I haven’t really played a lot of games recently, besides grinding through a few more series in Forza 3 and knocking off more puzzles in Picross 3D.

I did wind up caving in and buying Victoria 2, though. I was initially hesitant to; I liked the first Victoria but didn’t play it much since the UI is rather weak and POP management gets fiddly, but Paradox games are typically somewhat…troubled on initial release and need at least some patches and an expansion before they really shine. The word-of-mouth about V2 was very positive though, so I wound up getting it anyway, and it is indeed a pretty decent game. There are still some troubles with the economy and things like way too many rebels popping up mid-game though, so I’ve shelved it for now until we see how well the next patch helps.

Otherwise, I’ve been thinking of getting back to some of the FPSes on my backlog, to counterbalance the ultra-long RPGs. I can probably burn through a bunch of them fairly quickly and at least free up some drive space. So far I’ve played through Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter, a remake of one of the more old-school shooters. The gimmick here is that there are tons and tons and tons of enemies in each level, keeping things at a frantic pace. Unfortunately it was a bit too frantic for me, and I turned the difficulty down one notch to Easy midway through. I could probably finish it on Normal, but it would take a ton of reloads and I just want to run through these games as fast as possible, not master them.