Procrastination Blog: Autumn Term Essay Deadline Edition

Hey guys. I hope no one's expecting anything major from this blog. It's simply an excuse for me to take time out of essay writing. I plan to just ramble for a bit about games I've played, games I'm playing, games I plan to play, and blogs I hope to write before the end of the year. With any luck, it'll postpone my writing about Shakespeare's last plays for another hour or so. 
 

• On Wednesday, I finished playing through the single player campaign of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. I played through on Hardened difficulty, and had an absolute blast. Some of the missions are full of really memorable set-pieces that I won't forget any time soon - in particular the missions 'Charlie Don't Surf' and 'All Ghillied Up' will stick with me for some time to come. I also sank some time into the multiplayer, but at Level 18, I feel like I'm kind of done with it. Maybe it's because I haven't felt the need to mess with my loadout since about level 7, in spite of everything I've unlocked since then. I may pick it back up in the future. but for now I'm happy to put it away and move on.
• Finishing CoD4 has left me in the mood for more FPS gaming, and to satisfy that urge I've opted for TimeSplitters: Future Perfect on the PS2. It's pretty far removed from the modern military shooter, true, but I'm absolutely loving returning to this classic title. It still looks great, it still plays great, and it's still funny as hell. Picking this title back up has also reignited my desire to see TimeSplitters 4 on current-gen consoles. I'm convinced there's still a place for this fast-paced arcade style of shooter, especially in a market saturated with regenerating health and cover systems. It's a shame that Free Radical (or rather, Crytek UK) have found themselves in their current situation, unable to do anything with the franchise that made them.
• Alongside Future Perfect, I'm also slowly pushing my way through my first playthrough of Mass Effect 2. To be honest, I'm trying really hard not to get too invested in this right now, on account of all the essay deadlines I have creeping up. With those deadlines hitting on the 13th, and term ending on the 17th, I'm planning to really get stuck into the game then, with a view to finishing it before the year is out. I'm currently fifteen hours in, and I've just started recruiting the second wave of crew members. It's been awesome getting reacquainted with my Renegade Shepard from the original Mass Effect - almost like meeting up with an old friend. I really can't wait to see where this game ends up taking me. It's just a shame that for now, waiting is exactly what I need to do.
• The recent hype surrounding the release of Gran Turismo 5 has had me itching to pick up a racing game of some description. My first port of call was Gran Turismo 3: A Spec, considered by many to be the series' highest point. Despite really enjoying my first few hours with the game, it wasn't long before I felt myself getting fed up with it. At that point, I switched it for a much lesser-known and less-praised racer - ToCA Race Driver 3. I immediately felt the GT fatigue lift with my first race, and since then I haven't looked back. I won't go into detail about why I love this racing sim so much - if you're interested, I did write a review of it a while back. Suffice it to say, the game is, in my view, a drastically underappreciated racing game - one of last gen's true gems. Those of you who love GRID - this is where it started.
• I'm anticipating that the combination of Mass Effect 2 and ToCA Race Driver 3 will keep me busy for the rest of the year. In terms of where my gaming habit takes me after that, we'll just have to wait and see. I pretty much allow myself to be governed by my urges when it comes to picking something new to play, at least when it comes to genre. I anticipate that 2011 will kick off with at least one lengthy western RPG to pick up where ME2 leaves off - my girlfriend has bought me a copy of Fallout: New Vegas, and my parents are getting me Dragon Age: Origins. On top of that, I've recently been feeling the urge to get stuck into a good JRPG of some description. I've been putting off playing them this year, so as not to disrupt my run through Final Fantasy VII. However, that's been so sporadic recently that I'm starting to think picking up another JRPG couldn't do any harm. I have plenty to choose from, too - Vagrant Story, Dragon Quest: Journey of the Cursed King, Persona 4, and Star Ocean: The Last Hope are all pretty strong candidates at this point. I'm also hoping to polish off quite a few of the shorter titles in my backlog in the New Year, just to try and whittle it down to a more manageable level.
• Blogging will probably cease over the next couple of weeks as I shift all of my focus onto finishing these damned essays. When they're out of the way, I'm planning to turn into a veritable blogging machine, and hopefully keep it going into the New Year. I've got four episodes of Enduring Final Fantasy VII planned but unwritten, which I really need to put out there. Like the last two years, I'm also planning to push out another three-part Christmas Mega-Blog this year. There's the obligatory break-down of the gaming year to put together, and of course, blogs to be written about all the aforementioned games as and when I finish them up (assuming I can conjure up anything worth writing about them, that is).