Raithe

Roy Dotrice has passed on...

I was having a few frustrations last week, so decided to say what the heck and picked up Shadow of War to vent some of it by killing large amounts of orcs. Its enjoyable enough. Pretty much Shadow of Mordor once more. The first act is purely getting back into the swing of things in Mordor and re-learning all those skills,wile the scene is set in Minas Ithil (later to be Minas Morgul). Act 2 reintroduces the domination side and building up your own forces, but I have to admit, the much touted "leading your armies to war" is rather minimal and not that deep. Selecting different types of orc (tribe or class) has absolutely no real effect beyond the visual, and then you choose which of them are part of your "assault force", spend in-game money to tweak them from the same set of seige upgrades, and then run through a set of "capture the flag" points. Story side starts wandering even further afield from the points known, and is entertaining, but it gets distracted by the huge amount of grind involved in taking on all the orc captains, getting the intel, setting them at each others throats and all that. Still, fun in its own way but I do see how this could get a wee bit tiresome after x point. Ignoring the loot box thingy. So yes, if you enjoyed the first game, you'll likely enjoy this because there really isn't that much different to it - Just the skill tree has been changed some.

Go hunt up the mini-series Ultraviolet It's a down and gritty 6 parter revolving around creatures with fangs who drink blood and the cop who discovers them and gets pulled into a secret government organisation to deal with the threat. Idris Elba plays one of the team involved. Plus its fun in that the word "Vampire" is never mentioned once in the entire show. It's basically a very British gritty mix of police drama, thriller, mystery and vampire chasing.

It's always fun when you spend 4 odd hours downloading a game, hit the 90% mark and have to shut things down, then when you come back to restart it... Steam resets the download back to 0% and starts all over again. So much for my cunning plan to have a break from university workload with some new gaming....

For the other fun world news... StratFor - Catalonia declares independence ; well, more or less

This time around with David Boreanaz..

Prince Harry launches new partnership with MoD over improved mental health for Armed Forces

Out of curiosity, and to take a break from some sql, I watched an episode of Seal Team. Seems like a fairly functional "new" take on The Unit. Just this time around, it's a Seal Team, and the balance of missions away and home life and families, rather than Army Special Forces. They're weaving in the strands of the top-line team, the wives and kids, and the ****y young guy going through training who wants to get in.