Taking care of business

Well, I polished off Bioshock last night - I'd actually managed to get all the way to the end of the game in just a couple of days play, so it wasn't too much of a slog after that. I just had to make it through the Proving Ground area and then beat up the last boss, which was a piece of cake really. I also got the good guy ending for saving all of the Little Sisters too, which was nice.

I have to say that, even the the ending itself is fairly brief, it is still one of my absolute favourites and is a beautiful way to cap all of the things (good and bad) that have befallen you as you make your way through Rapture. Wonderful, wonderful stuff.

Fresh from my success I decided to jump straight into the sequel. I've already done the original 1k worth of achievements plus the first lot of DLC to boot, so that leaves me with the Protector Trials and the Minerva's Den story to go through.

I've certainly heard good things about Minerva's Den, which is many peoples favourite stand alone DLC and is a well contained story in its own right - by all accounts. So I decided to leave that until last, so that I could finish off my return to Rapture in style. Instead I hopped into the Trials with a touch of trepidation, as I'd always believed they would be quite challenging and frustrating. Happily nothing could be further from the truth, at least so far, as I managed to get through every trial with at least an A ranking on my first attempt.

Actually, I did die on my VERY first attempt as they'd swapped the 'Use First Aid' button from where it was on the first title and I ended up dying without figuring it out. Second time around I looked at the control layout (it was on the d-pad - obviously) and it was smooth sailing from there on out.

I have to say that I have mixed feelings about the trials. While it is nice to use the mix of weapons and plasmids you are allocated in a tactical way, they always feel like a weird horde mode and don't really fit in that well with the overall feel of the game. Maybe if there was a more co-op, or even adversarial, feel to things then it might have come across a bit better. Though it did give me a chance to use a bunch of plasmids that I had criminally overlooked in the campaign so that is a neat touch. I managed to get through 14/18 of the trials so far (there are also 6 bonus trials, but these don't require an A rank so should be pretty easy) with the requisite A rank or better, so I'm hoping to polish the rest off tonight and then move onto Minerva's Den at the weekend.

If I get all of that done then I can move onto Tomb Raider Legend (which I hate) and get that finished off. After that I can look at cleaning up some stuff on Condemned 2 and maybe jumping into the single player as well. We shall see. I also have Halo 4 turning up at some point so I'll be trying to make my way through that bad boy ASAP.

EDIT: Oh yes, I should probably say that in between games I'm ranking up on Gears 3 so I can get the achievement for Re-upping (Prestige, we all know it) for the second time. Easy to boost that with two pads and zero input so I figured, why not?