Reviews of "Current Affairs"

As long as by "current affairs" it's taken to mean "school so far and my new computer games".
School is alright for now, although I am starting to get distressed by the ammount of work my teachers appear to be demanding. All of them have stated that I may need multiple text books and teaching aides in order to do well. This I find distressing as it offends my belief that I should be able to get by in school without having to pay and extra $500 per term. Is this what I often hear referred to as the "price of success"? My anatomy prof is the founder of the School of Anatomy. Which is cool except for two things: He retired 6 years ago and he is a passionate intelligent designist. He has promised that this will not play a big part in his teaching, and I hope he's right.
My psych teacher is a barrel of laughs. My only complaint? I have my week's worth of psych on Tuesday nights from 6:30-9:30. No trouble. Except that my prof is determined to let us out at ten after or 9 o'clock every lecture. This sounds great, except for the part where I'm paying him to teach me. If he doesn't have enough material, why doesn't he teach it all and then give the last lecture or so over to serious review? I'm not a goddamn arts student! Your bullshit has no effect on me!
Introductory physiology looks very cool, but my teacher has a "bump". This is her way of explaining to the class that she is not fat, just preggers. She hopes to make it to Reading Week before having to switch profs on us.
Chemistry will never live up to my prof from first term, and the current one both uses handwritten overheads and has a thick South American accent.
Into more interesting territory, I've been playing the pants off of the Cossacks Anthology, Cossacks II, and Hitman: Contracts.
Cossacks has always been a solid game, and with the 2 expansions in the anthology is only gets better. There are too many reasons to list, but here are the top 3: An 8000 unit population limit; 18 actually different nations with unique units and upgrades (although this diversity is lacking in the naval and artillerous feilds); and also, like all good older games, the graphics scale to fit all the resolutions my video card has to offer, so it looks like a dream. There are a few things I can't stand, however. The "Art of War" expansion (nothing at all to do with Asia, let alone SunTzu), expands the game's mapmaking ability to 16x larger than the original game. That is fucking amazing, as it allows me to watch an enemy deploy a force and then design, build, and deploy my response before they arrive. However, it brings into terrible relief one of Cossacks serious problems: unit location. I'm not going to get into the fact that fighting on multiple fronts is impossible, I'm just going to talk about the fact that an individual unit is effectively lost after it leaves your screen. You can hotkey units just like any other game, but where other games let you double-click to centre that unit on your screen, Cossacks doesn't, and since the maps are now so large, but the minimaps are still the same size, individual units barely register (especially at 1600-1200, sigh). Other than that, Blake has orgasms every time I play it.
There is a really good game inside Cossacks II. It's just that I haven't found it yet. I am playing it right now, and it is fun, but where the problems in Cossacks are laughable, workable, the ones here are just too big to handle. However, they all appear to have a unifying theme: The designers really wanted a ground-breaking RTS title that would seriously make you think you were fighting the Napoleonic Wars, they just did it really, really wrong. Take the opening sequence. In the original Cossacks poorly animated soldiers kick each other's asses with cannons, with a closing shot of a map of Europe burning. In Cossacks II a bunch of reenactors strut around and yell half-heartedly. Seriously! They got (hopefully not hired) a bunch of reenactors in Napoleonic Costume to march around, move their shit, yell at each other, and even added in a few frames of terribly reenacted combat. Not that that's the ren-people's fault! How does someone pretend, convincingly, to get hit with 8 musket balls without the aid of special effects? Id like to say that the tutorial was informative, but I can't. I got 2 steps in and the game told me to click the "next" button. Only problem: There wasn't one. So I launched right into the "War for Europe" as the Russians. I was enthralled by the numerous choices of commanders, but I'm not sure if picking different ones changes the army at all. My current man was a cavalry hero in his time, but my army only supports 2 cavalry...thingies... compared to 7 infantry and no artillery... Next, the actual "War for Europe" is a tabletop game. It's a map of Europe much like Risk. Now, don't get me wrong, I love tabetop games, when I can see the whole tabletop. As Russia, I could not move the map any way I tried in order to have any sort of diplomatic relations with Britain, the West-furthest nation. I don't think I could talk to France either, although I don't remember. oh yeah, there's no more "town" aspect to the game (as far as I could tell) You move your general onto a territory to fight it. Then we switch to "regular" Cossacks view, except that as the invader I don't have a town, I just take others over (there are around 15 very small towns on every map). Only problem? Can't build shit, or control anything, not even the stupid militia I had to fight to get the place. Taking over a town wins me resources, that's it. So, if I can't build soldiers, where do they come from? magic. When I lose a battle all my men die, and I replace them by magic, immediately, back in the Risk side of things. Furthering the "really on a feild in Europe" theme, the developers oviously wanted me to experience the headache of trying to control units properly that a real 19th century commander would have had. The units are sloppy, get tired, and put up (charming?) little video sequences whenever I tell them to do anything. There are a million more things I hate, but it's time to move on. Blake's penis shrivels so much it tickles his prostate whenever this game crosses my mind.
Hitman: Contracts = massive dissappointment. Ben bought the original for my family when he lived at our place, and it was so good Blake had orgasms every time I booted up my comupter, because he knew I was going to play it. Contracts is still a good game. It's just disappointing because half the missions were stolen directly from the first game. Do Eidos think I'm retarded? That I won't notice? I actually didn't the first time it happened, I thought they were reusing a great location, but then it turns out that the last 4 missions of Contracts, are the first four missions, exactly, from the original Hitman. Mein Gott...
So that's it. I'm busy assaulting Berlin right now, but that's quickly diminished into me feeding my infantry to the german maw while I use my cavalry to raid the towns. I may even see what retreating does in a couple of minutes...