Hey,

Been busy doing class work recently for my graduate student thing. I'm trying not to fall behind or flunk out, and also being frustrated that the classes I came here intending to take are not being offered. My social life is also normally busy, but my plans ended up completely canceled this weekend because I canceled my normal plans to do stuff with my mother and then she got sick, so I had more time for gaming.

I got a couple games from my brother via Steam recently, and so I've been playing them. Achron was near the top of my list for "Fun and interesting game I want to try playing", and he bought that for me, so I'm pumped up. The bad thing about the game is the very high level of complexity and how quickly that complexity ramps up. Honestly, a time traveling game doesn't even need more than one kind of unit to get complicated fast (right?), and this game has an enormous number of units. I don't know if they're all necessary. The controls are also a little wonky, and I haven't figured out if I can change them (using Ctrl to que commands instead of shift, for example). I was also disappointed that when I wanted to beat up a computer, it didn't seem possible -- you know, those "jump into a game" maps? Maybe I just picked the wrong one (something about mechs). Overall it looks promising, but it's got a lot going on.

Played Civ4 with friends recently in a big multiplayer game. That was pretty fun, but the "bad" thing seemed to be how easily people got frustrated with being attacked. Civ isn't exactly a game that lends itself to multiplayer, I think, mostly because it all happens so slowly. It doesn't help that people get used to winning, and expect not to be overrun by chariots 30 minutes into an otherwise 6 hour long game (and with 6 of us, the game does take a while).

Achron does support some comp-stomping via the "quickplay" option.