Dear Diary: Tactics, Duty and Doom.

Life is hurtling by it seems, at a rather fast pace. Between work, family and everything else, the moments I get to myself seem super compressed. I vicariously watch speedruns of games I know I'll never get the time to finish and agonise over what to play first and within ten minutes of playing any one game I'm over thinking if it's worth going the whole way. I know, what a freak. 
I don't remember it being like this, do the kids go to be later or is there genuinely more stuff to do? I don't know, but me and the wife have now finished series 4 of the fantastic BBC police procedural (is that an actual genre? Crime thriller really...) Line of Duty. 
It was only after a colleague at work told me about the show that I contemplated watching it, I had actually spotted in on the Netflix listings several times in the last year or so and kind of wrote it off but damn it is one good and gripping show. I love that it's only six episodes, it's long enough to create characters you care about and satisfy but not so short that it's all over in a breeze and things feel rushed. Netflix's standard 10 episode shows isn't too bad I always find they end up with tons of filler content by episode five or six and then rush to wrap up everything in the final episode.

But anyhow I digress! Line of Duty; great show. Watch it, I implore you. Four series on Netflix, the fifth I think, is still on the BBC iplayer but I may be wrong.
On the gaming front I restarted a playthrough of Final Fantasy Tactics A2, on a previous run I played for around 65 hours and was only two or three missions from the end but I had made questionable class choices and I just wanted to re-experience it again. Fundementally it's a good game, some of the nerfs they afflicted on some classes feel too extreme and I hate some of the ridiculous laws they impose. Worst thing about the last two tactics games were the laws, on top of the RNG heavy accuracy stats it's just a cheap way to increase difficulty. At least in A2 it's not as punishing as the Advanced.

Now that I've signed up to the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, I do feel like a kid in a candy store. I'm really struggling to pick a game and stick with it to the end. I did try the new Metro game but it crashes every ten minutes, so that's a no. I tried Observer, but that's not my cup of tea in any sense of the word. Gears of War 1 remastered I quit mid chapter 4, the lick of new paint may be aesthetically great but the series has improved so much since then, it feels really stifling to play. I had downloaded Doom, which I rented when it came out but having watched the Eternal trailers it had given me a taste for that crazily addictive arcade style shoot'em up that the Doom remake offers up.

So many games, so little time. What's a nerd like me to do?