I was away for the last little while, but I still got plenty of gaming in. To quickly summarize:

I finished off the main story in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: EoT, after an number of plot revelations where I discovered that Dusknoir was actually a ‘bad guy’ (well, as bad as they get in Pokemon games), the time gear thief was actually working to stop him by placing the gears at a tower to stabilize time, and I was also from the future and the thief’s partner. A lot of the endgame was a series of linear slogs through dungeons, often without a full party, which worried me a bit since I didn’t have the opportunity to grind quests like I could back at the guild, but I managed to squeak through. The boss fight was tough since he dished out a lot of damage, and I was down to a single reviver seed, but the Smokescreen skill kept us from getting hit too often. There’s still other things to do afterwards, like opening up new areas, recruiting the rest of the Pokemon, and evolutions, but I don’t think I’ll have time for that.

I tried a game of Civ4: Colonization, but it was quickly apparent that it wasn’t really as much like base Civ4 as you might think, and I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t catch on to proper resource management and wasted a lot of effort there on things I wound up not being able to make, and gave up on that attempt. I love the Civ games, but I really need a good stretch of time where I can pay more careful attention to them.

I also restarted Darwinia (technically I had started it before, but didn’t have the save with me), and made it up to just past the mission where you first start to create armour. Most of the missions have been pretty easy so far, with the major difficulties coming from the ‘seed’ launchers that create new enemies (suicide rushes with squads seem to work best to wipe them out early on), and the damn ants. I wound up not even using the armour for the ants, and just used a bunch of squads, slowly inching them closer to the nests while they’re distracted picking up nearby souls, though even then it usually took a few attempts to finally lob enough grenades.

I finally played Depths of Peril, which is a rather interesting game in that it’s kind of like competitive Diablo. It has the same basic kill-loot-level-quest gameplay as Diablo, but you also control a ‘covenant’ where you can recruit other NPCs, and you have a house with a lifestone you have to defend. There are also a handful of other AI-controlled covenants, and they play the game much the same way you do; they have houses in town, you see them running around town and buying stuff from merchants and picking up quests, and you see them out in the combat fields, and they can actually wind up beating you to completing quests. You don’t want to let them do that, because they’ll earn influence from those quests and kills, and there’s a diplomacy aspect to it where covenants can form alliances, trade, or go to war and raid each other based on their influence and relationships to each other. You can win by either wiping out all of the other covenants, or merging them all into an alliance. In my game I wound up getting an alliance victory, mainly by letting them wipe each other out until only two others were left, and then buttering them up by giving them leftover items until they agreed to alliances.

The other new game I tried was World of Goo, a just-released puzzle game where you have a bunch of ‘goo balls’ that you can stretch out to form structures (think Meccano girders), with the goal of building up a structure that reaches a pipe on the map, with enough free-roaming goo balls left to satisfy a certain goal. The difficulty comes in the map layouts, terrain hazards, and the fundamental instability of the structure — the things you build have a very rubbery behaviour that leads to a lot of swaying, making it difficult to do things like build straight up. I’m most of the way through Chapter 1 so far, and each puzzle has been fairly different.

And the guys finally got together and for the first time we got a full band session going in Rock Band 2, unlocking a couple more achievements for me in the process. Oddly enough, playing with a full band actually seems to make things more difficult for me, since it’s harder to hear your own instrument among all the others.