It occurs to me that I haven't done one of my Game Calendar posts in over a year. I was still only on LiveJournal back then! What I do here is cover the games I've played recently, usually ones that were on the previous calendar, then look ahead to games I'd like to play. Traditionally, I do one of these every six months or so.
The thing is, I never did get around to playing most of the games on last year's list. DC Online, Dragon Age 2, Marvel vs Capcom 2, and X-Men Destiny all got mixed to bad reviews either online or from friends, so I skipped them. Arkham City got great reviews but I'd never finished Arkham Asylum so I never got around to City.
So here are the games I did play:
October 7, 2011 - Panzer Corps
Panzer Corps is, for all intents and purposes, a remake of the old Panzer General series. In fact, the basic campaign in Panzer Corps mimics that of the original Panzer General, almost mission by mission. You go to Poland, then Norway, then France, then do Sea Lion, then invade Russia, and so on. It's pretty decent. What makes it more interesting, though, is that they've been doing year-by-year expansion packs. So rather than do the whole war in one twenty six scenario campaign, you now have the chance to get the Panzer Corps: Grand Campaign expansions. Grand Campaign 39 lets you do 1939 as fourteen scenarios from Poland to Norway, then Grand Campaign 40 gives you France in fourteen scenarios, then Grand Campaign 41 sends you to the Balkans, Greece, and Russia, and so on. They've only released as far as Grand Campaign 43 East, but the plan is to go all the way to 1945 and the end of the war with some 70+ scenarios in all. I haven't gotten any of the Grand Campaigns yet, but once they're all out, I think I might invest in some serious World War II.
October 28, 2011 - Sword of the Stars II
This was another Elemental scale disappointment. Fortunately, I'd learned my lesson from Elemental and didn't pre-order the damn thing, because Sword of the Stars II came out buggy as all hell and unplayable. Even after I let them patch it for months and managed to buy the thing on sale, the game still disappointed. Granted some of that may be due to the problems I've been having with my machine, but even so, this was a game by a smaller publisher that I trusted because of their earlier strategy game work, and I was severely let down.
December 20, 2011 - Star Wars: The Old Republic
Well, yeah, obviously I'm playing this. I've got some seventeen Log posts about it. Here's the first one. I do have to snicker at my own estimate in the last Game Calender that I thought it could be out by September. Not so much. Of course, I was actually playing it through beta by October and had the game a week early because I pre-ordered it. And I'm enjoying it. Especially our weekly guild runs where, despite a certain number of growing pains, I think our group is gelling nicely.
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March 6, 2012 - Mass Effect 3
And so we move into the future. I'd expected to have played ME3 by now, but it got pushed back to March so it wouldn't compete with The Old Republic's launch in December. I'm going to play it, of course. But I do have some hardware concerns. My XBox 360 is well out of warranty and is starting to show signs that the inevitable "Red Ring of Death" that plagued the early model 360s may be about to claim my own early model 360. Thing is, I've only played the Mass Effect games on the 360, so all my save games are on the 360's hard drive. And since they track your progress through the games into the finale with your old saves, losing them means losing all my work over hundreds of hours. And that sucks.
April, 2012 - The Secret World
This is a modern era MMO where magic is real and you're a member of one of three conspiracies that knows that, uses magic, and wars against magical threats and the other two factions. I'm not up for another $15 a month subscription game, but if it's free to play, I might give this a spin. I know that Paul, a retired member of our Old Republic guild is looking forward to this one.
2012 (?) - Guild Wars 2
My cousin in Vegas was big on the original Guild Wars. Presuming they keep the same "pay for the game up front, play it forever free....but also pay for the expansions" business model, I'll probably give this a gander. The (theoretical) impact that you can have on your game world is pretty appealing even if it is, in the end, just another medieval fantasy MMO.
And that's about it. I never finished Diablo II, so Diablo III doesn't excite me. Most everything else, like BioShock Infinite or Borderlands 2, is in the "definite maybe" category.If the reviews are good, I'll consider it.
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