March 17, 2013

My plan for a relaxing day filled with a lot of nothing worked out. I got to sleep in until 9:30AM or so, which was nice, and I spent most of my day playing Anno 2070. It kind of reminds me of a mix between Sim City and Warcraft. The Sim City aspect being the city building and the Warcraft aspect coming from only having your little piece of land visible on the mini map and having to go out and explore to reveal the rest of the map. I played the first four missions of the campaign and then I jumped into the endless sandbox mode. The missions were fun but there wasn't much tutorializing so there were a couple times where I had no clue what I was supposed to be doing. I am really liking the endless mode but I'm not that great at it. Right before ending I spent half my money unlocking all the tech and undersea stuff. I think I still have a lot of work to do before I can even start messing with the undersea stuff, and I might completely fail before I get there, but I'm looking forward to it if I get the chance.

One of the more interesting aspects of the game is that after playing for two hours, a notification pops up and the narrator lady tells you that you have been playing for awhile and that you should stretch your legs and take a break. Kinda creepy but also kinda cool. It got me thinking about the future of video games. I think there is talk about the next Xbox either having a Kinect build in or at least requiring you to have one. That seems like it would open up the possibility of requiring video game breaks. Like after an hour or two you have to get up and do jumping jacks or stretch or whatever else, with the Kinect keeping track and not unlocking the game until you do. It would be easy enough now to make a game lock for a little while after you have been playing a certain amount of time but it would be interesting if physical activity could unlock it.

I also played a tiny bit of Black Ops 2. Just enough to get the gold camo on my shotgun. It looks so nice. It is now my weapon of choice on Nuketown 2025, which is my map of choice. I just can't get into any of the other maps. I like playing Headquarters and Hardpoint and other objective gametypes but I die a lot. And every time I die I get spawned on the other side of the map. So I spent the majority of the game just running back and forth across the map. That is boring. When you get spawned on the other side of the map in Nuketown 2025, it takes five seconds to get back into the action. I like that. I think I will probably take another break from the game until double XP and/or Nuketown 2025 24/7 comes back.

Tomorrow I plan on waking up relatively early. I for sure have a haircut in the afternoon but I also might go over to my grandma's to take down decorations. I also need to get ahold of my dad about maybe going over to his house and finally getting a start on my desk. We'll see what happens.