Having finished Starcraft: Brood War I have been planning what to do next. I have about 15 days before school starts up again, and I want to use those days to finish off a few titles that have been collecting dust on my shelf.
GTA4 lost it's flavor to me, and I am not sure I will get back to it this summer. Maybe I will take a mission once in awhile during the next few months, but it's too long and too frustrating to play.
Instead I got back to Assassin's Creed. Wanting to do it properly I decided to take reinstall Windows Vista with intention to try to be exclusive to Vista until Windows 7. With Direct X 10 the game looks amazing, but while I find the story exciting, I find the gameplay frustrating. The game is supposed to have out-of-the-box support for XBox 360 controllers, but that's a lie. The game begins with a corrupt config and it's impossible to assign Right/Left Trigger to anything in the game. After a lot of hassle I gave up and configged the joypad differently than default 360 controls. Since your gamepad is associated with your profile you cannot select and start your profile with your gamepad, you have to select it with your keyboard, which is a hassle when you play on television and just want to lay back to play the game with your wireless gamepad. But that's not all, if you haven't enabled your gamepad before starting the game (so the wireless is powered down), AC will automatically disable gamepad support. If that happens you have to quit the game, restart the game, and enable gamepad again.
Once in the game the quests are sometimes annoying. I died five times when I had to pickpocket a guy as one of the first tutorial quests. Then when I finally reached the "free" mode in which you can explore the huge map, it turns out that any attempt to fast travel with a horse will make the guards hostile to you. Simply passing a mountainside (10% of the map) I managed to get the guards hostile 10 times and I even died twice. I know I can take things slow to avoid the fights, but that means I will spend several minutes extra doing nothing but walking/riding slowly.
I have a limited selection of other titles to play, but nothing really attracts me atm. I might have enough time to finish System Shock this summer. The Witcher and Drakensang are too long for me to play right now. I have the entire Hitman series, but found the first title to be a bit too outdated for me to enjoy. My Sam & Max season 1 have stopped to work, and I am seriously thinking about getting a pirate version of it despite being among the first who payed for the full season. I have already been in contact with Telltale twice to get the games working after reinstalling windows, but I do not think I want to do it a third time.