GameLog 137 & 138

Football Manager 2010 (30h) - T.Bowes - FM 2010. Big move up to the pros. Landed some great loans for the season, but not too many new recruits coming in. The team barely resembles the one on the field last year though. Almost 1/2 way through the season and sitting in ~17th. Can't update the

Gyromancer (12h) - Another special on Steam. Plays similarlty to PuzzleQuest, but seems less involved. In Puzzle Pirates, every colour is useful for something, or has varying degrees of usefulness. in Gyromancer there's only 1 or 2 out of the 6 colours that are actually noteworthy, with the rest more or less making up the numbers. It's pretty easy to manipulate the board to match out all the good colours, but since it's only a random replacement you seem to always just end up with a board full of other colours. The bejewelled twist motion is also not as intuitive as PuzzleQuest's straight swap mechanism akin to the original bejewelled, the storyline seems less appealing, and the monster selection less bound to the game. At least the game map for each 'scenario' offers a little more depth of play if you're at the same level, but it's also too easy to just level up and blow through the maps ala Pokemon.

Grepolis (7h) - Web game similar to Travian / Evony. One nicety is that you're more or less placed on an island with others starting at the same time you did. That way it always feels like a limited competition inside a larger context of the game. Another interesting point is that the farms that are 'harvested' by your soldiers share their 'production' with everyone. The more everyone harvests, the less they produce, but you can also build them up instead of harvesting for the benifit of everyone. Unfortunately there only seems to be 2 active people on my island, so there doesn't seem to be much tension developing.

UniWar (5h) - ~$1 purchase for the 'best of 2009' strategy. AI plays pretty well expert.

Trackmania (3h) - StLukes CCG started up again.

Supreme Commander demo (2h) - Got this one in before my GTX260 died.

Company of Heroes (1h) - Plays better with the new motherboard & CPU, but crashes on completion of the map :/

Sudoku (1h) - Daily puzzles.

Pocket God (1h) - Another pick from the 'Best of 2009'. Couldn't really get into it, I was expecting more gameplay.