Trying out something new this week: posting my various gaming experiences and opinions daily. I'm not sure if I'll have enough content to keep this interesting, but won't know until I try.

Started out the day by picking out winter clothes at the nearest decent-sized town, which is a half-hour drive away. That is also, conveniently, the closest Gamestop location to my home; much as I dislike their practices, they're pretty much the only game in town if I want to buy games or consoles. (If you think that's the hardest part about gaming in a rural area, try dealing with an Internet connection that involves a wireless signal to a nearby grain silo that used to go on the fritz whenever the temp dipped below freezing.) I went there to ask how much I can buy a used PS3 for nowadays and learned they're having a Black Friday special on used PS3s for $120. I'm currently debating whether to get that with a return policy, or try my luck on Ebay (where apparently some of them go for as low as $80). I think I'll go with the Gamestop one just to get a return policy and avoid the hassle of shipping.

So why do I want a PS3 in the first place? So I can play 2 old console-exclusives that weren't enough for me to buy a full-priced console: Disgaea 4 and Dragon's Crown. I've been a fan of Disgaea ever since it hooked me back in college (something neither Tactics Ogre nor Final Fantasy Tactics could do), yet dropped off the series when I switched from a PS2 to an XBOX360 last generation. I have a similar history with Vanillaware games, buying the original Odin's Sphere and Grim Grimoire and even picking up a used copy of Muramasa for the Wii that I have yet to crack open. When I read that Dragon's Crown was a loving homage to the old D&D Tower of Doom arcade game (which I first discovered tucked in the back of a comic shop years ago; did you know Iron Galaxy released it on Steam a few years ago?), that guaranteed I was going to play it eventually. You could say I'm crazy for buying an outdated system for just 2 games, but I also bought a Wii U solely for Super Mario Maker (although I plan to pick up Hyrule Warriors, Bayonetta 2, and few other games for it eventually). Now I just need to find time to play all of those alongside my other games...

The 50% off Hitman sale this weekend finally prompted me to buy the rest of the episodes (previously I bought Paris and Bangkok) and I spent 6 hours last night beating Sapienza twice, including an hour trying to figure out how to blow both targets up simultaneously once I realized you can drop a propane tank down a chimney. I also learned there's no indication in either the Opportunities or the Challenges you can remotely destroy the virus with a computer dongle. Once I beat The Icon bonus mission today simply by sabotaging the lights and poisoning his drink when he went on break (I wanted to get him devoured by robot teeth instead but got impatient), I decided to take a crack at the latest Elusive Target: a roaming chef. Once I realized he always went up and down the same staircase, and after a slight misunderstanding with the local security, I dropped a proximity mine for him and waited behind a wall for the inevitable kaboom. I finished the mission with a 1-star rating, but at least I finished the mission. With that, I wrapped up my Hitman play for the night and turned my focus to Space Rangers HD.

Ah, Space Rangers HD... I'm conflicted about the game. I initially got into it after playing a merchant in Caravan (horrible game), AL-FINE (bad game), and Recettear (great game) and a separate yearning for an open-world top-down space sim like Escape Velocity Override (cult classic). Space Rangers is a Russian series ported over to English by 1C, whom some of you might recognize as the developers of the King's Bounty remake. The game itself is an open-world space simulation, and I do mean simulation: every other entity in the game, from the other spaceships to the planets to the factions themselves, is doing things and growing/shrinking according to mechanics and AI. Other ships level up and buy equipment from shops, and you end up in situations where you run into the same annoying pirate in a different system months later (and he remembers he hates your guts). Battles play out even if you're not there, and several times I warped into a system in the midst of a pitched fight between 2 dozen ships, attempting to scavenge some of the loot before they finished up. Most appealingly to me, it's possible to shape the outcome of a war without firing a single shot simply by trading enough to finance a certain side. In addition to that, there's turn-based space dogfights, a crude (and frustrating) RTS minigame you can (thankfully) skip, and text adventures where you try to find an antidote on a death world, build a successful ski resort, or cook an award-winning pizza. It's an eclectic game that tries a lot of stuff and succeeds as often as it fails.

My current problem with it is the enemy faction that was added in the remake: the Pirates. Originally the game had the Coalition (your guys) vs the Dominators (robots intent on conquering the galaxy). While the Dominators are tough fights, they also play by their own rules and are manageable. The Pirates were an additional enemy faction added by the remake, and so far they feel like they're superior to the Coalition forces: they can retreat and survive while the Coalition militaries are coded to fight to the death, thus improving their experience levels and equipment until they're nearly-unstoppable juggernauts, and on top of that they (usually) have superior technology as well. This combination of factors means they usually outclass the Dominators as a threat, despite the plot explaining they're simply taking advantage of a Coalition weakened by the fight against the Dominators. In addition to that, the only way to stop them is to infiltrate their ranks and act like a pirate, which doesn't mesh well with the peaceful trader I'm playing. I wondered if my issues with the Pirates were just because I was playing the game wrong, but on the Steam forums there's a 4-page thread complaining about the Pirates' difficulty (including a developer response stating the Russian players never complained about how hard they were). As Sparky Buzzsaw put it, "Space Rangers HD is the kind of eastern European game that was never properly playtested".

Still, I don't like backing down from a challenge, so I've been reading guides on fighting the pirates to salvage my current game. With luck, I'll finance enough military build-up to start pushing the pirates back; I'll probably write more about the game as I do so, especially concerning the "I didn't realize RTS games could be so bad" minigame.