Mid-March greetings, friends! It’s hard to believe tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day. A “holiday” I’ve only ever celebrated by faintly recalling to wear something green so I don’t get pinched by random weirdos.

I will probably also eat some sort of salad. Salad is typically green. There! Celebrated!

The past week was productive on many fronts, one of which was gaming. Dying Light was completed a week ago today, and overall, I quite enjoyed my time with it. I forgot just how taken I can be by all those lovely icons on my world map. Because I did most of the optional content, it took a few days longer to complete than I had thought, but honestly? No regrets on that front. My co-op partner and I had a rousing good time. Thanks, Skittles!

My one real beef with the game came near the end. I don’t even consider it a moderate spoiler, but perhaps it is, so take it for what it’s worth, but there was a maddening sequence towards the end of the game that made me wonder why they waited until then to spring all that crap on the player. My co-op partner and I were in party chat so while we were forced to play that sequence separately, we could full-on hear each other and there was much swearing. And I mean much swearing.

While it was not at the frustration level of the end of Killzone Shadow Fall, it also wasn’t fun. I was glad to have that mission behind me. It was an odd way to close out (more or less) the story by forcing that frustration on the player.

Blechhh.

Directly after completing Dying Light, I moved on to Far Cry 4. Now Far Cry 3 was my game of the year in 2012, and I couldn’t have been more excited about FC4. But due to some arbitrary nonsense on Ubisoft’s part, I was feeling off-put from their lack of customer service, so I didn’t start the game until about a month ago. For whatever reason, I only got about an hour into the game before I was on to other things, so I didn’t really get into the meat of the experience.

When I stepped back in last week, I had that ever-so-lovely feeling of not remembering what the heck I was doing. I had to go back in and re-learn the controls. Fortunately I hadn’t done much of the story, so I was able to just hop into that with no concern, but I found myself (initially) somewhat uninterested.

It concerned me.

But as I began tackling more and more things in the game, I fell right back into that glorious Far Cry rhythm, and all was well. Sure, I still loathe the hunting aspect of the game (and I really do), but I tried to get all of that out of the way at the beginning so I could just ignore it for the rest of the game. I still find myself apologizing to the screen each time I must do it for yet another upgrade. (I really am sorry, digital animals. Except you, eagles. You guys are the worst.)

I am a decent chunk of the way into the story and I’m getting all sorts of fun icons on my map to take care of. I still miss Brian Tyler’s music from FC3, but I am enjoying Cliff Martinez’s score, none the less.

I must admit, I’m a little keen to try out Battlefield Hardline tomorrow, but I will force myself to wait until April, well after I have completed my March challenge.

Although it appears April might have it’s own unique challenge. More on that later.

I’m also anticipating the release of the Handsome Collection as well as Bloodborne next week. I will be at faux-midnight release for sure.

Is anyone else out there working on a challenge at the moment? If so, what is it? How is it coming along?

And now, off to that FC4 map to clear it up. Those loot caches won’t loot themselves.