Being a bad conqueror and an illegal immigrant (Rise of Nations & GTA IV)

Hi Danda!

Sorry for the radio silence. Another week and weekend has gone by. I recently bought Rise of Nations that they gave away for 4,99 EUR or so in a German gaming magazine, and I have been playing that vigorously for a few days. It's ideal for casual core gamers! You can start a mission, and those that I have played mostly require you to win against your enemy in 90 minutes. So after 90 minutes, you either won or you lost, but the mission ends and you can decide that you've played enough and go do something more productive. Like the dishes.

Of course, the bad thing about the game is that it is somewhat difficult and so I kept losing after a while and then decided it wasn't fun anymore. It doesn't help that they hide some options as advanced options that are really important for the game, like the option to make your soldiers protect your catapults. Catapults can be destroyed very easily by an enemy, so imagine how happy I was when I found the hidden option to use all my military to protect them! That certainly rid the enemy of some of his buildings quickly.
However, I kept building a huge military and attacking my enemy's cities and still ended up with nothing but dead soldiers. I might not be using the right strategy.

At any rate, I have now switched to GTA IV. If you look at amazon.co.uk (where they are selling the game for 14.99 GBP, which currently is only around 17 EUR), you will see a lot of negative comments. In fact, as I'm writing this, the game has 5-star reviews 48 times, and 1-star reviews 120 times. Most people are complaining about the Rockstar Social Club and Windows Live, which I completely agree should be an option and not a requirement. I don't want to play online, so I wish they'd just leave me alone. Also, I have a fairly decent system and can't even play the game on highest details, let alone my screen's full resolution, 1680 x 1050.

The story so far is interesting, though, and I'm sure it will be nice to turn my fresh-off-the-boat Eastern European immigrant character into a notorious ruler of the underworld, or whatever the goal will be. I'm skeptical, though, about having to take your friends in the game out for a night on the town in order to stay friends with them. That seems like incorporating a bit of The Sims into GTA. Who wants that? But I will report back to you when I played it for a while longer.

In other news, my brother managed to fix my laptop this weekend (a Dell Inspiron 8200 with graphics troubles) by taking it apart and cleaning each part with a brush. Now, strangely enough, it works again (it was probably a loose contact) and so I spent some of my Sunday playing Unreal Tournament against him. It's also amazing to see how many people still play the game online, considering that it's been released quite a few years ago.

Game on,
- SuperViv