Civilization V (17 hrs) - I took advantage of the Steam Fall Sale to finally pick up the Gods and Kings expansion to Civ V.  I have enjoyed founding my own religion, Otakuism.  Religion plays a much more key role than they did in Civ IV.  In the previous game, I would pretty much just found a religion because each city would pay me gold (with certain buildings or government choices) and I’d get a window into cities.  In Civ V the religion plays like another level of policies.  You get to choose a series of attributes for your religion such as temples giving you gold or faster territory expansion.  It tends to make the expansion of religion to other cities and civs a much more important task than before.  I’m still a little unsure of how cities pressure other cities to adopt religion because I seemed to have one city flipping even though I couldn’t see any reason for it.  (Could have been another civ sending prophets my way)  Spies are also added.  The spy missions remind me of Assassin’s Creed:Brotherhood  assassin missions.  Unlike previous iterations of Civ, the spies aren’t on the map.  You assign them to a city or city-state and then they either steal you tech (which may not be useful if you’re super advanced and/or playing normal or easier), rig elections in city states (gaining you influence), or protect your cities from being screwed over by other spies.  I must admit that I haven’t done much investigating in the civclopedia, but I can’t really see how to generate more spies and so the whole system seems like a mini-game diversion.  I continued my strategy of non-aggression unless another civ attacks me or denounces me.  Then I drop my hammer on them and take over their capital city and, sometimes, eliminate them entirely.  I like that the requirements on resources for building some units has been reconfigured.  I usually ended up not using a lot of early-game siege weapons because iron tended to be too scarce.  I think it’s a lot more balanced on which units need resources like oil, iron, and horses than before the expansion pack.

Team Fortress 2 (5 hrs) - a lot of this time was spent testing out my new private server which I described setting up in this post.

Civilization V (1 hr) - played a little bit in the game I’m documenting at onemoreturn.ericsbinaryworld.com .  Been too busy to play much more than that.

Saints Row: The Third (<1 hr) - Saints Row’s lack of a tight narrative may make it easy for me to step back into it when I have some free time, but it also makes it lack a compelling reason to come back.

I first heard about virtual machines about six to seven years ago.  I couldn’t see a point in wanting to run another computer inside your computer.  A few years ago I used VMs to test and blog about Linux distros.  In the past year I’ve used it to preview new features in Fedora while the next version was in beta.  This week I used them in the most useful way yet: to test server software before implementing them on my public, paid server.  These were some of easiest installs I’ve ever done - even easier than Wordpress’ famous Five Minute Install.

Mass Effect 2 (19 hrs) - I knew my wife was getting close to delivering our first child, so I was rushing as quickly as I could to save the galaxy.  I got to it with one week to spare.  Phew!  I didn’t enjoy the story as much as Mass Effect 1, but the gameplay was orders of magnitude better.  For one thing I didn’t have to worry about having too many guns.  (A frequent problem in the first entry)  I also enjoyed the characters a little more (some of them, anyway).  I ended up doing a lot more side missions and I felt they were well designed.  If too much time doesn’t pass between when I finished the game and when I get free time to blog, I’ll do a writeup on Mass Effect 2 and how I liked it vs the first one.  However, it would mostly be a long-winded version of what I said above and with the baby…. well, don’t hold your breath.

There aren’t any new games on here, so I’m only going to mention some quick comments on each.

Plants vs Zombies (29  hrs) - threw a bunch of hours into this game because I just had a handful of achievements left and for some reason I wanted to finish it off.  2 or 3 to go

Civilization V (9 hrs) - still love this game.  I wish I had more time for it

Civilization V (75 hrs) - What can I say about this game that I haven’t said already?  This is the series that made “One More More Turn…” famous and it still works today.  If I were to start a game tonight, I would not go to bed at a reasonable time.

Team Fortress 2 (70 hrs 45 min) - This game is almost as addictive as Civ 5.  I never thought I’d end up saying that about a first person shooter.  But I’ve played nearly all of my 85 hrs logged for this game in 2011 and in 2012 it might even surpass Civ 5!

With school over I had plenty of time to get back into video games last month.  I had a blast!

Team Fortress 2 (6 hrs) - Got back into this game because my brother-in-law wanted to play it.  I’d forgotten how awesomely fun it is to play this game!

Plants vs Zombies (5 hrs) - I wanted a quick game of fun so I went after some achievements in PvZ.  I also found this game to be a blast.

My graduate degree has stemmed my play time this month.  This is all I was able to put in.

Mass Effect 2 (1 hr)

Team Fortress 2 (41 min)

For those who are new readers, I’m keeping track of the games I’m playing monthly (via Raptr) and then writing a little blurb on the games.  This is in prep for my year-end blog post.

Team Fortress 2 (4 hrs) – I continue to really enjoy this game.  I think of all of non-story-based games I have, this one has one of the fastest completion times for a single game.  Civilization 5 can take me a week or longer to finish.  And my other games fall somewhere between these two.  (With a few exceptions like Pacman CE DX)

Mass Effect (2 hrs) - Dan tells me that if I don’t go for the optional quests, I could be near the end.  After the next major story beat I’m probably going to write up my next Mass Effect blog post. I’m really enjoying the fiction.

Team Fortress 2 (60 hrs) - I didn’t think I’d ever enjoy playing this game.  I am not an FPS person.  But it recently went free to play so I figured “why not?”  I started playing the game and it’s every bit as fun and funny as the “Meet the X” videos.  It’s a lot of fun to formulate the strategies for the game.  I’m still learning a lot about that.  And just when you think you know what to do, there are the extra weapons you earn for getting certain achievements.  They don’t throw off the balance because they give with one hand and take with the other.  The Heavy’s gun Natasha, for example, has a higher chance of critical hits, but it takes longer to spin up.