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When playing the game today the loading breaks are momentary, sure, but I definitely remember loads taking quite a while when it first came out. I play the Half-life games once every year or so. The series holds up pretty well. The only thing I've had issues with is some of the Xen areas in HL1. I've never really minded those parts, but something about running the game on a modern system makes some part of the platforming broken. The last time I played, I had to noclip my way around the final boss fight because one of the jump pads in the Nihilanth's chamber just wouldn't work and I couldn't get up to the higher points needed to kill him.

I took a vacation day so I could play it as soon as possible without having to worry about sleep. Took me about 5-and-a-half hours. Completely awesome. The ending is insane, but makes a weird sort of sense in-game.

Played CoD: BlOps over the weekend. I think it's the perfect candidate to counter Ebert's "games aren't art" argument. If ever a game tried to minimize player agency and intent, BlOps is it.

So there was a patch to Portal today, and the notes simply state: There are a bunch of in-game radios that now pick up mysterious transmissions when held at the right spot of a room, and an associated achievement for finding all 26 spots. There are a number of different news posts about it, like this one on Shack. There are about 17 minutes of Morse code among the new sound files, and hidden images have been found in some of them. Of course, this has led to all sort of speculation, including the possible announcement of Portal 2 or even Episode 3. I don't really have the patience (or much know-how) to try to solve things like this, but I like seeing where things go.

Don't know if anybody else noticed, but a number of indie games had a weird "Potato Fools Day" update on the 1st. Digging through the data has revealed more ARG-type stuff. Unknown whether or not it's related to Portal, but it is close to the release date. Details: http://valvearg.info/wiki/Valve_ARG_Wiki

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I figured it might be good to have a thread in the vein of IGN.com for new EA Presents games. I'll start with a few that may or may not be good. EA Presents: Atlas Slugged EA Presents: Catch .22 EA Presents: True Crime: Punishment (actually, that's probably more an Activision one...) EA Presents: Uncle Tom's Cannon EA Presents: A Farewell to Arms and Legs

Rev. Dr. M. L. King, Jr. You communist. I seem to dream on a somewhat regular basis, but almost never remember more than a few snippets or basic themes. I do, however, have the occasional vivid and hard-to-forget dream, and I took to writing them down a little while ago. Here's one that I think is video-game-related, because it happened shortly after Pokemon SoulSilver came out, and I think the game might have been mutated into this weirdness by my sleeping brain: I'm standing outside on a small grass lawn surrounded by red brick apartment buildings or townhouses. The space is possibly a backyard or small courtyard. I am also aware of the fact that I'm somewhere in Great Britain. I'm with a woman who I recognize as a friend, but cannot specifically identify. An older man stands next to a low pile of dirt, motioning to it and telling us to look at what's there. We move closer and look, seeing some sort of large green snake burrowing and writhing around amidst the dirt and grass. The man speaks some sort of warning and I back away to avoid being attacked. The animal leaves its burrow, transforming into a brown, ferret-like creature. It has wide eyes and its lips are pulled back to reveal long, needle-like teeth. The man shouts and gestures at the animal, attempting to scare it away. His hand gets too close, the animal lunges forward, and it bites the man. The man screams, holding his wrist, and the creature limps off to the other side of the yard. After a few seconds, a black sludge starts to ooze out of the man's eyes, nose, and mouth. I'm dumbstruck, and I'm not sure how to get help because I'm in England and 911 won't work. I turn to express this to my friend, who is on a cell phone, assuring me that emergency services have been alerted. The man slumps to the ground, the black ooze still issuing from his face, completely obscuring his features. As the emergency medics arrive with a stretcher, I move aside. I come upon the animal, which is now dead, lying stiffly on the grass. The medics put the man on their stretcher and carry him off. I turn to my friend and make the observation that at first the animal appeared to be a snake, but then transformed into the ferret-creature, which shouldn't happen in real life. As I realize this, the entire scene drops from underneath me, stretching and blurring into darkness below, and I wake up.

Love the Thumbs-esque "animation" back-and-forth. dP30WYgYiUI

Sounds awesome, but that line sort of weirds me out.

Nidhogg/Nidhoggr is a dragon from Norse mythology, which may go to explaining the presence of the dragon-serpent thing that's in the game. Although right now, searching Google for "Nidhogg" does return the game as the top result.

Announcement of the sequel piqued my interest in the first game, and I'm enjoying it so far. I look forward to finishing it and starting the wait for PA2.

I just started playing a Pathfinder game that's all wizards. It's interesting so far. I'd be up for whatever if a group needs an extra person, as long as it doesn't require time on Sunday evenings (when my real-life game is).

I'm loving it so far. It's got a great sense of humor beyond the excessive profanity. The only problem is that now I'm feeling this odd compulsion to commit sexual crimes. Well, more than usual, at least.

No, not today. I normally schedule my stalkings for Thursdays, to avoid the weekly Tuesday game releases. Even if there's nothing coming out that interests me, I find that these sort of things are best when you maintain some sort of regularity.

Man, you guys are being Negative Nellies. As soon as I wake up later today, I plan on wandering down to my local gamery and procuring a copy of this undoubtedly fine product.

DISCLAIMER: This post is mostly just enraged ranting, and can be dismissed as such. Or you can join in, or whatever. I've been dipping into my backlog recently in order to knock out some of the build-up before I'm distracted by all the good-looking releases coming in the next few months. It's been fun, and I've finally completed some great games, but as luck would have it, the last two games I finished ended up as exercises in frustration. First up is STALKER: Clear Sky. This one wasn't actually much of a surprise. Both STALKER games have been buggy and a bit unstable, and I knew full well what I was getting myself into. The only real problem I had was with the ending fight. After carefully making my way through teleportation anomalies and sharpshooting enemies, I finally get to face the final boss. I unsling the gauss rifle designed to penetrate his psionic shield, take aim, fire, and... nothing happens. His health bar doesn't move. He doesn't move. He doesn't even shoot. He stands there, shouting things I can't understand because the localization team decided that his incidental dialog didn't need to be in English. I spend the next ten minutes trying desperately to kill him, to no avail. I subsequently did a few searches online, and found out that a great number of people had experienced the same bug, and there wasn't much I could do to try and fix it. A quick trip to YouTube to watch the ending video, and all was well. Overall, it wasn't much of a big deal. The ending bug was the only real problem I had run into the whole game. Unfortunately, its proximity to another end-game bug helped to magnify my anger at the next game's problems. The second culprit? Crysis. Again, I had a lot of fun playing the majority of the game. But this time, there were so many little things that happened, it completely ruined my playing experience. First was the flying sequence. Not really hard, but one of the worst-implemented scripted events I've seen. I'm flying a VTOL aircraft, tasked with defending to other aircraft while we make our way through a small canyon, rescuing soldiers along the way. The problem is that the VTOL's movement is extremely sluggish, and the other scripted aircraft continue about their course completely unaware of my situation. By the time I've finished clearing an area of aliens, they've already taken off and found some more guys to rescue, and more aliens to be attacked by. They reached the objective, declaring, “Yes! We made it!” as I'm still only halfway through the canyon, and it takes me another 3-4 minutes to reach the end. Then I'm aboard an aircraft carrier. There were a few groans and some head-shaking at some of the inaccuracies during the lead-up to the attack on the ship (I used to not only be in the US Navy, but was also qualified as a Reactor Operator on an aircraft carrier), but hey, it's a video game. I can forgive that. The real issues are, once again, during the final boss battle. The gun I need to use won't lock on the the boss. After restarting the game, the locking is back, but now the major piece of cover doesn't physically exist. I can see it, but it doesn't collide with any other geometry, so its function as cover when re-arming at the nearby weapon cache is now useless. When I finally kill the boss, there's a checkpoint and an auto-save, after which I instantly die. I re-load. I die. I re-load. I die. As it turns out, the game saved right as an alien was in the middle of a lethal attack, leaving me to experience the final result of that attack every time I started from the checkpoint. I had to start over from a mid-fight save in order to kill the boss again and finally, actually survive the fight. I have never been more frustrated with a game. I felt like snapping my keyboard in half. All the fun and interesting things that had happened up to that point were completely overshadowed by the buggy, glitchy ending, and now I'm much less interested in playing the expansion or upcoming sequels. Now, I say "PC gaming" because I really can't see something like this happening on a console. I'd like to think that the prolonged testing and certification process that a game goes through in order to be released on a console would have fixed these problems, but who knows. The PC is still my favored platform for almost any game you'd care to mention, but FUCK! It can be a real pain in the ass sometimes.

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Hey guys, how 'bout them internet videos? Some of them are pretty funny, huh? gF_qQYrCcns

It's part of their marketing campaign for Bulletstorm. Can't wait for that to come out.

Makes me think more of a bouncy, excited puppy than a "creepy" insect.

No wonder I've been getting a bunch of TA friend adds today. It's probably me who has all the Fallout 3 PC achievements. Yes, I will admit to using the console to get them, but if you look at my games again, you'll see that there's another entry for Fallout 3 on X360, where I got all of the achievements legitimately. I bought both versions of the game thinking that they'd be the same achievement track, found out they weren't, and figured hey, fuck it, I'm going to get my money's worth.

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