Welcome to Now Loading Month-In-Review for February 2012. Today we are going to take a look back at all the stuff I wrote this month not only to reflect but to have a nice collection of all the posts of the month. This was a pretty good month with plenty of Now Loading In-Depth to keep everyone reading. If I am going to beat the record of 150 posts in one year I might have to pick up the pace a bit. 150 posts averages out to about 12.5 posts per month so you have to average around 13 posts a month to just get to 156. Anyway, let's get to the recapping.

FEBRUARY 2, 2012
(NLID #49) In the second edition covering Darksiders I complained about the game's combat and slightly tedious puzzles... and the second set of stupid challenge rooms which must be completed to progress in the main gameplay. Luckly though there are only 2 of these.

FEBRUARY 8, 2012
(NLID #50) I finally hit the 50th edition of NLID and completed Darksiders. It's one of those games where I wasn't entirely sure if I liked it or not. It's a pretty good game and has some really cool ideas but I am not a fan of that s.tyle of combat it just doesn't grasp me. Overall though, I am pretty sure I enjoyed it nevertheless and recommend it, besides you'll like it even more if you enjoy the combo driven action game type combat.

FEBRUARY 10, 2012
This was a mostly unnoticed post covering my impressions of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning... I reckon that you will get tired of doing hundreds of meaningless fetch and kill quests for meaningless amounts of gold coins after about 20 hours. Do a few of them in each area and then move on with your main and faction quests as they are much better.

FEBRUARY 14, 2012
Post #700. This was a little bit late in its arrival coulda and shoulda been done by the end of 2011, but post #700 on Now Loading finally arrived. I didn't want to do another retrospective thing because I had just done the 7th Anniversary editorial five months earlier so I decided to cover the three RPG Playthrough Logs. They are pretty long to read and full of spoilers so be warned it you attempt to read them.

FEBRUARY 16, 2012
(NLID #51) I procrastinate. I am not going to lie. So when I promised to play Final Fantasty XIII a week ago when I finished Darksiders, I decided to come up with this reintroduction thing so I could buy myself a bit more time to actually play FF13. In retrospect it actually wasn't a bad idea as the last post for FF13 was October 18th, 2011.

FEBRUARY 20, 2012
(NLID #52) Four days later I had actually played some FF13 for the first time in 4 months. I manged to in 5 hours or so get through Chapters 5, 6 and get through about half of Chapter 7. I made some off the cuff comments about a few things and wasn't really clear on where I was coming from... so...

FEBRUARY 22, 2012
(NLID #53) I felt I had to attempt to reiterate my thoughts in a more clearly written blog post. I sometimes don't put my thoughts clearly down when I write and things get muddled. I feel I did a much better job explaining my ideas and thoughts on the gameplay design and battle system.

FEBRUARY 26, 2012
I decided it was time for a quick update after being a few days late with my promised Final Fantasy XIII coverage. I updated you on finding good and also horrible XBL Indie games and how boring and tedious Kingdoms of Amalur was starting to get.

FEBRUARY 28, 2012
(NLID #54) I finally played some Final Fantasy 13 and made some pretty good progress completing the last half of Chapter 7 and then Chapter 8 and 9. The game's first challenging boss is encountered at the end of Chapter 9 and took a bit of planning and a strategy to beat. Also, I think I wasn't clear again when I was explaining about Auto-Battle. I wasn't really trying to refer to my own realization, I was trying to make a point to any non-FF13 fan who might be reading that thought just like I did previously, that the game was all about press auto-battle to win, that it's a convenience tool not a magic win button. I'm on Disc 3 now and probably still have 20 hours to go but hopefully I can get it done by mid-March or so.

That's it, February 2012 in a nut-shell. In March I will have my impressions of SSX and coverage of Mass Effect 3 both of which are sure to push back the Final Fantasy XIII playing. Though if I am in to Mass Effect 3 it will probably be completed in 3 or 4 days so it shouldn't get in the way too much. After Mass Effect 3 there isn't really anything I can think of to get in the way of NLID until probably late summer. Tomorrow (March 1) I will have my impressions of the new SSX and after that I may try to get in an NLID or maybe try to get Kingdoms of Amalur a Finished Article. I will talk to you later. Loading Complete!