I may have backslid a little on my backlog reduction goal.  I wasn’t supposed to buy any games until Fatal Frame V came out, and instead I got sucked into an indiegala deal and wound up with three new VNs and a bunch of other games that I’m not even going to redeem on Steam.

Still, all three of them were ones that I wanted to see (X-Note, eden* and Higurashi), and for $1.99 it was hard to pass up.

Since my last update, I’ve finished Halo 4.  I’m not sure that the series NEEDED a sequel – I thought that Halo 3 wrapped things up pretty well and that they could have kept putting out more ODST or Reach-style side stories, but I guess Master Chief wasn’t going to get left in his cryosleep capsule forever.

It was pretty good, for all that.  I found that I had to take the difficulty down a notch from my usual, and I still managed to get myself killed plenty of times even playing on Easy, so either I am very out of practice or 343 Studios bumped up the challenge a bit.  It WAS super shiny – they really knew how to pull some nice graphics out of the 360 by 2012.

I also started and abandoned a couple of games, for reasons.  I feel a little guilty in the case of Deadly Premonition, because I was really enjoying the deeply-infused weirdness, but I was having a lot of trouble getting past the controls and the really awful textures in some places.

I have a little less guilt about starting and ditching Fallout 3 (And, by extension, New Vegas), because I picked it up for practically nothing on a Steam sale and it really did NOT click with me.  It was a sort of combination of the janky 3rd-person animations and the really overdone gore (at least THAT I could turn off via an INI tweak) and the weird combat system AND the part where, after I finally got done with the tutorial and got out into the wasteland and got to Megaton and picked up a couple of quests and set off on my questing, the game started crashing to desktop every few minutes.

When I was playing Skyrim, I think it crashed 3 times over the course of nearly 170 hours, and the first of those didn’t come until I was well invested in the story, so apparently Bethesda made great strides in stability between the two titles.

I may give the Fallout series another crack when Fallout 4 comes out, but for now it can just sit in my pile of mild regret.

Finally, I’m up to mission 80 (of 85) in Earth Defense Force 2025, so I should be able to get that knocked out in the next day or so.  It’s been weird playing it solo – I’ve always thought of the series as a couch co-op thing – but it’s a BIG improvement from Insect Armageddon.  It’s also been quite a long game, for a shooter.  It keeps track of how long you’ve played, and it looks like I’ll be at about the 20 hour mark when I put it to bed.