Fat Man Uses The Force

April has been a funny month. Not hilarious, or oddly peculiar. In fact, now I think about it there's nothing particularly funny about April at all. Forget I mentioned it.

The schools being closed for a fortnight over Easter gave me some precious time with the fruit of my loin, which in addition to her bicycle escapades also saw her attempt golf for the first time, complete with a solid five foot put. Already aspects of her game are superior to mine. She'll be five next month so will naturally be turning pro.

Days in the park, basketball and football were fun, though did highlight my ever expanding waist and my need to step up my weight loss and fitness regime. Time to fish a dusty Wii Fit board out from under the TV unit. Firing it up I discovered that it had been over three hundred days since my last workout, giving my beloved and ever supportive wife yet another opportunity to assert her correctness. Looking at the figures from last year I was genuinely surprised to see that I had been losing weight at a nice steady pace, so I started to wonder why I'd stopped using it. Some uncomfortable memories of my former employer followed. Extra work, additional hours, integrating new people following another acquisition, re-routing the fleet, and the regional manager suggesting that I should tell the disruptive elements of the workforce that I masturbate regularly, as a way to endear myself to them. I'm still not sure how that was supposed to work. Perhaps the thought was that once informed they'd invite me to their masturbation parties.

As I no longer have those excuses, I mean reasons, I'm back on the fitness trail. This is where it gets difficult though. I know why I'm fat. I eat too much and exercise too little. I eat because I'm hungry, because I'm unhappy, because I'm happy, and because I like food. I don't exercise enough because I'd rather be eating. Particularly crisps. In fact, just thinking about it makes me want to eat.

As I'm being healthy I had a large bowl of Bran Flakes, with a Cheerios chaser.

Getting back to exercise, the idea is to burn off more calories than you take in, only, the exercise makes me hungry. So I eat. I learned that lesson early, which is why I stopped using the treadmill after breakfast while watching The Wright Stuff and switched to watching Stargate SG1 before lunch. Whether this fresh impetus will work is solely down to me, and I think that's the main problem with weight loss and exercise. The only people who can effect change are the people whose lack of discipline got themselves into that state in the first place.

On the game front I finished Far Cry 2 (PC) and found the whole experience somewhat lacking. For all it's free form pretensions I found it to be little more than a series of fetch quests through familiar terrain and endlessly spawning enemies with Steve Austin-O-Vision. That's not to say it wasn't fun. It was. The weapons and vehicles were well realised. The environment was suitably varied, if a little ecodome-esque, and graphically it was stunning. Game breakers for me were the likes of destroying a checkpoint, including blowing up the gas cylinders and fuel storage and killing everybody on site, only to return a short while later and find the thing rebuilt and fully manned. It's all well and good having great fire effects and showing them off as the fire rages and spreads across the grass, but when that grass grows back into a lush carpet within the day, the suspension of disbelief puts on it's coat, gets into it's jet powered rocket copter, and trundles off back to Jelly Tot Land.

On a happier note I corrected a grievous error on my part and finally played Knights of the Old Republic (PC). When it was released back in 2003 I had a quick go on a friend's X-Box, and I didn't take to it. Since then I couldn't help but notice the reverence with which it and its sequel have been held by the PC community at large. There is a fear with such things that nostalgia does have a habit of painting things much more vibrantly than they may appear to the naked eye, so when I installed it and it proceeded to crash to desktop on a regular basis I was in danger of letting my frustration cloud my judgement and dismiss the game. Obviously the issue is down to the game being so old and Windows, despite what Microsoft may say and what we PC gamers may extol about our wealth of a back catalogue, doesn't play well with it's older siblings. Thankfully the issues brought about by Vista and in particular 64bit Vista are not uncommon and I found a number of fixes, none of which work fully but that between them made the game playable. As long as I saved my progress frequently I was able to make it through to a thoroughly satisfying conclusion. At some point I will return to it and play through again, allowing the dark side to rule. For now I remain a child of the light. A fat man-child of the light casting a grotesque shadow, but a child of the light all the same.

Wandering far

I've finally finished playing Fallout 3 (PC) for the time being. I've visited every significant location, though not found every bobblehead nor triggered every quest, and you know, that's fine. I never wanted the experience to degenerate into a complete fetch quest, I just wanted to see what the wasteland had to offer.

Leaving the confines of Vault 101 I played the game pretty much as myself, in so much as I can be myself in a fictional post apocalyptic future, letting my personal morality be my guide. As such, as tempted as I was to put a .44 magnum shell into the back of the likes of Moriarty's head and blow the residents of Megaton to kingdom come, I never did so. Maybe next play through. And that's the biggest ringing endorsement I can give. Despite almost 100 hours of wandering the wastes I'd be more than happy to start all over again. Sure the ending is a bit of kick in the happy sack, but that doesn't detract from the delights that have gone before.

I could of course continue playing now, with the Operation Anchorage expansion, though as it's only available through the Games For Windows Marketplace, which would be a reason to disregard it in itself, and the reviews giving the impression that it is akin to sprinkling powered turd on my cornflakes, I think I'll give it a miss.

There's other expansions in the works and I'm sure when Bethesda have finished milking it they'll put a nice little expansion compilation together as they did with the Knights of the Nine for Oblivion and that's when I'll jump back in, only this time as a twisted killing machine bent on intensifying the pain and misery of the inhabitants of this ravaged DC. [insert Vincent Price laughter here]

So with an ever expanding backlog of games it was a tough choice deciding where to go next. Being the FPS lover that I am Far Cry 2 was always going to be favourite, though with the recent system wipe I need to restart both Colin McRae DiRT and Psychonauts so there was a temptation to go back to them. I've also got Beyond Good & Evil and Company of Heroes Gold Edition sitting in my Steam list eyeing me disappointedly. I've not given nearly enough time to zombie blasting in Left 4 Dead, and Mass Effect and Grand Theft Auto IV aren't going to play themselves. Add to that the recent release of F.E.A.R.2: Project Origin and Burnout Paradise Ultimate Box demo's, that gave me just enough to tempt me in with their wily ways, and the excitement is palpable. How am I going to cope?

One notable absentee in all this is Warhammer Online. There was some debate about Warhammer over at the ZTTB site, which I'll expand upon my input in order to explain that while I am still playing it, I'm not doing so as much as I expected.

I dabbled with Warhammer briefly in school, though I was primarily a D&D kind of guy, and maybe my memory isn't too good because I wasn't expecting, well, what Warhammer Online is. I've tried to love it, tried to warm to it's charms, but once the initial excitement wore off I felt that there's just something missing. Now it may just be me being the anti-social nay sayer that I can be, but the reason I liked Guild Wars was because I got to play with people I liked and had fun with. Once all the guildies stopped playing I had no reason to go back and finish it. I was never really into running around alone, and not being sure I could invest the time needed for character development I was never convinced a proper MMO would fit, so I avoided the likes World of Warcraft and Everquest II for this reason and because of the monthly subscription, despite the number of people I knew who where jumping in and splashing around while telling me how lovely it was and to get the water wings off and join them.

Warhammer, I told myself, would be different. Surely going into a massive bloody conflict with several hundred others as body parts fly across the battlefield in a hail of flame and bullets would be my dream ticket, particularly as we had, an all be it brief, history.
It seems strange then that I'm having most fun going off doing the PvE alone. I certainly didn't expect that. I think the cause of this unexpected development is that I've found people still play as individuals, and as such the PQ's work best because people can do their own thing but it still contributes to the overall goal. In the PvP scenarios, unless you have at least a party and preferably a warband going in, it just becomes a free for all. That makes the experience feel somewhat unsatisfying. Hollow.

Having said all that, I still think it's worth picking up and having a play, and despite my reservations I have put my money on the table and will be playing until May, but I really don't know if I'll go beyond that. There's no doubt that WoWers who came across for the launch didn't find it compelling enough to stay once Wrath of the Lich King was released, and there was a significant juggling act to balance the servers. There's also been a number of changes in game since launch that have improved things with Mythic being swift to implement them and the speed with which they've responded to criticism has been commendable. They've reintroduced classes that were removed to ensure the game launched on time and balancing and UI issues have been rectified. All in all it is very solid and well implemented.

The environments are fantastic. The characterisations are brilliant. The Tome Of Knowledge is a stroke of genius. There's a wealth of material in and around the game world that you can delve as deep as you like into. There's an abundance of content, and you're free to sample whichever takes your fancy. Want to play as a High Elf but like the Dwarf story? Go do the Dwarf story then. Once you've basically got through the training quests and got to your first warcamp, your race doesn't have to dictate your quest path. The quests themselves can range from a quick walk down the road to chat to someone, to sprawling multi-part epics. Should you find some like minded people to adventure with, your quests can be shared with the others in your party, with re spawn of components/quest items happening swiftly enough that you don't get bored waiting for everyone to get the loot.

There's so many plus points and great things in there and I want it to be a great success. That's why I'd love to recommend it to everyone as an essential purchase. The fact that I can't saddens me. I hope that anyone who does buy it likes it. I hope it's just that MMO's at the end of the day aren't my bag. I really do.

Not that I can worry about that now. I've got some bloke going by the pseudonym “The Jackal” to kill.