I’m currently re-reading Justin Cronin’s excellent “The Passage“, primarily to get reacquainted with the world and the characters and the story before diving into the sequel. But I’m also just totally in love with the book itself, and I’m probably enjoying it even more the second time around. Cronin is a masterful storyteller, to be sure, but I think I’m most impressed by his words. The man just knows how to write a sentence; no detail is superfluous, no word feels out of place, and every paragraph has a perfect rhythm that sweeps you along to the next one. For me, there are few pleasures like being sucked into a great book.
I say this only because my experience playing Assassin’s Creed 3 is very much the opposite of what I’m feeling when I’m reading The Passage. AC3 feels like a depressing slog; the already-tenuous narrative is now fraying and starting to make very little sense, both in Connor-time and (especially) in Desmond-time, where the cutscenes between Desmond and that weird ghost lady are just flat-out dreadful – the ghost lady’s dialogue is flowery and pretentious and desperately trying to sound important and mean something, even though it sounds like nonsense. I suppose I could try to see past this if the gameplay was still holding up, but it’s not. I just escaped from a New York City prison, and while that sounds interesting in theory, in practice it was dreadfully dull and I just wanted the damned thing to be over with. I’m not sure I’m going to keep playing, and while a part of this makes me a little sad (as I really want to care about this franchise again), the truth is that I don’t like feeling that I’m wasting my time.
So, while I wait for Gamefly copies of Lego LOTR, Hitman and Far Cry 3 to arrive, I’ll probably start diving into my Steam Sale purchases. I didn’t go too nuts this year, but I did buy enough to keep me busy for a few months:
- Tropico 4
- Yesterday
- Thirty Flights of Loving
- Resonance
- Batman Arkham City GOTY
- Dishonored
Those last 2 require some explanation, I guess. I’d already played Arkham City on the 360, and I’d found over 300 of the Riddler’s challenges, too, but I’ve found myself thinking about it lately and figured I couldn’t go wrong for $7, especially since my PC makes it look really, really nice. Similarly, I guess I kinda felt bad about quitting on Dishonored, and since it was 50% off, I figured I’d give it another ago, now that at least I know how to play it a lot better than I did, previously.
In all, I spent less than $40 on 6 games, most of which have gotten great reviews, and since as far as I’m concerned there’s nothing worth playing until either Bioshock Infinite or GTA5, whichever comes first, I might as well dig in.
Shouts From The Couch 
I haven’t played any of AC3. I’ve been curious about it based on the premise, but not quite curious enough to pick it up and play it myself. I’ve heard a lot of mixed reviews. And I have to seriously applaud your 6 games for under $40 snag. That’s awesome. I feel a bit of a rant boiling up about the arbitrary pricing of games (at full price) but I’ll save that for another time.