November's Lineup Card

In an effort to spur some more posts, I’ve decided to do a monthly preview post. I’ll write about a paragraph on upcoming games, gadgets, books, and other things.

Leadoff

The month of November will start off with a blaze of glory as Nathan Drake returns for another installment of Uncharted. It was the Uncharted series and Heavy Rain that spurred me into purchasing a PlayStation 3¹ and my expectations for the third game are sky high. Fortunately, I don’t see many ways for this game to disappoint. All I’m asking for is great graphics, a good story, crazy gun fights and for Nate to get the girl.² That’s not much right?

On Deck

notch and Mojang are hosting the inaugural MineCon in Las Vegas. Their intent is to push a new version of Minecraft while on stage.³ I’ve been playing Minecraft for about a year now and it has firmly pushed itself into my rotation of games. Hopefully the completion of the Adventure Update will push it to the front of the line between Uncharted and the next pair of games.

In the Hole

Halfway through the month will see the release of two new games. The first game coming out Nov 15 is Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. The third installment for Ezio Auditore da Firenze will wrap up his storyline. I picked up all the other Assassin’s Creed games over the Steam summer sale and thoroughly enjoyed Assassin’s Creed 2 and Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. I still need to go back and play Assassin’s Creed but that will likely happen after I finish Ezio’s trilogy.

Cleanup

The second is Batman: Arkham City. Sure it hit consoles a couple weeks ago but I played Arkham Asylum on my PC. Asylum got rave reviews and when a Steam sale dropped the price I made sure to pick it up. Now I’ve been rewarded for my dedication to PC gaming with a $20 discount on my Arkham City purchase through Steam because I owned the first game. It took me a two solid stints through Asylum to beat the game (the last leg coming over the last few weeks). Great game, simple but fun mechanics and a great cast. As long as Arkham City follows through with the same stuff I’ll be more than happy with the purchase.

High Power

The Kindle Touch 3G will be my second kindle.⁴ While I don’t find my Kindle to be indispensable it has been a very useful device. My one complaint has been that it’s a bit too large to carry everywhere I go. When I show if off to others, the first thing they try to do is touch the screen and become slightly puzzled that it doesn’t respond. The new Kindle should rectify that issue and I expect it will feel just as natural with a touch interface. I rarely find myself using the hardware keyboard so the absence of it in exchange for a smaller device is an easy trade.

Protection

Reamde by Neal Stephenson. I’m not sure how I got introduced to Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon but I loved everything about it. World War II, cryptography, banks, theft and computers. The tome was huge but it wasn’t enough to deter me. Unfortunately, since reading that novel, I’ve skipped over his other works. His latest novel, Reamde, however has drawn me back in. It involves an MMO, a game company, gold farming, China and the Russian mafia. One of my acquaintances gave a slightly negative comment on it, so I picked it up on my Kindle instead of in hardcover. Still, I expect this to be a solid read.

RBI Guys

Holidays, birthdays and NaNoWriMo. Veteran’s Day and Thanksgiving will give welcome days off. My birthday, my aunt and cousins’ birthday and my good friend’s youngest sister’s birthday. While I won’t be participating in NaNoWriMo exactly, I plan on using it to spur a bit more fiction and non-fiction musings.

Pinch Hitters

Excluding Reamde I’m not sure how much reading I’ll get done this month but if I get the chance I’ve got two novels in the SWtOR universe waiting, Fatal Alliance and Deceived.⁵ Women have their trashy romance novels, men have their trashy game novels. I love exploring the histories and backstories of worlds and these two novels will give me a chance to fill in some more knowledge gaps.⁶

Nine Hole

Bringing up the end of the line up is the iPhone 4S. Upgrading from my 3GS will be great but I’m not sure exactly when it’s going to happen which is why the 4S is so low on this list. It’s a phone, a personal assistant, an internet device, a twitter client and an HD camera all rolled into one. I’m not sure what else I would need or want in a single device but I’m sure Apple will show me in two years.⁷

Waiting for the Callup

First off the bench is Nimbus from Noumenon Games. It’s an indie puzzle platform game that looks neat. It’s been out for a year but I just heard about it recently. If I manage to go through all the other games and still have some funds left in the entertainment budget this game will be the one called up.

The other item hoping for the call is Mile 81 by Stephen King. I’ve never read any of his works before and a recent short story only available on the Kindle for $3 sounds like the perfect one to start with.