The environments are beautiful but extremely linear. So far this isn’t detracting from the experience as it feels much more action-oriented and it keeps the game moving forward.

The story and characters are so far pretty interesting, it’s nice how it seems to give equal time to each of the characters… fave so far Vanille and possibly the baby chick chocobo in Sazh’s hair. The least liked so far is Hope, whiny brat whom I hope grows as the story progresses.

The fal’Cie/l’Cie connection and explanation isn’t done particularly well in-game but the games encyclopedia-lite covers it better. Essentially, the fal’Cie are god-like entities that can “curse” humans into beings called l’Cie, when cursed you are shown a brief interpretive dream giving you a task to complete, known as your “focus”. Complete this focus and you turn to crystal and “live” forever. Fail and you turn into a ghoul.

The relationship between humans, the fal’Cie, the l’Cie and the worlds of Coccoon and Pulse at this stage seems quite complex but I’m sure it’ll start linking together later.

The combat is slowly revealing it’s fullness, 5 hours in and I’ve just obtained my first Eidolon on Snow and Paradigms are being introduced. It’s very fast and furious (and sometimes hard to follow) and definitely more complex than it first appears (which is a good thing). Reminds me a lot of FF8 for some reason… (which is my favourite FF for many reasons).

I’ll keep posting with my thoughts as I hit milestones in the game, as spoiler-free as possible as I progress.

I’m getting back into WoW at the minute, focusing on getting my Shammy Totemicshock geared for both Elemental DPS and Healing via Triumph Emblems. The new (as of Patch 3.3) Dungeon Finder system is really helping that along so hopefully it won’t take too long.

Other than WoW I’m getting pretty excited about Pokemon HeartGold/SoulSilver and Final Fantasy XIII. Both these franchises are pretty important to me personally and are responsible for some of the more life-consuming moments I’ve had in gaming.

The third instalment of DLC for Borderlands also came out this week and I’ve been enjoying playing that. The Secret Armory of General Knoxx so far is great, it’s much harder than I think folk were expecting and adding 11 levels to the experience as well as adding new loot is really nice.

Nerfing those New Haven chests was a pretty good thing to do overall although it’s a little sad to see them do it this late into the game. It should have been done in the first patch really.

As it turns out it’s not an out and out DPS class so I decided to make a new character, this time an Elven Runekeeper which is both a straight DPS class as well as being a healer. The Runekeeper mechanic involves a bar that can fill towards damage or healing dependent on what skills you use; using damage skills fills it towards the hurt-things end whilst healing moves it to the fix-things end. How full the bar gets determines how effective your hurty or healy skills get. It’s an interesting mechanic.

I’ve gotten this character to level 13 today and I have to say, she’s been much more fun to play upto this point than my Burglar.

I REALLY want to see what LOTRO’s Skirmish system is like as well as what the Moria/Mirkwood expansion content is like so I’m hopeful that I’ll gel with this class and get her to max level.

There are a surprising amount of points in the game where you make choices, sometimes without much thought on your part at the time; which turn out to be important later on. The fact ME2 weaves decisions (both big and small) you made in the first game into the narrative in such a clever manner is quite intriguing and bodes well for the ante-upping third instalment.

As for the rest of the game, the combat feels faster and more satisfying and the sidequests feel more integrated into the main story thanks to their use of unique maps and fleshed out feel.

I kinda miss the Mako “tank” sections from ME1 even though they sometimes annoyed the crap out of me. The “scanning” minigame replacement in ME2 is kinda tedious but it’s not as bad as I’d thought it might be.

ME2 sometimes loses the “scale” that ME1 had due to the lack of those explore the planet bits but the sequel’s pacing and excellent characters make up for it.

I’m definitely going to be going back and "New Game Plus” my way through with different decisions…

It’s going to be a long wait til Mass Effect 3

My Pulse arrived (confirming sadly that I’m not one of the undead) and it’s a rather nice phone. As my first Android phone I’m pretty impressed at it’s capabilities and might well try and program “something” for it at some point… The only slight disappointment is it’s battery life, but I gather that’s an issue with most smartphones.

I’m still managing to do a picture a day for my PAD2010 project which I’m rather pleased about. Focus and not getting sidetracked by shiny things are my adversaries.

I’m currently not playing WoW… I’d kinda gotten fed up with certain individuals attitude and lack of commitment and just all round gotten a bit fed up with it. I still love the game but just fancied one of my WoW breaks, I’ll be back into WoW before Cataclysm hits I’m sure.

In the meantime I’ve been playing a Lord of the Rings Online trial (which runs out on Tuesday) and it’s been pretty fun although it suffers like WoW whilst levelling in that you rarely see folk.

I like how it does certain things, it’s class system and group-specific move system (Conjunctions) are pretty unique and clever. How it weaves it’s story around events in the books is clever and seeing a lot of people and places from the books come alive is fun in itself.

I don’t like how bland and landscape-less most of the land (so far) appears, I know it’s being true to the books and it DOES look pretty but it’s just seeing rolling green hills and empty green fields of the Shire and Bree-land ALL the time (At least upto level 21, I’m about to head into the Lone Lands which should hopefully make a graphical detour) that gets a bit boring. (Although to be fair I imagine the Elven and Dwarven areas to be slightly more exciting, Hobbits aren’t known for their interesting-ness)

I know, I know, it’s exactly as the book describes and it does a fantastic job of recreating Tolkien’s masterwork, I’m just fairly sure Turbine could’ve found ways of breaking it up with a bit more variety.

There is also a massive over-abundance of fetching and returning OVER and OVER to the same places in early questing which just drags. Also I’m a bit said that the main quest-line (the so-called Books) are reliant on grouping so much, I KNOW it’s an MMO and I’m definitely not adverse to grouping but having the early levels require grouping so much means you end up ignoring them until you way out-level it and then going back and doing them, just because there is a lack of low-level population to group with.

I’m fairly sure it’ll get much better at higher levels as you venture into places with more players, but the low-level game is honestly not that thrilling so far. (Although I also acknowledge that it’s not great in WoW either, I’m just numb to it in that game through the amount of time playing it…)

I’m REALLY interested in what they’ve done with Moria and Mirkwood but I’ll only see those if I upgrade from the trial (which for £20 I might well do, we shall see come Tuesday…) as I doubt I’ll hit level 40-50 by Tuesday.

I haven’t touched upon LOTRO’s PvP (or PvMP as it’s called) or the new Skirmish system as I’m not quite high enough level for that yet, but they seem like interesting plays on other games systems.

I actually REALLY like LOTRO (despite the vibe that probably comes from this post), so we’ll see how we go!

The Pulse is a re-branding of the Huawei U8220 which has similar specs to the G1 and is the first Android phone to be available on Pay as you Go. It’s running Android 1.5 (Cupcake) although there are rumours that it’ll get an upgrade to Android 2.0 or 2.1 early this year, those are just that though, rumours.

Even if that upgrade doesn’t appear there are still custom ROMs being produced for it along with the hope of getting a 1.6 (Donut) kernel running on it.

I’ll no doubt take some piccies of it in it’s stock form before flashing it with @PaulOBrien’s Modaco Custom Rom (MCR) currently at version 1.7.

Paul’s MCR comes in two variations, one that keeps the T-Mobile customisations and one that returns the device to the stock Android look. It also has performance updates as well as plenty of other tweaks like updated OpenGL ES Drivers as well as being “rooted” by default.

I’ll make sure to keep track of my adventures in Android land as well as any interesting apps I come across.

As I mentioned in my previous blog entry I’m planning on building an arcade joystick from scratch, I’ll post more on that as I develop it more fully in my head.

I’ve also started a project I’m calling Picture-A-Day 2010 (or PAD2010) which as you’d probably expect involves me taking a photo of SOMETHING each day for the whole year. I’m really interested if I can keep this up as I think it’d be quite interesting looking back at 365 days of random pictures.

I’ll be taking pictures with whatever device I have to hand, seeing as most gadgets these days seem to somehow be able to take photos regardless of original usage, I’m waiting for the Garden Hoe with 8MP Camera personally…

And on the subject of gadgets I’ve finally decided to get a new mobile phone, my trusty Sony Ericsson W300i still works fine after 3 years but it’s looking a bit old in the tooth. So after looking around a bit and really not wanting to sell my soul for 24 months I came to the conclusion I wanted to stay Pay as you Go. But I REALLY wanted an Android phone, this left me with two choices, save up between £400 and £500 and get a SIM-Free Hero or G2, or purchase the only (as of writing) PAYG Android phone, the T-Mobile Pulse for £140.

After staring at reviews until my face had turned Android Green it looked like the Pulse was actually a pretty good phone in it’s own right, cutting hardly any corners hardware-wise, using a similar spec to the original G1.

The only “bad” thing about the Pulse is it’s only running Android 1.5 with rumours of 2.0 coming in the 1st quarter of 2010, even if that doesn’t happen I’m sure the custom ROM community will come out with a solution of sorts.

I’ll be sure to comment more on the Pulse when it arrives sometime this week.

I also have plans to improve and personalise the blog a touch at some point rather than using a pre-built theme, but we shall see. Quite a lot of interesting stuff happening at the moment…

After talking to my best mate Pete I decided to buy Street Fighter 4 for the PC, after doing so I thought why not grab a fighting stick. So after a bit of browsing and comparing I ended up ordering an HORI Fighting Stick 3 for the PS3 (it also works on the PC). This should be here tomorrow… (16th Dec)

Later that night I was browsing the Shoryuken.com forums and found a thread on creating awesome looking custom joysticks using arcade parts and an idea was planted.

So I’m going to build and make a custom arcade stick that’ll work on both PS3 and PC using my non-existent carpentry and electronics skills. I’ve not cut into a piece of MDF or soldered onto a PCB since secondary school, which seems so very long ago right now.

So I’ll be grasping at the basics as I go with no real idea what I’m doing. I’m planning on starting this misadventure at some point in the new year, I’m currently playing around to come up with a VERY basic design that I think I can actually make with no experience and will use that to come up with materials and costs for it.

I’m planning on using original Japanese Sanwa parts for the stick and buttons along with a Cthulhu PCB to act as the guts. I’ll talk more about this stuff as it moves forward.

Exciting though!!!