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Currently Playing

This is a place holder post really. My gaming hours in the last week have been spread between Lotro, Team Fortress 2 and Braid.

In Lotro my Lore Master Ceoldir  is now level 36, working his way around  Evendim doing white / yellow quests that are slightly above his level. It is going well though I notice that Ceoldir has far lower morale (health) than characters of similar level I see around (in one extreme case I saw a Captain with twice as much morale). Some of this may be gear related but I suspect much of it is class design. The LM is a powerful flexible class but as a trade off they can take very few hits.

I enjoy Team Fortress 2 but I am pretty bad at it. To do well at the game you need three things:  an organised team, knowledge , and personal skill. I play on public servers so team organisation is usually non existent. My knowledge of the game, its maps and its classes has definitely improved but my personal skilll level seems stuck in a rut and I cannot hit moving targets for love or money.

I am slowly working my way through Braid, now  just one jigsaw piece short of solving the fifth world. It is called the fifth world but it is actually only the fourth jigsaw puzzle leading me to think that some time traveling jiggery pokery will transport me back to the missing first world later. Time distortion is a common theme in all the worlds but each introduces its own kink. In this fifth world the puzzles are all about using a time shifted shadow of yourself to work in tandem with your present existence to reach the goals.

Apart from the cleverness of the puzzles the game is very well paced,  at least for me. I find I can solve one or two puzzles (levels) in a session but if I try to do more I will inevitably fail to progress. I have learned to take a break at these points leaving the game for a day or so until I can return to it with a fresh mind in order to go on.

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