A little glass vial?

Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate is everything I hoped it would be.  Which is good, considering it is one of the few games I paid full price for, on the week of their release no less.  No buyer's remorse this time.  I've got about 12 hours clocked in, and I'm not even done with all the tutorial quests yet.  I'll let that sink in for a moment.  My son watched me play it, when I was still doing some of the initial quests, and commented "I thought you said this was hard.  It doesn't look hard."  He's since learned otherwise.

It comes from an old school game mentality, and a distinctly Japanese game design.  It doesn't hold your hand, it throws you into the mix and expects you to read and learn through playing.  You will spend hours killing the same monster over and over to make a suit of armor that you will swap out for the next suit of armor that you spend hour upon hour grinding monsters to make.  It has never really caught on here in the West, and I can't say as I'm surprised.  The kind of gamer who will like it, has never heard of it, and the kind of gamer who has heard of it is too busy bitching about how hard it is and will then promptly go back to Call of Honor XVI. 

I'm pretty well done with MMO's for the time being.  I'm tired of the juveniles honestly.  Nothing ruins a game for me faster then children arguing over chat about ridiculous things with badly spelled words and no concept of punctuation.  Oh, and their answer to this complaint?  "Well, if you used voice chat, you wouldn't have to see my bad spelling."  Because I really want to have my game immersion destroyed by actually hearing you whine about ridiculous things and having no regard for the fact that I have children running around and for God's sake will you watch your damn mouth! . . . Sorry, sort of lost myself there.  So yeah, I love these games, but they are just no fun if you have no one to play them with, and every guild I've made an effort to track down and join has either been completely devoid of anyone to play with, or is dominated by juvenile asshats.  Right now I'm playing a couple of hours a week of LOTRO, but that has more to do with the fact that my wife plays than anything else.

So, it's single player games for me.  When I feel like playing anyways.  Been devoting myself a lot to the Sims 3 lately.  I never understood why the hardcore crowd disliked the game.  It's as much of a sandbox as you can get while still having some direction to it.  My Game of Thrones mod stopped working with CK2 during the most recent update, so that's a shame.  I think it's time to go through my back catalog and finish some games.  Torchlight 2 will be my next project, so expect some thoughts on that eventually, as I consider myself a bit of an ARPG connoisseur.  I wrapped up Fire Emblem on the 3DS not too long ago, and am now devoted to Etrian Odyssey 4.  If anyone has a 3DS and they fancy a nice strategy game, you could do worse then Fire Emblem.