 and is essentially a shiner version of every single console ever made, and it has a share button! WHO ASKED FOR THAT?

Great, with that sorted, onto my picks for the games I can't wait to play over the next few years!

Assassins Creed 3 - PC Review

Steam has a somewhat disheartening feature that logs how many hours you've put into a game. Early into my time with Assassins Creed 3, it read 7 hours played. My save game told me I was 20% through. By that count this should be a fairly meaty game of roaming the Eastern seaboard assassinating things. So why was I learning how to craft furniture?

Assassins Creed 3 doesn't know what it wants to do. Like an over-stimulated child, it sees something exciting, rampages off in its general direction until it becomes distracted, chases a new object and so on. Inevitably the child becomes tired and stops playing, having accomplished very little. 

Maybe this is a tad harsh, but Assassins Creed 3 is characterized by long stretches of activity that have nothing to do with being an assassin. You can't help but feel the time and effort spent crafting these features would've been better spent elsewhere. There is a solid game in here somewhere. You just have to sift through mounds of produce, pelts and plumage to find it.

Gaming's Best Things of 2012

What a great year 2012 was for games. Think about it. When was the last time where nearly every major title didn't disappoint? Just about everything I played this year was excellent. Admittedly 'I WASNT DISAPPOINTED" is not the most stunning rubric to judge the year in gaming by, but we gamers are a cynical bunch and grow suspicious at high praise and kind words. Here are my picks for the finest five games of 2012.