I was really pleased with the whole game overall, which might be sort of surprising if you know me.

I am pretty much of the opinion that cheating on your significant other is absolutely unforgivable and there is never an excuse for it. So when I learned that the entire plot of this game centers around you (the male main character) cheating on your longtime girlfriend… I wasn’t really sure this was the game for me.

Overall though I was impressed with how the game dealt with everything. It is only rated M so there’s a lot of sex implied but nothing actually shown. There’s a hilarious amount of creative camera angles in some scenes to avoid showing anything.

They managed to make Vincent, if not a target of your hatred, at least maybe some pity. Because seriously, the man has no balls. More than once I told Vincent (yes sometimes I talk to the TV) to “man up” or “grow a pair”, but I guess if he did that the game would probably only be a half hour long. He is pretty much the most ineffectual, pathetic male character I’ve ever had the pleasure(?) of playing as. Ultimately though through the course of the game that also works in his favor because you get to see him grow as a person.

Well, actually I don’t know if that is entirely accurate every way you could play the game. But the way I did (eventually getting what I think of as the “best” of 8 endings) he definitely grew as a person and that was nice to see. I genuinely liked most of the side characters, particularly Jonny (it helps that he was pretty good looking too, lol) and Erica.

I found Erica’s character to be SUPER interesting because of the reveal about her at the end (if you get the ‘True Katherine’ ending). But the reveal itself is too fun/spoilery so I won’t mention what it is here!

Of course all of these comments so far are story or character based. The gameplay was pretty darn fun too. I enjoyed the puzzles even though a couple of them brought on my video game rage (think road rage, but video games).

I do find it fairly amusing that I was sure I was going to beat it one night, then I was SURE I was going to beat it the next night, but at least I finally finished it yet one more night later! I think I got about 20 hours of playtime out of it so far (just one playthrough) which isn’t bad for $40, particularly if I go back and try to save some of the side characters. (You can control whether some of the side characters live or die depending on whether you talk to them and what you say to them.) There’s also gold trophies to be had!

Semi-bitter moment: Catherine had 8 endings and all of them were more diverse and interesting than the ‘only’ ending Mass Effect 3 had. YEAH I SAID IT

So yeah. I was not at all sure at first that Catherine would be a game I’d enjoy, but I decided to pick it up because regardless of the weird marketing, the general weirdness of the game, and the apparent storyline about cheating on your significant other, I’d heard MANY good things about it. I’m really glad I decided to give it a chance.

And last, an aside: I really enjoyed the questions you had to answer, though at least one of them was confusing and felt like it needed more explanation or maybe a better translation from Japanese. I did sort of lose a bit of hope for humanity though when I saw that the split for answers from the community “have you ever cheated on a significant other” were like 40% yes / 60% no. SERIOUSLYYYY. Maybe they were answering from Vincent’s point of view… But overall the questions were super interesting and I enjoyed being able to see what other first-time Catherine players answered.

Once other obligations were out of the way, my husband and I sat down to play with a couple of friends who also had invites and we set to playing in a full 4 person group. I played a wizard; my husband played a demon hunter; one friend was a monk; the other friend was a barbarian.

We had a blast

The beta right now is only a part of Act I, so it is pretty short. We went through the whole thing in about 90 minutes.

The runes aren’t in the game right now so there isn’t much character customization outside of armor, so that is kind of a bummer. You can upgrade the vendors though!

Since that first playthrough, I’ve played almost every class (everything except the monk – that’s next!). They are all pretty fun and unique. Can’t wait for the game to come out for real! Here’s a gallery of screenshots that I’ve taken while on my beta adventures (including a shot of the skeleton king’s crown being fixed up… on an anvil that is missing. Wooo! )

Here are some of my favorites:

Shadow Complex

Shadow Complex is the first XBOX Live Arcade game I ever played, and it is still one of the best I’ve gotten my hands on. It’s a fantastic side scrolling Metroid-like game where you collect power-ups and items on a quest to rescue your date from the hands of radical soldiers who are planning an attack on the US. The gameplay is fun and the plot is pretty interesting – I didn’t even mind the whole “save your girlfriend” bit It also has a fair amount of replay value, trying to get through the game getting as many (or as few) items as possible. The only thing about this game that made me unhappy is there is an area at the end of the game that you can no longer access due to triggering the end-game event, and that bit me when I tried to get the 100% completion achievement

Shadow Complex actually inspired me to read the two books Empire and Hidden Empire by Orson Scott Card. He had a hand in the story for the game and these two novels also came out of it (though I don’t think I’d really classify them as “video game novels” as I would with Dragon Age and Warcraft books). The books were also pretty fun to read and I’d recommend checking them out if the overall story of the game was interesting to you.

A Kingdom for Keflings / A World of Keflings

These are really fun kingdom-building games. I started with A Kingdom for Keflings, but A World of Keflings came out second, doesn’t require the first, and is overall a better designed game, so that is the one I would recommend if you want to give them a shot. The gameplay is very much the same, but A World of Keflings got a lot of really nice and needed UI updates, and there are more quests available which make building the kingdoms a bit more fun.

Anyway, you get to play as a giant (either your XBOX Avatar or a premade giant in A Kingdom for Keflings – not sure if you have an option to be anything other than your avatar for A World of Keflings) and this giant is tasked with helping the Keflings create their kingdoms. They start off with a meager amount of supplies and plans for buildings and over time you acquire more building plans as well as new resources to collect (or teach the Keflings to collect). This game reminded me a lot of Black & White for PC, except you are actually a giant, not a god manipulating the people through miracles and your creature.

Doritos Crash Course 2

This one is fun to play and compete against friends in, and best of all, it’s free! I spent an evening going through each of the courses with my brother, husband, mother, and sister-in-law all watching and cheering me on. The many different ways in which you can fail never stop being amusing (okay, well maybe after you fall victim to the same one 15 times in a row). This is like that Japanese game show Most Extreme Elimination Challenge (US name), except that it’s on XBOX Live and you get to do all these things with your avatar!

At the low cost of free, it is definitely worth grabbing!

Feeding Frenzy 2

Fun, simple, and crazy addictive. You are a fish. Your goal is to eat smaller fish. You grow larger after consuming a certain amount of smaller fish, and then you can eat fish that used to be bigger than you! REVENGE!

Overall it is pretty darn fun. There’s a variety of power-up items, the player fish changes every few levels and some fish have special powers, and new dangers are admitted through the story so it never feels like it gets too stale. The main objective of the game rarely changes (eat fish. lots and lots of fish.) but it isn’t long enough for that objective to get particularly repetitive. Definitely fun for a few afternoons!

Costume Quest

Very cute RPG where you play a little girl (or boy) who needs to save their twin from the clutches of some monsters who are stealing candy. I loved that I could choose which twin to be! The story proceeds exactly the same whether you play the girl or the boy twin – the one you play is the hero and the other is captured by the Grubbins.

Each costume your character can wear has special abilities in the game world (where you run around, talk to people, and explore the different areas) as well as in battle. The designs are extremely cute and each of the costumes is different enough that battle doesn’t end up feeling too stale even though it isn’t that inspired. Worth playing for sure, particularly around Halloween for the thematic element

DeathSpank & DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue

This is one of the funniest games I’ve ever played. It is rare that a video game can get me to laugh out loud multiple times in one play session, but DeathSpank and its sequel are two that definitely succeed in this. It can be difficult if you aren’t used to blocking (and the second game seemed particularly difficult in the beginning) but once you get past the first few levels and get some attributes leveled up, it evens out.

Castle Crashers

I’m pretty sure everyone has heard of this game by now… but if not, read on When I first gave Castle Crashers a shot, it was alone, and as a single player game it was fun but I wasn’t quite sure what all the fuss was about. However, grab a friend (or three) and Castle Crashers starts to shine. Things can get confusing with 4 different knights on the screen plus all the enemies – it can be easy to lose your place. But hacking and slashing enemies with friends has never been more fun!

Limbo

Limbo is one of the most lovely games I’ve played on XBLA. The puzzles are interesting and challenging and the aesthetic is difficult to match to any other XBLA game I’ve seen. I don’t have a whole lot else to say about this game because I think it’s all pretty much been said, but I highly recommend this one!

I just started playing L.A. Noire Tuesday night and I must say that it’s pretty fun! I started off a bit skeptical because I’ve never enjoyed the Grand Theft Auto games that much, except to try to get as many stars as possible and get the army after me or something. However, I did love Red Dead Redemption (Game of the Year all years!) so I knew that Rockstar could pull it off. (Granted, I’d also like to attempt to play GTA again sometime and give it another shot, since I know that series must be popular for a reason other than breaking the law in as many ways as possible. Well, I hope!)

L.A. Noire is a fun detective game which, in the beginning at least, is separated neatly into different cases. Each story case is another chapter in the game which (so far) feels pretty stand-alone as far as the story goes. Your character goes up the ranks in the LAPD and solves cases but so far there doesn’t seem to be a plot to tie the whole thing together. I’m still relatively early on in the game (I just completed my first case as a homicide detective), so it’s very possible that might change.

Gameplay is enjoyable and feels like a mix of a bunch of different games. The driving around, well, it reminds me a lot of Grand Theft Auto except that I’m pretty sure you get in trouble if you just start shooting random civilians, and your score at the end of each mission is higher if you don’t destroy every car you get into and run over traffic lights and street benches (not to mention people). Searching for clues reminds me a lot of Phoenix Wright (hey, what do you mean lawyers aren’t the ones that do all the investigating?!) and so does interrogation, though unlike Phoenix Wright you can pick the wrong option when questioning witnesses (it just leads to getting less information than was possible if you had chosen the correct option).

The one thing L.A. Noire is missing from interrogations is “OBJECTION!” and “HOLD IT!” and “TAKE THAT!” but I think I’ll manage without, for now.

So far I guess I can’t really explain why I like to play this game and why I find it fun. I certainly am not as bound to it as I was when I first played Red Dead Redemption or Mass Effect 2. I’m not absolutely dying to play when I get home from work and I don’t mind tearing myself away to do freelance work or something else. But there is still an undeniable enjoyment factor. I’m looking forward to solving more cases and seeing what happens… also crossing my fingers for an overarching plot to show up… any case now…

Loopin’ Louie

It’s meant as a children’s game but I think that’s fairly shortsighted if someone avoids it because of that. It’s definitely one of my favorite games and results in endless fun. We generally play by tournament rules which I believe means that every time one person wins a round, they reduce their maximum number of chickens by one. So if A, B, C, and D are playing and D wins the first round, D starts with two chicken tokens and everyone else fills up back to three, and so on. We also rotate the seating arrangements each round so that you don’t always have the same person to your left, right, or in front of you.

How far you want to take Loopin’ Louie is up to you, but I think my group of friends has decided. One of them left the following review at Board Game Geek:

I believe that this may be the apex of Western Civilization. It is the fundamental issue of our time to ponder – who is Louie? What does he want? Because if we look at ourselves, we see that we are Louie, and his struggle is our struggle.

I am only half joking.

Yeah.

This game is really fun, deceptively awesome, and I think everyone should give it a shot, whether you’re a child or not. I haven’t personally had any experience with the American version of the game – I hear it is larger than the German version and among my friends, the German version is the preferred one. So if you do pick it up I would recommend (based on their recommendation) that you try to pick up the German version!

Both being people who enjoyed video games (including computer games in that definition), we definitely wanted a way to share our passion with each other. However most of the games we played were games played against each other more than together. There were arguments over Soul Calibur II, Super Smash Bros. Melee, Warcraft III, and more. While we could play these competitive games against each other for a time, we both got pretty burned out on them quickly because we didn’t like to lose to each other. We realized we had to share our love for video games in a different way.

I think that cooperative games are some of the most fun things to play with your significant other. The first we played together as I remember was Diablo II – less co-op than just multiplayer, but still very fun to play together online with friends or with strangers. He leveled his thorns pally and I played my assassin and we played alone and in large random groups on battle.net, finding fun no matter what we did.

I know other people get in the same situation that my husband and I did with being too competitive to be able to play games against each other, so here’s a list of co-op or multiplayer games you can play together and our experience with them!

(Note that I have listed systems here – these are not the systems exclusive to this game… rather, they are the systems that my husband and I played the game together on.)

Resident Evil 5 (XBOX 360)

LOTS of fun. I know a lot of people hated RE5 but I think most people would have enjoyed it a little bit more if their partner wasn’t AI For me it also meant that I could actually make it through this game, because normally survival horror games put me in such a state that unless I have a strategy guide in my lap, telling me where every scare is coming, it can be days or weeks between play sessions while I gather my bravery. Playing with another person made it less scary in a way that playing alone with someone else in the same room does not.

Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles (GameCube and DS)

This was a game that met mixed reviews. I mostly played with a 3- or 4-player group but also played with just my husband.

Don’t go into it expecting a coherent plot because you won’t get it, but overall the gameplay is enjoyable and it’s a lot of hours of gaming with your friends and/or significant other. The only warning I have is don’t attempt to beat the game with someone who doesn’t have any memories in your world. We tried to beat the game with one of my friends who imported his character. You need memories to beat the final boss and… he wasn’t getting any memories, so it made it significantly harder than it should have been which was a real shame.

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Echoes of Time (Wii + DS)

This is one that my husband and I didn’t spend a ton of time on, but it was fun enough. The weirdest thing is that one person plays on the Wii and one plays on their DS… but really, the graphics look just like DS graphics and it doesn’t look so hot blown up on a nice HD TV, so you might be better off playing on the DS. Either way though it is fun, good one to play if there isn’t something else pressing. It will probably be a little while until we play more of this one.

Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures (GameCube + DS)

This is another GameCube game that requires everyone playing to have a DS. It’s a lot of fun with the full four people, although you can pretty much guarantee that at least one of your friends is going to be a dick and ruin things for everyone If you can handle that, go for it!

Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 (XBOX 360)

This one is fun because it is pretty enjoyable in either 2-player or with 3 or 4 players, though the best experience is with four. It’s a survival horror game but having your friends playing it with you (and, if playing alone, 3 not entirely stupid AI characters) makes it so it isn’t very scary. I wouldn’t recommend trying to get some achievements with the AI (there’s one in particular in L4D2 that involves not scaring a Witch in a particular level, and I’m afraid the AI makes that fairly impossible), but it’s enjoyable regardless. This is one that you can play co-op on one TV/XBOX with 1 or 2 friends online, but make sure if you do that, you and more partner both have headsets.

My first experience playing this online was almost enough to make me stop playing it because it was so frustrating. My husband and I switched around who was wearing the headset but it was equally frustrating every time, because teamwork and communication is really important in that game and relaying something over the mic doesn’t work very well. So yeah. HEADSETS! Use them! Of course if you are just playing co-op, it isn’t necessary if you are in the same room.

Fable III (XBOX 360)

I was more interested in playing this than my husband was, but I wanted my character to make babies with his, so I got him to level up for a while until that was possible I found this one to be a lot of fun and I think that if he hadn’t been obsessed with Starcraft II at the time we might have played the whole game together.

There’s also an awful lot of amusement when you decide to make a baby. I walked over to the bed and clicked on it and I got to  choose whether I wanted to sleep or have sex. Then had to select protected or unprotected sex. Then my dialog window goes away… and another one pops up for my husband to control, and it says “Ayashi would like to have unprotected sex with you. Do you accept? Yes/No.” It was kind of incredible XD

Trauma Center: New Blood (Wii)

If you are a fan of Trauma Center games this one can be a lot of fun to play with your significant other. You both get a full set of tools so it doesn’t end up being half-assed at all, you just need to communicate to make sure that you aren’t going to butt heads while working. JUST LIKE REAL SURGERY! Actually I don’t know that at all but it definitely encourages teamwork. My husband and I got into a really nice rhythm with the procedure at the end where you have to sew up the patient and then use the salve and bandage them. We had it down to a science.

The later levels can get frustrating so watch out and be careful not to lash out! But all in all it’s quite a bit of cooperative fun.

Trauma Team is another title in the same vein, but beware – if you want to get it, get it because you love the Trauma Center series, not because you love the co-0p. Only certain parts of Trauma Team are co-op, much to my dismay. (It does make sense however, since some parts of that game don’t match up so well for two people, such as the Forensics mode or Endoscopy.)

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light (XBOX 360)

This is a great XBOX Live Arcade title. Collaborative puzzle solving and battles galore! I don’t have a whole lot less to say about this one since my husband and I haven’t played it in a while, but we went through the demo together and enjoyed it more than enough to buy it at the end.

Castle Crashers (XBOX 360)

One of my favorite XBOX Live Arcade games. So much fun no matter how many people you have playing the game with you! The art style is great and the fighting is very fun, though it can get confusing to find your knight when the screen is covered with both enemies and allies.

Borderlands (XBOX 360)

Fun to play, but you really miss out on a lot of the beauty of the game when you play co-op because of the split screen. I never played it single player, but I did see my husband do so and I was blown away at how lovely the game looks when the screen isn’t cut in half.

Guitar Hero (PS2) / Rock Band (XBOX 360)

Always fun whether it’s 1 player or more. This is especially fun in a full group of 4 (or up to 6 I believe it is with all of the vocals?) but is also enjoyable with two. Go through the song catalog and buy your favorite songs, and play them together! There are few things more fun than rocking out on plastic instruments.

Gears of War 1 & 2 (XBOX 360)

This was the first game of its kind I ever played, and I don’t regret a second of it. Gears of War has really amazing co-op, the graphics are beautiful, and I rarely ever felt like the split-screen was preventing me from seeing things that I really wanted to see. My husband and I played through the single player together and later moved onto playing the multiplayer with friends. If the violence doesn’t bother you or your partner I would highly recommend giving this one a shot.

Portal 2 (XBOX 360)

Portal 2 is really fantastic with the co-op mode. You don’t have to play the single player in order to enjoy co-op, though single player is useful because it shows you how to use some of the new elements of the game that have been introduced with Portal 2. One of the best things about it is that there’s two brains facing these puzzles, and two brains are better than one! It ends up being one of those games where both of you can feel smart because whatever puzzle one of you doesn’t understand, your partner might. Very enjoyable to stumble through your first try together.

Diablo II (PC)

Can’t forget this one. Watch for Diablo III and Torchlight 2 to get more dungeon crawling fun. This is a really fun game to play in just a pair or online with a group of people.

World of Warcraft (PC)

This is a game that I’ve been playing since 2004 and I would be silly not to include it here. In general I think that any MMO, not just WoW, would be a blast to play with your partner.

Just be sure that you and your partner are on the same page as far as expectations for the game (in more ways than one). See if your partner will get upset if you level without them, and perhaps compromise by having an alternate character for when you can’t play together. What do you both think is a reasonable amount of time to play the game? Especially early on it can be easy to get caught up in an MMO and neglect some real life duties, and that can be problematic if the work builds up. Also sometimes it simply can boil down to a matter of different play styles – sometimes one person wants to be more strict with the game and tries to be really good at it and is competitive, and the other person may be more easygoing and not care as much or not want to devote the time to it, and this can lead to strife. Be sure to communicate with each other and it will go a long way!

Mario Kart: Double Dash (GameCube)

This is a competitive game, but rather than compete against each other you can also play with one person being the driver and the other being the helper (helper uses items and can quickly move the car left or right to avoid obstacles). That can seem like a somewhat half-assed co-op mode but it is pretty fun, and I often like to get a break from driving. You also can swap driver + helper at any time during a race!

New Super Mario Bros. Wii (Wii)

There is a reason why Penny Arcade called the multiplayer portion of this game “divorce mode”. I highly recommend playing it with at least 3 people so you and your partner don’t murder each other. However it can be a whole lot of fun if you don’t want to tear each other’s throats out!

Donkey Kong Country Returns (Wii)

Fun to play together, but is probably easier to play single player. My husband and I went through a few worlds playing together and eventually the game got a bit too frustrating for him. We faced a lot of “Game Over”s. I started again by myself and ended up having a huge surplus of lives! Part of it was we got in each other’s way quite a bit while playing co-op, and also when one of us died we just used the ability to revive ourselves, using up lives at a much quicker rate than we would have otherwise. If we do play it again co-op, I think we’ll try to use up less lives in that manner. The game itself is very fun!

I don’t recommend playing if you have any sort of stomach problems, whether just a stomachache, nausea, or a more permanent issue. Perhaps it was just the way I was playing, but shaking the controller to do certain moves caused me to feel a bit sick to my stomach and also after a couple of prolonged play sessions made my stomach hurt too much to play for a few days! I think it’s because when I shake the controller like that, I don’t just move my arms.

Eternal Sonata (XBOX 360)

Eternal Sonata’s co-op is so-so. You can only turn on the second controller for the purpose of fights, and when you reload the game (after dying or just after turning on the system again) you need to remember to reassign the second player to some of the characters for battle. We generally split it up so that Player 1 played one character during fights and player 2 played the other two. Player 1 had map control, which is part of what made it so-so. If you both could run around the map would probably have been a lot more fun and less boring for player 2 when there wasn’t a lot of fighting. Still, it has a cute story, though the interludes with information about the real-life Chopin are a bit weird.

Warcraft III & Warcraft III Defense of the Ancients mod (PC)

Warcraft III, similar to to SC2 (which I describe below) allows you to play in a team with one or more friends versus the computer or against friends (in a custom game or LAN) or strangers. I include Defense of the Ancients here because it is the first version of DotA that I know of (though now you can play some non-Warcraft III versions such as League of Legends). People on battle.net can be rude as per usual, but if you get a chance to play in a LAN or a custom game with friends it is VERY fun. It works best if there are at least 3 people on each side.

There’s a lot of fun playing over and over because there are so many different heroes – you almost inevitably will end up with a variety of heroes you really enjoy playing. For myself it was Dwarven Sniper and the Priestess of the Moon, though there were others I enjoyed as well.

Starcraft II (PC)

Starcraft II is a competitive game, but it can be fun to play 2v2 games together against other friends, the computer, or against random people online. They also introduced some mini-game maps which are very fun to play and are also multiplayer, and two are co-op – Left 2 Die is exclusively co-op, and StarJeweled has a co-op mode vs AI. I don’t recommend getting Starcraft II for only the minigames, but if you enjoy the normal 2v2 with your partner, the free mini-games are fun and worth giving a shot.

Are there any games you’ve played with a friend or partner that you’ve really enjoyed and I didn’t mention here? Link it in the comments!

The basic gist of it is that everyone is a different alien and we have five home planets each. Our goal is to get 5 different foreign colonies. (All five could be on one opponent’s home worlds, as long as each colony is on a different home world.) We create colonies by landing any one of our ships on someone else’s home world. Generally this means that some sort of fight is going to go down (which can result in a battle or in a negotiation depending on what cards you have). There are other cards that can get involved as well but they’re not necessary to describe here.

Recently I played a particularly fun game. I was the Masochist. The Masochist alien race’s special power is to have a second, alternative win condition: the Masochist wins the game if, at the beginning of any player’s turn, the Masochist has lost all of its ships. Of course, they can also win normally, but why would you want to do that when you can have so much fun sabotaging yourself? I haven’t the slightest idea.

I proceeded the way any Masochist would – by placing myself in harm’s way at every possible opportunity. I was invited into alliances and always allied with the side that I hoped would lose. During my own attacks or defenses I either played a card that would cause both of us to lose immediately or I would play a Negotiate, and either fail to make a deal (if my opponent also played negotiate, in which case we’d both lose three ships) or get run over by my opponent when I played Negotiate and they played an Attack card. It was some of the most fun I’ve had playing Cosmic Encounter in ages, and that’s saying a lot since I have a lot of fun every time I play.

I highly recommend giving it a try with at least two other friends, but it’s best with larger numbers of groups because that means there are more aliens in the mix.

Some other interesting aliens…

Antimatter This alien makes it so when you reveal your attack cards, rather than the higher total winning as per normal, the lower total wins.

Loser The Loser’s special power is that they may declare an upset – if they do, the loser of an encounter wins and the winner loses. It creates some really crazy games when both the Loser and Antimatter are in the same game.

Warpish The Warpish adds the number of ships in the Warp (where ships go when you lose battles) to their total when they attack or defend.

I spent the majority of my evening just finding high quality book covers, resizing them and making them greyscale, and loading them up into the screensaver folder. It was a lot of fun to have something like this that I could customize again.

I used to be crazy into customization back in high school, especially with my PC. I had custom windows start up and shutdown screens (which were just .bmp files as I recall, and of course given my obsession at the time were all Evangelion themed), special homemade desktop icons for everything, and of course a screensaver that would go through a folder of all of my anime screencaps.

At this point in my life I am not quite as gung ho about finding every little thing I can customize and doing it – I have so many other things going on I usually don’t have the time. But customizing the Kindle screensaver was something I really wanted to do, and I was glad that it was so easy! The only hangup was that after copying my files onto the Kindle, it wasn’t using them and just showed a blank white screen when it was asleep. After I restarted the Kindle though it started using all of them just fine!

Tonight I’m finally going to be seeing the HBO A Game of Thrones, which I’m really excited about since I just read the first book of A Song of Ice and Fire this past month. Will be interesting to see how the different characters are portrayed.

I mean, look at this cover. AND THE BLURB.

“Forbidding and proud, Duncan MacKenzie wanted only one thing from his new bride — to use her special gift to determine if young Robbie was truly his son. He never expected the MacDonnell lass to stubbornly follow her heart, chase away the darkness in his castle with light and laughter, and ignite a raging fire in his blood. How dare she defy him, and tempt a devil like him to feel what he feared most of all — love!”

HOW RIDICULOUS IS THAT?! Hahaha.

Of course, she doesn’t think I should talk… because I read video game novels. She probably has a point

I think the first video game book I ever read was The Umbrella Conspiracy by S.D. Perry. It’s been ages since I read it – over 10 years. I can’t say how I’d feel about it if I were to read it again today, but I fell in love with it back then and I devoured it and many of the following Resident Evil tie-in novels.

I thought the books would be terrible because they were video game novels – I mean, before I read any of them I considered video game novels to be on the same level as video games based on movies. All crap. (Except for the SNES version of The Lion King; that was awesome.) But hey, here was a series I enjoyed, so surely others may be the same!

Since then I’ve read a lot more than just those books, and branched out to other video game novels as well. I’ve read various books from the Diablo, Starcraft, and Warcraft universes, as well as one of the Dragon Age novels.

I think when you decide you want to read a video game novel,  you have to prepare yourself in a couple of ways. First, the book is not the game and never will be – the video game is going to start you off with a lot of expectations. I think these expectations are part of what makes a lot of tie-in novels seem bad. Toss ‘em out! We usually aren’t reading a video game tie-in book for the fantastic literature (and if you are, you should probably stop now, because you will never be happy). We’re reading because we really enjoy the world that these games take place in and we want to learn more about them.

For that, video game novels are pretty great. I learned all about Arthas’ past in Christie Golden’s Arthas. I learned about Draenor and the taint that gave the orcs their bloodlust in Rise of the Horde. I got to read about Dragon Age’s King Cailan’s father in The Calling, and Jim Raynor’s first search for Kerrigan to try to rescue her from the Zerg in Starcraft: Queen of Blades.

The coolest thing about the Starcraft novels was getting to see the inner monologue of the characters as they first came across the Zerg. I thought it really helped to drive just how alien and frightening the Zerg are, the feeling of futility when facing them, and what they are capable of. Obviously in the video game, they are the enemy, and lucky for you, you tend to be armed with pretty heavenly weaponry which can be used to blow the enemy away. But in the books, it isn’t always a heavily armed marine ready to face down the alien invaders – sometimes it is just a member of a colony trapped on a planet with them, or a reporter. These books help to give us background that we might not have gotten in the video games, or they show us another character or part of the world that wasn’t in the book.

One of the greatest weaknesses of some video game novels is things can seem forced. The plot doesn’t flow naturally like it might seem to do in the video game that it comes from. Characters can sometimes feel like they have no personality or they are too perfect. (Rhonin in particular gets a lot of crap for being a “Mary Sue” or a “Marty Lou”.) That’s something that I am willing to just take with the rest. The main character in the Diablo books seemed about as cliché as they come, to me. Standard male character with past trauma and daddy issues. But the story was something I rather enjoyed, so I stuck with it even though I thought the character was completely uninteresting.

It’s a little dangerous to go into a video game tie-in novel expecting the same brilliance that kept you playing the games. The books are not the games, and the games are not the books. (Just like after reading the book that spawned a popular movie, many times the movie may seem lacking.) But if it is more information you want, if you’d like to just get another tiny slice of that video game world, the novels work quite well.

Do you have any video game books you particular liked (or didn’t like)? What were they? What were you glad to read about, or what were you disappointed was missing?

Well, those days came to an end pretty abruptly in 2004 when World of Warcraft first came out. I’m the kind of person who generally plays a video game obsessively (if I like it) until the day I beat it. Enter the MMO… which cannot be beaten. A game that never ends… knowing how I am, it was perhaps not entirely wise of me to start playing an MMORPG, but what’s done is done. I’m moving into my 7th year of playing World of Warcraft… and finally started to seriously re-integrate other games into a normal part of my day last year.

Now, that isn’t to say that I never played any games other than WoW – I just didn’t dedicate a lot of time to them and thus played a lot less than usual. I still got in a fair number of lovely gems – Shadow of the Colossus, the Phoenix Wright series, Fallout III, Oblivion, Mass Effect, and more. But I also kept buying other games, some of which I never even opened, at full price. Now I can usually find them in the bargain bin for under $20. Ah well, lesson (somewhat) learned. I finally stopped doing that unless I’m pretty sure I’m going to play the game.

Back to my original point – the video game backlog. Since my rate of acquiring new games did not really slow down for a long time, I’ve amassed a very long list of games that I paid for and still want to try. I’m still working on exactly what order I’m going to play them in… but maybe I can get some help from my (extremely small right now) readers for what to start next!

Well, it’s also almost the hope that perhaps if I put this in writing out for other people to say I will become really embarrassed about it and maybe actually make the lists smaller instead of larger.

1. Uncharted 2
2. Neverwinter Nights 2
3. Tomb Raider Legend
4. Final Fantasy XII
5. Final Fantasy XIII
6. Monkey Island: SE
7. Amnesia: The Dark Descent
8. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat, Shadow of Chernobyl
9. King’s Bounty
10. Bayonetta
11. Batman: Arkham Asylum
12. Bioshock (1 & 2)
13. Devil May Cry II (and beyond)
14. Beyond Good and Evil
15. Viewtiful Joe (1 & 2)
16. Infinite Undiscovery
17. Shadow Hearts 2
18. The Last Remnant
19. Metal Gear Solid 3 & 4
20. Wild ARMs 2 (and beyond)
21. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
22. Xenosaga 2 (and beyond)
23. Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance
24. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (…yeah)
25. Harvest Moon: Another Wonderful Life
26. Harvest Moon: Magical Melody
27. Killer 7
28. Mega Man Network Transmission
29. Metroid Prime 1 & 2
30. Metroid: Other M
31. Super Mario All Stars
32. Skies of Arcadia
33. Lego Star Wars
34. Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door
35. Super Mario Sunshine
36. Tales of Symphonia
37. Atelier Iris
38. Contra Shattered Soldier
39. Digital Devil Saga
40. Disgaea 1 & 2
41. Dragon Quest VIII
42. Ephemeral Fantasia
43. Eternal Poison
44. Galerians: Ash
45. Grand Theft Auto 3
46. GrimGrimoire
47. Growlanser Generations
48. Ico
49. I-Ninja
50. Jax and Daxter
51. We <3 Katamari
52. Kessen
53. Kya Dark Lineage
54. Odin Sphere
55. Persona 3
56. Psychonauts
57. Radiata Stories
58. Ratchet and Clank
59. Suikoden Tactics
60. Tsugani: Atonement
61. Valkyrie Profile 2
62. Star Ocean: The Last Hope
63. Chocobo’s Dungeon
64. Baroque
65. Castle of Shikigami 3
66. Animal Crossing: City Folk
67. Metal Slug Anthology
68. Super Paper Mario
69. Resonance of Fate
70. Resistance Fall of Man
71. Atelier Annie: Alchemists of Sera Island
72. New Super Mario Bros (DS)
73. Suikoden Tierkreis
74. Resident Evil DS
75. Metroid Prime Hunters
76. Lunar Dragom Song
77. Heroes of Mana
78. Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon
79. Etrian Odessey
80. Children of Mana
81. Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, Portrait of Ruin, & Order of Ecclesia
82. The World Ends with You
83. The Dark Spire
84. Etrian Odessey: The Drowned City

That’s only the beginning… unfortunately that doesn’t include the list of games I’ve started and still plan on beating (and just haven’t gotten around to it yet – some will need a full replay):

1. Bulletstorm
2. Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood
3. Half-Life 2
4. Alan Wake
5. Scott Pilgrim vs The World
6. Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light
7. 3D Dot Game Heroes
8. Dead Space
9. Resident Evil 4
10. Brutal Legend
11. Donkey Kong Country Returns
12. Machinarium
13. Okamiden
14. New Super Mario Bros. Wii
15. World of Goo
16. The Witcher
17. Koudelka
18. Guild Wars
19. Record of Lodoss War
20. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
21. Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance
22. Baldur’s Gate
23. Baldur’s Gate II
24. Oblivion
25. Morrowind
26. Ecco the Dolphin (Dreamcast)
27. Eternal Sonata
28. Titan Quest
29. Shenmue
30. Spyro
31. Suikoden IV
32. Suikoden V
33. Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals
34. Mirror’s Edge
35. Panzer Dragoon: Orta
36. Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time
37. Fallout
38. Penumbra
39. Aquaria
40. Red Dead Revolver
41. Alien Hominid (since this game is nigh impossible, this might be a dream)
42. Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles
43. Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life
44. The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures
45. Phantasy Star Online 1 & 2
46. God of War
47. La Pucelle Tactics
48. Onimusha
49. Kartia: The Word of Fate
50. Grandia
51. Beyond the Beyond
52. Threads of Fate
53. Lunar: Eternal Blue
54. Silent Hill
55. Rhapsody:  A Musical Adventure
56. Dino Crisis
57. Primal
58. Parasite Eve