Most of my gaming now feels very casual. For the most part, I play WoW. WoW is more socializing than game. Don't get me wrong, I'm on WoWWiki or Allakhazam looking stuff up all the time. We're doing ramparts soon, so I need fire resist. It's mostly just a pain, but makes me feel like I'm earning credit with people by putting in extra effort. It's probably worth mentioning that our guild is all people who know each other in real life, so I'm putting in more effort to please them than I probably would otherwise. I probably shouldn't though. They mostly don't notice or care. I bust my ass doing research, collecting mats, and questing just to get berated because I forgot to remind someone to get milk on the way home from boardgame night.
Outside of WoW, I'm mostly just playing fluff. Cheap old games that are fun to blow through on easy. BloodRayne 2, King Kong, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, Armed & Dangerous. I consider games like this (when turned down to easy difficulty) the purest form of escape. They're like running around in the parking lot making whooshing noises to pretend that you're Superman.
There is one other game I'm playing. Because of the controversy surrounding its successor (and because Mike enjoyed it), I picked up a headset and a copy of Manhunt. So far I'm not impressed. It's a stealth game where the major mechanic seems to be find a shadow, make a noise, when the bad guy gets tired of staring into the shadow and turns around, kill him. Repeat until... yawn. Whoops. I was going to say repeat until bored but became too bored to finish the sentence. The gory canned animations really aren't that big a deal to me. Pan's Labyrinth had way worse face stabbing, and exploding a guy's head with a baseball bat seems more comical than horrific to me. Maybe if the graphics weren't so dated it'd be scarier.
Also the "director" talking into your headset, egging you on and reveling in your kills, was supposed to be a big part of the experience. I bought a headset, just for this game. I've been largely disappointed. From the first time the director said "kill this #%*#", I knew that he had a preset number of audio barks for whenever I got into the kill position. And his post-kill wanking is totally random. Sometimes he praises you lavishly for a crappy kill and remains completely silent when you pull of a level three kill. The only post kill bark I enjoyed was after I killed a guy with the nailgun and he said something like "Nice shooting, pardner."
These are preliminary opinions, of course. I haven't finished the game yet. But so far, the game's pretty dull and the gore is no big deal. Some gamers who have seen and even played Manhunt 2 say it's about the same or even tamer than the original. The original only lets you unlock certain things if you do extra nasty kills while the sequel gives you a nicer ending if you try to be less violent. If that's the case, it sounds like the ESRB rated Manhunt 2 wrong. Likely it's caving to pressure groups and / or taking retribution for the Hot Coffee scandal.
Meh. If it was a better game, I'd care more.
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