Got what I wanted out of Redfall; gunplay got boring, exploration got boring, story was boilerplate by the end, and the last boss... Yikes. There's a good game in there, but Arkane Austin did not get to realise it. The Blackwood House side-story and the like were neat, and the other three bosses were alright, but yeah, moving on...
Found a Logitech MK850 (minus the M) for $8.49 instead of ~$75 on eBay, and a Microsoft LifeCam Studio for $6.99 ($30~$40 on eBay) at a thrift shop. Still looking for a new mouse; found another Microsoft Wheel Mouse Optical (mine's getting tired after some 20 years) for cheap, but decided to keep looking - I hear good things about the Logitech G203. Need a numpad, too - the C64 Edition of the 8BitDo Retro 18 Mechanical Numpad is tempting.
Landstalker's not as bad in terms of perspective-issues making jumps as confusing as the reviews or the intro animation might suggest, but I am getting kind of tired of the game's jumping puzzles on the whole; it's all doable, the combat's fine, and the puzzles are neat - but it becomes a little too frustrating when you know the solution and the execution is the only issue. I've skipped at least one puzzle room because I looked-up the reward and decided it wasn't worth it. I'm almost through the Lake Shrine, so I should finish it... But it's just not winning me over like it was at first.
Otherwise, I started a Phantasy Star game for the umpteenth time (the original SMS release, in this case) and I'm about a third of the way in now. Always had a weird relationship with those games - could never get into any of them, and I'm not sure this is going to change things. There's a classic grind here, and I might check-out the Genesis titles again after this - but I don't think I'll ever be able get into the outright grindfest of the PSO/PSU/PSP games.
