As my impromptu fall vacation nears a close in the next day or so I look back and reflect on what I got done. Or more specifically what I didn't. I hadn't quite realized how stressed and unhappy I was with work until I sat here for about seven days without having to go. It then dawned on me that I have two college degrees and was within weeks of becoming an officer in the Army. I'm also 26. What the Hell am I still doing in Parkersburg working a crummy retail job?
 
So, I'm going to have to start looking into graduate or law school for next fall. I'm currently leaning towards the history doctorate because from everything I've read the lawyer market is saturated to the breaking point at the moment. Plus I enjoy reading books about dead people and what they did. It's fun.
 
Enough about my life realizations and on to the video games. This week has been very productive in my achievement whoring. I finally managed to S-Rank Bad Company 2 and Toy Soldiers. I'm quite proud of those two. I love the living daylights out of both games and it's kind of sad that they will now go on my shelf not to be played again till new DLC comes out. I've just got too much in my backlog and the fall release season will begin soon.
 
The two games I played earlier this week were Aliens vs. Predator and Army of Two: The Fortieth Day. I wanted to like Aliens vs. Predator so much but I just can't do it. Rebellion started off so strong with the incredibly atmospheric and solid Marine campaign that so beautifully captured the feeling of Aliens. The shooting didn't reinvent the wheel but it worked and everything looked and sounded correct. Then things all went downhill when I got into the Alien and Predator missions. First person melee is something that only a very small number of games get right (Chronicles of Riddick and Condemned) and when it's done poorly it can ruin a game. I suppose now I really hope that Aliens: Colonial Marines gets made but I somehow doubt that will ever happen.
 
Oh, and I also played Army of Two: The Fortieth Day. That game is so generic and short that it's just a blur in my mind. There's a disturbing trend in games these days to have almost no story to back up their gameplay. I suppose that makes it a much purer "gaming" experience but not everyone is Bungie and able to get away with that. Your gameplay has to be amazing in order to not remind me I have no idea why I'm doing what I'm doing. Even Borderlands only got away with its minimal story until the end when you realized there was no satisfying payoff to what you had just done for the past twenty hours. Sure, it was an awesome twenty hours but it felt listless. At least Gearbox appears to have learned their lesson as The Secret Armory of General Knoxx had a much more interesting and fleshed out story.
 
So, I have about two days left in my vacation and I have to decide what I'm going to play. At the moment I'm torn between going back and playing some of the older games I'm on the verge of S-Ranking or pressing on to my backlog. There's also Kane and Lynch 2 but from the freezing video Jeff showed I'm going to hold off on that until I hear some more about it. I'm within an achievement or two of an S-Rank in Bionic Commando, Bioshock, and Dead Space. The only problem is that they all require me to replay the entire game on a high difficulty setting. I don't really know if I'm up to that.
 
I suppose I should get back to doing nothing. These games arn't going to play themselves.