Let's take a look at what I've picked up this month (SPOILERS, GOD DAMMIT):
- The Orange Box
- Portal -- Surprisingly high quality. The weighted companion cube is my only friend. I thought this would be shit, but the writing talents of the Old Man Murray guys make it the best release of the package. *pulls shirt off* WE LOVE YOU CUBE
- Episode Two -- It was okay, but short. The muscle car is awesome. The battle near the end is dull. Alyx is much less one-dimensional, and the house raid sequence is brilliant.
- TF2 -- Those of you that know I've been playing TF since 1999 know that I really like TF. I didn't like TFC, though. But TF2 is TF, and not TFC. So I want to make babies with it. Too bad my work PC's GPU can't handle the strain and crashes often. But at home -- aw yeah, double jump.
- Peggle Extreme -- Popcap has a sick fucking sense of humour. I love it.
- Phantom Hourglass -- I like it. It's not very hard, except my hand is always in the way of what's going on the screen. Nintendo: I can't see through my hand.
- Metroid Prime 3 -- I haven't even opened this yet.
- Final Fantasy XII -- Zellers had a sale on PS2s. I picked one up. I can't play the game until next month. I've been trolling games stores for copies of FF IX as well, since IMNSHO that was the last "true" FF game.
- Perfect Dark Zero -- I haven't even picked this up from Purolator yet.
- Viva Pinata -- Ditto.
- Worms XBLA -- I played a lot of this with various people who came inside the bounding box of my home. It's great, except it's hard to read the little health numbers, even on an HDTV, from across the room.
- Hellgate London Beta:
Okay, seriously. What the fuck. How many years have you been working on this? The game runs okay, but the UI chops along at 5-10FPS. This is unacceptable because half the game is the UI. On the plus side, the game respects Windows very well (doesn't take long to come up, alt-tabbing works well, it respects my resolution settings -- very nice!).
The multiplayer mode seems wholly superfluous, and I hope they aren't wasting a lot of money running these "hub" servers, because they're completely useless. I'd rather start a server and play with my four buds than wander aimlessly through a London train station packed with illiterate ethnic thugs armed with guns. I can do that for free.
Also, your installer and beta distribution is completely unacceptable -- if two multigigabyte files are the exact same, don't call one "Part 1" and the other "Part 2" and tell me to download them both.
I'll pick up the Mac port in a year or so, because at least then the game will be finished. Maybe then I won't get stuck on geometry while unbalanced boss demons whale on my helpless ass.
I've also been looking at new cars since the Cavalier is really getting on my nerves lately. The Honda Fit gave me a fun test drive and is cheaper than all hell. However, going home I saw a Volvo C-30. I'm in love. Too bad it's twice the price of the Fit (three times if I take the 227 horsepower turbocharged ass-on-fire edition).
As for Novarunner, the "jumping" vignette is now done, or at least getting closer to it. I think I might spend tonight implementing sound.
