A Window, A Light...

My mind is on Exalted at a point when I have better things to do. I spent, like, a shitload of time writing up Exalted information in the last two posts. Posts that had mysteriously vanished or, perhaps, had never been posted at all. These are all things that bubbled up from the muck half-formed, hecatonchires to be put down. Nobody wants those hanging around at parties. 

( exalted )

That's a lot of Exalted, but I can promise you that it wasn't the full measure of the beast. You don't know what you've avoided.

( vidya games )

The weather warmed up and, endless gray and salt-encrusted landscape not withstanding, I feel like I can actually function again. I got air in my tires and a terrible haircut, so I'm making progress again where before I just kind of came home and wished for the cold to go. I can deal with bleak, but cold is miserable.

I'm a little cranky about my haircut, because the hairdresser obviously phoned it in. Some regulars came in, and you could actually see her lose interest in cutting my hair. I just let her quit, really, with the caveat that I'm not likely to go back anytime soon. I'll try the place Vi recommended, instead, or something. Maybe I should have done that in the first place, but it looked like a nice place and I was a tired dude with unwashed hair. Yeah, I was basically too embarrassed to get a good hair cut.

Exalted game tonight. Am I excited? Of course I am. Here's a weird dynamic that I brought this up to mention, though. We're basically playing in 'the past' in a game we're already run. We're playing the antagonists to an early Solar game. Our opponents tonight? Our Solar characters from the very first campaign. We can't possibly succeed because we already succeeded before, but I guess we can change the past by doing well in areas that weren't in our purview in the Solar game. This is something that Frank is doing, and it's interesting, but it's a move I would never pull. I don't really like to throw around the term 'de-protagonising', and it's true that it doesn't quite fit, but it's going to take a deft hand to not feel like we're stepping on our own game a little like this. I don't know if you're interested in this, but I kinda am.

Assassin's Creed is over. It was a few subsystems that turned into a game. It feels for all the world like a testing of mechanics that are later to become standard and there were enough that the design team felt that they made a game when a weak plot was layered over them. It sounds like a condemnation, but I didn't even buy it, so I don't really care. I've moved on to Dead Space, which I've heard a lot of strong reviews for. This is another game I didn't buy, but probably would have and so far, my guess is that it's going to turn into something that might be well described as 'Resident Evil, played straight, in space.'

Basically, your bog-standard jump-out-of-nowhere space horrors comprised of the torn and amalgamated flesh of the former crew. You've seen it before, I've seen it before, and it's a fan favorite but after the first few times of being ambushed by pointy flesh-bags, it kind of loses the sparkle. When almost every unattended corpse rises again to perforate your sweet, sweet skull, you just learn to plug everything you see with hot plasma then step on what remains of their face.

It's shaping up to be a good game, let's see if it can keep experiences fresh through the whole thing.