The Steam weekend sale coming up reminded me that I already bought Red Orchestra in a previous sale but never got around to trying it, so I fired it up and played around in practice mode for a little while. It definitely lives up to its hardcore reputation — maps are big, movement is slow, your durability is low, vehicles are unwieldy and unavailable to a lot of ‘classes’, there’s no crosshairs, and aiming is extremely inaccurate unless you use the iron sights, which often obscure a lot of your vision.

The practice mode kind of sucks though, since it only spawns six bots on each side, and you wind up running around not doing or seeing very much. I’ll have to give it a try on a big multiplayer server sometime, but didn’t have time tonight.

Instead, I started the next major game, Drakensang: The Dark Eye, an RPG based on a pen-and-paper game from Germany. It’s a fairly complex-looking system, with all sorts of skills and combat talents, but I started off with a fairly basic “metamage” template. I’m not sure what a metamage is, beyond being able to summon a skeleton and cast a frost attack to begin with.

So far I’ve just wandered around the starting area, picking up a whole bunch of quests but not yet getting any of them done, with the eventual goal of getting into this nearby city which is blocked off for now. Hey, that’s just how The Witcher started out…

It’s pretty competently-executed so far, with decent graphics and voice acting. The controls took a bit of getting used to, since it uses WASD but the left and right strafe instead of turn, and you have to right-click-and-hold to turn the camera. Not *that* unusual, but it’s been a while since I’ve played one like that.