Food coma over, folks! It's December now, and that means that we've got a game completion report coming in. So, then, November's games are:

Halo 3, 360, November 13th: It's strange to think that this, being one of the biggest games of 2007, was a game I was reluctant to play for so long. I have a tendency to avoid that which dominates the attention of the world at large simply because I know how disappointing it can wind up being when the Next Big Thing turns out to be neither Big or a Thing. That said, Halo 3 does not live up to the hype that had preceded it in 2007. It does, however, hold up as a good example of how to do a first-person shooter and is a solid game in its own right... it's just not a great game. Many of the issues I had with the first two games are very evident in the third; there's so few bullets for the human weapons, forcing players to use the less-effective and less-interesting Covenant gear. Some of the things I liked got changed as well; Master Chief can only carry two of each grenade type now, and having four types to choose from does not make up for the limitation, particularly when the two new grenades aren't all that useful. Not being forced to play as the Arbiter works well story-wise, but it does make the game a bit monotonous. And the new support items feature is all but useless on the lower difficulty levels; enemies walk right into shield bubbles and walk around deployable cover. I can only shudder to think how tough the game is on Hard or Legendary. Still, I enjoyed it for what it was (and getting the Legendary set for 25% of its initial asking price back in June was a nice bonus), and I have to admit that it earned its A-. Now, about this ODST expansion...
LittleBigPlanet, PS3, November 22nd: The phrase "killer app" gets thrown around quite often. Halo was considered one; Wii Sports undoubtedly is one; and for the Playstation line, Final Fantasy has traditionally filled that role. But FF13 is still a couple of years off, and FF12 launched on the PS2 weeks before the 3 emerged. It's hard to say what Sony has pinned their hopes on these past two years-- MGS4 was the last big name, but I see tons of those sitting on the used shelves these days, even if I enjoyed it. Given this, LittleBigPlanet's core tenets of level creation and sharing were lauded as what would make the machine worth it. In a nutshell: no. Level creation, even with other people, is hard and boring. The game itself turned out to be a pretty basic physics-heavy platformer, and while I still couldn't get the multiplayer to work right, I can only imagine that playing with other people is fun. The game is fun, yes, but unfortunately it's painfully generic. Sackboy is cute and all but it's hard to make a blank canvas identifiable with a brand, which is what a killer app accomplishes for its system. A better analogy is that the game, as delivered to the player, is plain vanilla ice cream with forty zillion different kinds of sprinkles on the side. The player can arrange the ice cream and sprinkles as they see fit, but at the end of the day it's still just vanilla. It's hard for me to give the game the B- it deserves, but there's no other way to put it. While I like vanilla ice cream, I expect my games to have a bit more flavor to them.

December's already spoken for; I'm going to try to get through Chrono Trigger DS, and later in the month start up one of the major 360 RPGs on my plate-- either Tales of Vesperia or Infinite Undiscovery.

Delays have savaged what I was looking forward to in December; DJ Max Fever got pushed forward "indefinitely". More than that, some of the titles I looked forward to in November got lukewarm receptions-- Mirror's Edge in particular wound up being somewhat short, so it's more a rental now. Only Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories looks good for December, and that's a delayable purchase until after the holidays anyway.

Let's take a look at the current numbers:
Overall List: 32 completed of 51, 62.7% (UP 3.9%, was 58.8%, Goal 40%) with 19 remaining.
Prioritized List: 32 completed of 42, 76.2% (UP 3.0%, was 73.2%, Goal 50%) with 10 remaining.
2008 Goal: 32 completed of 25, 128% (UP 8%, was 120%, Goal 100%) with 0 remaining (Perfect Clear Accomplished).

As a personal challenge, I'm making an effort to clear three more games in December, to bring my year-end total to 35 or more. (Chrono Trigger doesn't count.) If I accomplish this, I'll permanently remove all but a select few retro games from the 2009 Backlog list (mostly GBA and PS1 games).

Finally... Last month I said I wanted to give more of an idea of what I wanted to do with the LJ. The bottom line, really, is that I don't know. I've really stopped doing a lot of game-based thoughts, and eleven months later, the whole "division of content" thing has turned out to flop hard. I figure that, to do daily updates, I have to make them as easy as possible to do... which I am going to try to do, of course, but that means this journal might wind up being a "sometimes" thing. I might start locking entries a bit more often, to give me a bit more freedom with what I say (because I don't much care for blasting out personal stuff unprotected) but the gaming and anime focus here might get diluted a bit. Really I went about this the completely wrong way; this should have been the personal news site, and the main page should have been where I did my geekery. Ah well.

There's no anime report this month, folks, because I didn't watch any. I saw just enough Bleach to realize that it had to go; it's just not my cup of tea right now, and the manga is starting to look like it's going to drag on forever without any progression or point. In any event, I should be back here before or around Christmas. Ciao until then, folks.