I was tearing through the Zero Escape games, but 10 hours into the final game (Zero Time Dilemma) I got a bit burnt out. So I resumed playing Fire Emblem Echoes, which I had stopped playing about a month ago once I got to the dreaded swamp maps. I'm fairly close to the end now, and it's getting harder which is frustrating... but it's also so very satisfying, and I'm loving it again after my extended break from it.
I've also recently played through the Final Fantasy XII remaster, which was excellent. Not only was the gameplay as good as I remembered it being, the story was significantly better than I remembered... possibly thanks to me being a bit older and wiser now. And perhaps somewhat due to the tighter pacing that the 4x speed boost affords it. In any case, its status as my favorite Final Fantasy has only been reaffirmed.
Now that I'm finished with XII, I'm planning to resume playing FFVII so I can finally cross it off my list of shame and be done with it.
Oh, and I beat Half-Life 2 for the first time a couple days ago. Phenomenal game, incredibly ambitious and manages to mostly fulfill that ambition. In some ways, even modern AAA games can't quite hold a candle to it... big bombastic setpiece moments in a typical AAA game are highly scripted and not very dynamic or reactive. HL2 isn't devoid of scripted events, but mostly trusts its physics engine to handle the minute details of the action which breaths life into it and makes it feel very convincing and real. Now I need to go back and play Half-Life 1, not to mention HL2 Episodes 1 and 2... then I can join everybody waiting for Half-Life 3.
