I’ve had a lot of time on my hands lately and between my birthday and Christmas, I’ve come into a slew of new games to pass the time.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine

Space Marine is a part of the Warhammer 40,000 gaming franchise and, while this is really my first delve into that setting, the folks at Relic did an amazing job. The entire tone and feel of the game was superbly brought from books and tabletop miniature wargaming to the PS3. It lives up to it’s Mature game rating in every sense, due solely to a smidgeon of profanity but almost entirely due to the copious amounts of, literally, explosive blood and gore violence.

I hemmed and hawed about getting this game and it wasn’t until I watched a video review of the demo of Space Marine on YouTube (video is below). The video was made by “TotalBiscuit” as part of The Cynical Brit series. After watching the video review, I was sold on it. Luckily enough for me, Best Buy happened to have this normally $59 game on sale for $29, plus an additional $20 discount for buying one of their $4.99 gaming magazines. Well worth every single penny!

Assassin’s Creed: Revelations

The very first game I bought to play on my PS3 was Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. If you’ve ever played any of the Prince of Persia games on Game Cube back in the day, this is very similar. Lots of crazy stunts, climbing, acrobatics and cool tricksy assassinations. I got a large return on my investment, in terms of game play time with AC:B, so I was eager to play the new release.

The thing I like about the Assassin’s Creed games is that you’re free to roam around and pursue your own goals, without being shoe-horned into following the storyline and missing exploring the world the gamers created.

Battlefield 3

This game is one that you’re almost expected to own, for fear of having the Gaming Police kick in your door and take away your video game console. The Campaign mode of Battlefield 3 was, for me, very challenging. I’m no novice to first person shooters and normally breeze through a FPS within hours. This game, however, took a number of days on Normal difficulty mode. There was more than one mission where I put the controller aside and played a different game for a day or two, because of the frustration of “HOW THE HELL DID THEY HIT ME THAT TIME?!” Lots of gamer rage.

In one mission, you fly around in an F-18 fighter and blow up all manner of people, vehicles and buildings. Even before the jet fighter takes off from the aircraft carrier, the chills were shooting up and down my spine. The gradually ramped up sound effects and feel was great. That’s not even getting into the actual in-air dogfights.

My only real complaint is that, while driving around tanks, they tended to succumb to the dumb rule of video games: Big vehicles get stuck on dumb things. I had to restart a tank mission more than once because my tank got stuck on top of a barrel drum or wrecked car.

I suck in multiplayer mode and our military should be VERY thankful I’m not a part of it, what with my 0.255 Kill-to-Death ratio. It’s fun, but a large part of what I’m going through is having to earn my stripes with un-modded guns and resources as I start at the bottom of the totem pole and work my way up. Either way, I enjoy games like this one where I can go back and still have fun with the game at my own leisure.

World of Warcraft

While this game certainly isn’t new, or even a game I just started playing, I’ve recently been able to hit max level (85) on a new-ish character and I’ve been able get my virtual greedy hands on some respectable gear. Which means, I’m able to take part in raids and more end-game content that I previously was not able to do until all of the normal-to-hard-core players were too sick of running over and over. The game is fun again.

Disclaimer: Some links are affiliate links because, well, hell, I’m out of work and have bills to pay. Also, because of Amazon’s amazingly advanced link-building interface, there is stupid padding issues. Please excuse the ugly.

Related posts:

1. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time
2. Battlestar Galactica The Board Game