Quick update: finished The Walking Dead and loved it. Never played a game like that before, and I hope I never have so much trouble grabbing someone's hand while jumping off the side of a building ever again. I also played through Uncharted: Golden Abyss a couple more times and -- just like the first three Uncharted games -- now have every trophy except beating it on Crushing difficulty. I just wasn't built for the really tough ones. I haven't done much else with my Vita since then though.

My most extreme distraction the last 2 months has been the Assassin's Creed series. I've violated all my own rules about not buying too many games in a series without playing prior entries. All of these games have looked great to me and I owned 6 (the 5 on PS3 and the 1 on Vita) before I started any of them. At least I bought them all for good prices.

I started with the original, knowing full-well of the repetition complaints. Yes, you did a lot of the same things over and over, but I had a lot of fun doing it. Really enjoyed running around in those environments, and the villains were pretty cool too. More bugs than I'm used to, and that didn't improve too much with the sequel, but between these and The Walking Dead I wonder if I'll ever play another great game without bugs that require a reset. At one point I was trying to finish a time trial by dropping off a building and landing on a piece of wood sticking out right next to my contact. Somehow my leg got stuck and I was then hanging upside down, swinging back and forth, right next to the guy. If it was possible for your foot to get stuck in a rope and end up hanging like that, then it was perfectly done. It was just impossible to escape!

Up next with no hesitation came Assassin's Creed II, which was better than the first in nearly every way. I lost sight of why I was targeting half of those major conspirators, but beyond that this was one of the very few best games I've played on the PS3. So much more to do, and I probably don't need to go on too much about how great a game it is. And, as a bit of an amateur trophy addict, I loved getting another platinum, my third within the last 6 months. Though the ending was a bit wild, my jaw didn't drop quite as much as most due to my extensive history with the rpg genre. Once they revealed the Apple of Eden in the first game, everything from there on out was fair game.

Now I'm into Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, having started maybe 3 weeks ago and getting through 60% of the game so far. It feels like an open world game within the Assassin's Creed universe, and I'm really really enjoying it. So many options! Of course, there is some frustration of course. You want to hit that 100% sync on every mission and the terms make things rough. As of now I couldn't get it on 2 of the War Machine missions, but I'll try again later. Still, love the game.

Looking forward, I have that collector's edition of Tomb Raider preordered, so I'll dig into that next month. I'll do a little bit of multiplayer in that and in Brotherhood, but not much. Then of course in June comes The Last of Us!!

Happy gaming, JP