seasonal norm?

For the last couple of days the weather's almost been mild.

I wouldn't go as far as to say that it's been warm and there's been plenty of rain, so it's not been great weather, but it has definitely not been as cold as it has these last few months.

As I understand it this almost-mild spell has been rather restricted to the South, with plenty of snow and cold weather further north, but then I don't live there. I live in the South and down here it's not been too bad.

The bad news is that looking at the forecasts it's meant to get cold again next week, but for now I'm enjoying not freezing to death at work at the very least.

It was fully my intention this week to watch some anime. However, for the early part of the week I focused more on watching some things I'd recorded. My logic was that this weekend is going to be quite a busy one, so the more stuff I could clear the better.

That's all fine, but then I'd completely forgotten about something. Anno 1404 - Venice turned up yesterday. Of course, if I was sensible I would have held back and watched the anime as I'd promised myself. But of course I didn't do that. I installed the game and gave it a quick go.

I was a little disappointed by one thing if I'm honest - there's no new campaign, which is the story-based version of the game.

Instead they've introduced a lot more Scenarios. The first one of these I played did feature an animated cut scene like the campaign has, so my guess would be they've built cut scenes for all of the scenarios, but I don't know.

What they have introduced, as per the name, is a whole load of new stuff that mainly relates to Venice. There's a bunch of new NPCs, which by the looks of things includes a new equivalent to the Occident and Orient quest givers for Venice.

There also appears to be multiplayer, which is of little interest to me. But the big introduction of interest to me seems to be 'espionage', which allows you to plant spies and to undertake sabotage missions. This looks interesting, but I have to confess in the sample I played in that first scenario there was something that puzzled me.

If the idea is that these are secret espionage missions then it seemed odd that the player I was doing them on keeping sending me messages about loosing reputation for conducting them. I mean, I understood some of these when he caught my spy, but it also seemed like I got them when the spy successfully completed his mission.

Maybe it was my not understanding it properly, but doesn't that kinda defeat the point? If he knows it's me all the time then they're hardly secret espionage missions are they :/.

Anyway, the big point here is that I can already feel that I'm going to end up being a naughty boy and playing Venice this weekend.