Up late talking games & writing? You're...

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Trying to get back in the habit of posting every other day, but haven't quite found the groove yet… for now, just some quickies:
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Misc: Whittaker and Mommy are both doing excellent, although I think everybody here at the homestead is feeling a wee bit rough around the edges. Enervation aside, Whit's got a great appetite and looks fantastic, and the woman is a role model for new mothers everywhere. Family Happy Get!
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Misc: Still about 150 e-mails before I get current… everybody please bear with me. ^_^
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Games: Spent a little time with the Valkyria Chronicles DLCs, Enter the Edy Detachment! And Behind Her Blue Flame.
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Edy wasn't bad. A little short maybe, but it starred most of the offbeat characters I liked in the main game. Seeing more of them was a good thing.
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Blue Flame was kind of pissing me off… it's neat to be able to play as the enemy side, but one big issue I have with Valkyria in general is that a player’s performance ranking is based solely on speed of completion and nothing else.
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By nature, I'm a very cautious and methodical SRPG player, so trying to go for speed is something that does not come naturally to me. I don't enjoy it. I was quite content to finish levels with ‘D’ rankings in Valkyria’s story mode since I played it my way and never lost a teammate, but it's known that there is a secret level in Blue Flame that's only accessible by getting ‘A’ ranks in the three missions before it.
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It feels incredibly unnatural and unpleasant to break out of my normal SRPG play style in an effort to see this secret level, but I wasn't doing a very good job of it. After ‘A’ ranking the first bit, I was encountering significant frustration with the next and had to step away from it and give my blood pressure a break. I’ll come back to it later, but this was a poor way to close out my otherwise-exemplary Valkyria experience.
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Look for full reviews coming soon, BTW.
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After (temporarily) jumping ship from Blue Flame, I moved on to Fallout 3’s Broken Steel. Didn't get very far in this long-awaited bit of DLC, but if nothing else, it was worth $10 to finally be able to get an ending to the main storyline that made sense.
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No spoilers for people who haven't played Fallout 3 yet, but in my opinion the original ending was not only completely unsatisfactory, but illogical and poorly plotted as well.
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Kudos to Bethesda for being willing to rewrite history in this particular instance, and admitting that they biffed it the first time around.
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More to come.
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