But when it comes down to it, the save point system is the only thing I really dislike about an otherwise nearly perfect [Batman - Arkham Asylum].

Add one more thing: The final fights. I skipped those because the game, for me, has never been about the fights but more about being as sneaky as possible so I could avoid them and instead take out the baddies one by one, instilling increasing levels of terror in the remaining ones.

Now that I'm done with that game, I'm playing Drakensang, which I kinda, sorta enjoy. Now I've played pretty much all of the CRPG games based on The Dark Eye rule set that have come out over the years, and they all, including Drakensang suffer from a certain... gruff... inaccessibility and general lack of friendliness to new players. If you're playing a TDE game, or so the thinking at the developer's studios seems to be going, you damn well better have studied the manual and know the TDE rule set inside out. Which is a shame because TDE is a complex rule set and it's not all that hard to shoot yourself in the foot if you're not paying attention.

Case in point: My primary character, who is a fighter with some dabbling in magic, suddenly found himself unable to cast spells. Since the class came from a mod, I was all but ready to discard the obviously buggy game and start fresh with one of the stock classes. Except that some googling unearthed the tidbit that wearing any piece of metal armor disables spell casting. It would have been nice had the game notified me of the fact that I was crippling my character when donning that ugly bucket of a helmet, especially since there lay quite a bit of time between this and my next fight, but of course it didn't.

Despite the somewhat unwieldy mechanics of the underlying RPG system, the unfriendliness, the boring, cliché plot (main character stumbles into murder mystery that looks like it'll expand to a threat for the continued well-being of the whole world) and the fact that for all the running around they do, your party sure is sloooooow on foot, the game has its moments as well as a varied bunch of side quests.

EU3, ongoing and occasionally. Mighty Russia, with ambitions in the New World, has swarmed down from Alaska to seize the west coast from the British, then marched across country to do likewise in Canada. For a while we even had a blockade of Britain going on, until they got the navy home to make us go away.

Oh, and we raided Ireland too while we were over there. Shortly afterwards the rebels took the whole country. Not that we were funding them or anything ;-)

I like how the game shifts. Early on was a survival game, getting Muscovy on top of the neighbouring Russian dukedoms, backstabbing the Golden Horde while they were struggling in a war with the Timurids, carving piece after piece off Zaporozhie, finally declaring the Russian Empire and the Patriarchate of the Third Rome.

Then wars in the Middle East, the Orthodox crusades prevailing where the Catholics always failed. Converting Mecca to the true faith was satisfying.

But yes, the endgame is the most fun. Not fighting to conquer and annex any more, but for the balance of power. I've never had any intention of seizing territory in Europe, Russia has always looked south and east. Still, go east far enough and you get to Ireland ;-)

Next... either play as a serious nation on a meaningful difficulty setting now that I know the game, or have another go as Connacht. Liberating Ireland as the undisputed number one global superpower smacking down a presumptuous rival is one thing. Doing it as a tribal warlord of Galway is quite another.

Just finished The Darkness 2.  Decent enough, but still not as good as the first.  Ending sucked balls, too.  Seriously, saw it coming, and it still didn't make any damn sense.

Now back to the awesomeness that is Uncharted 3 and Zelda: Skyward Sword.

Figured since I'm running a better system these days, I'd take another crack at trying to run UT3.
Installing right now. If this works, I'll be running every iteration of the UT series [other than 2003].
[[I had to bring back my old UT99 install the other night because I had a hankering for some of the CTF4 maps that never got translated over]]

I can probably also run Oblivion just fine too. And Bioshock, and Fallout3.
But I'll do Oblivion first.

Update: Meh. UT3 certainly *looks* nice, but, well, looks aren't everything.
*goes back to 2004/99*

So when you reached Mr Freeze, you froze up? 

Replaying Mass Effect.  About to head to Ilos.  Shit's gonna get real here.

CTF4 / SmartCTF for UT99.

Damn pity they haven't managed to merge the two.
I like the improved scoring system. Sure, sometimes I like to cap flags like crazy.
But sometimes I just like to find a nice quiet sniper hole and provide epic cover fire.

*points*
It's a real testament to to a good game when people are still making mods/maps and still actively playing a decade+ later.

I'm still alternating between Hellgate: Global and Drakensang, switching to one when the other is annoying me too much, either with it's slowness (Drakensang) or its lag spikes and, at least for the 2nd invasion maps, horrible game design (Hellgate). I'm yet undecided whether to mix it up some more by adding VtM: Bloodlines, which was cheap on Steam last week, into the rotation.

Mass Effect Threeeee

So far not overly impressed but it's early hours so we'll see.