Hot diggety damn. I just finished my first runthrough of Dragon Age: Origins. What a funking awesome game. It was such an enjoyable experience, I'll definately visit Ferelden again.

And immediately after finishing DAO, I started with Mass Effect 2. Up to now I am awed. Again, epic as the first part. Just the opening scene, a killer.

I've been playing this very small demo now for some 4 hours I am seriously surprised at how much fun the demo with it's limited amount of content already brings. There are 4 difficulty modes: Easy, Normal, Advanced and Expert. Now the first 3 won't pose any difficulties if you go only with any decent team of fps players, the first two being very easy and Advanced being rather easy. But Expert mode is really something else.

The Director, as Valve calls the AI engine, is a brilliant piece of engineering. If you think you can rest and camp out for 10 seconds somewhere the Director suddenly throws a raging horde of zombies at you. If it gets too easy it throws a Witch or 2 at you, and if it "feels" particularly nasty, the Director will throw a Tank at you. These babies look nasty in the downloadable movies, but they are bad when you're running around with all the hordes running around. Especially hard does it get when the Tank manages to take down 1 or 2 of your team mates. This boss really requires a team effort where there's strafing and shooting all around.

You can't be selfish in this game either, keeping health packs to yourself because if the team goes down the team goes down and you start the level all over again, with a total new challenge because the Director will spawn Bosses at different positions and responds to your reactions.

This is already a game I have no regrets in buying and I look forward to the full game in less than 2 weeks.

I cleaned out my now playing list. I prepped for Left 4 Dead, which will start taking up a lot of my time anyway in the coming months. TF2 will still be on there as the other multi-player I will probably play regularly. I have decided to just skip putting single player games on the list because I sometimes tend to take a while to finish them :p.

I downgraded Spore in my rating from 7.5 to 6. I stopped playing and actually have feeling at all to go back to the game. Some other games have had me on a break for a while but I always went back and finished them, but Spore just feels too much blah.

And looking at the huge amount of games both casuals, single player shooter, rpgs and adventure games I have more than enough time to waste on other titles before I should even consider wasting my precious game fun time.

I hope L4D is all it's promising to be, at least a lot of people around me are buying the game so I'll be able enjoy both the coop campaign and the versus mode in about 2 weeks.

I can't wait :D.

Since I bought Audiosurf for almost no money last week, I browsed through the Steam store bins and decided to buy some more nice goodies. Now I almost have that female feeling of satisfaction after having bought something, but I actually already have that after buying any new game, music CD, DVD or any gadget or PC item. This time I added Ninja Reflex, Everyday Shooter and the Best of Underground Pack which includes Eets, Rag Doll Kung Fu, Gumboy Crazy Adventures and Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved. I love my kung-fu :).

It's good to have some casual/indie titles to refresh my mind at times in-between my longer sessions playing either ETQW or TF2, which are my most played MP titles. TF2 probably takes the win atm though. After playing ETQW for 1400 hours I needed a little breather into another title.

The only thing still missing in DD is the true bargain bin. Just going to a store around the corner and finding a game dirt cheap because they need the shelf space. But maybe that also means my ever growing games collection will finally slow down and will allow me to be able to play the games that I have been buying. 8)

A few weeks ago, I already decided to leave my clan and at the same time reset my stats. The latter simply because the only thing I was focused on was trying to get better in the melee top 10, trying to get back on the first page of the statistics page.

I was actually more focused on stats and thus stats whoring than enjoying the game and gaming in general. This is one of the reasons I quit playing World of Warcraft in the past. Luckily I asked myself again, why do I play games and have I been playing games for so long now (at the unrespectable age I am :) ). I play to have fun, to enjoy myself, to kick it, to funk around, to fly out of my mind, to take a trip, to immerse myself in the story, to doodly dee as an extension of real life NOT WORK :). I have work that pays so there I need to work. And stat whoring, farming, grinding, raiding, gathering is all a big **** to turn the actual game into work again.

This week I made the switch from pure ETQW to a mixed bunch. I bought some smaller games: Audiosurf, which is a lot of fun to play with your music, Ninja Reflex, which is just a casual game to train visual reflexes, and I bought Gears of War and SWAT4 (bargain bin).

I also picked up TF2 again, which is a lot of fun and makes for a hell of a lot of mayhem.

Just worked my way through DOOM 3 RoE level 3, so I have that sitting for another day.

Time spend to date:
694 hours

Rank:

Supreme Commander

Overall Ranking: 29th
Melee Ranking: 20th (Back Stabbing for the win)

http://stats.enemyterritory.com/profile/bFunk?page=summary

I've been playing Quake Wars now for some 10 hours and I just have to say that I love it. It's an improved Wolfenstein:ET. Finally a game without a WW2 theme, it's got vehicles and it's very objective focused, which I must say is harder on public servers. So far I've only been exploring some of the classes (soldier, engineer, part of covert ops). It's a game that allows for more flexibility in enjoying the game. Even within classes you can still make a choice. Do I go for camp/sniping as Covert Ops or do I go for sabotage/killing undercover as Covert Ops.

Once the Orange Box is released I'll see what happens between the different MPs I have. I am not playing three different MP games. The choice between Counter-Strike, TF2 and QW will be a hard one, although I won't miss CSS as much. There haven't been any new official maps for ages now, and I don't expect new maps either. TF2 and QW on the other hand are relatively new (they are ofcourse update). So I hope there will be some updates from the game developer on some new maps also after release.

Well, I got back from Mexico last Sunday. It was a hell of a flight back because my oldest son threw up twice in the plane. He must have been dead tired from friday's party and then the next day a very long trip home. Anyway, after about a week now, I am more or less back in this time-zone (I've already spent a full week atwork).

I started back on my regular visits to Rapture which is still blowing me away, the game has such beauty. I get immersed in a world that feels so out of the ordinary and yet so much fun to visit. The only thing that has bugged me today is that I have constant crashes of the game, so I am now waiting for a reinstall to finish to see if that does the trick. I already downgraded to the last WHQL drivers under XP, but if this works I will upgrade again to the latest beta driver which supposedly has BioShock fixes.

Well, I'm off for some well deserved vacation. I will spend 2.5 weeks in sunny Mexico and will wager a trip into the US. Let's see if there's some nice game bargains I can pick up while on the other side of the Atlantic. My hard euros will give me loads of dollar value atm.

I might update these pages, but on the other hand, I might not :)

I ordered it, got called today by my local game store and had my wife pick it up (isn't she a sweet heart). Big daddy be prepared, and 8800GTX be prepared to suffer! :)