Happy 26th December everyone, I hope you all had a great Christmas. I'm having a good time back down in the south of England spending my two weeks break from university with my family and I've received some great presents. From my best friend I got a really nice CD and from my family (well, mainly my mum) I've got a black 16GB iPod Nano, a bunch of chocolate, Dragon Age: Origins for the Xbox 360, as well as Counter-Strike: Source, Garry's Mod, Braid and Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2 from Steam. It means a lot to me that they got me the iPod particularly because my family don't have much money and while the gifting of that present was somewhat to balance out the fact that my younger brother had demanded a HD TV for Christmas, I still don't expect presents like this from them. I must say the Steam holiday sale has been pretty amazing though, the four games they got me only came to about £23 with Braid currently going for less than £2, Steam never cease to amaze me with their sales.

My experiments in Garry's Mod have been pretty enjoyable so far and I've been surprised how easy it is to just sit around in the game for a while playing with simple objects and tools and still have fun. I feel like I'm still picking up on how manipulate objects in certain ways though and I currently have no idea how to program in Lua, but knowing a couple of other languages I hope I can pick it up reasonably quickly.

Braid has been an enchanting game to play through. I do have some experience with the game having played through the lengthy demo before, but the puzzling concepts of the game still seem innovative and very clever. I've also actually been properly following the story on this play-through and I've found it surprisingly deep and compelling. It's a shame I'm nearing the end of the game because it's been so good.

I have yet to try out Counter-Strike: Source, Dragon Age: Origins and Dawn of War 2. Counter-Strike: Source just happens to be something I haven't got around to trying out yet, Dragon Age: Origins is a game I feel I should really put aside until I can focus solely on committing my time to that single game and Dawn of War 2 I've been having technical issues with. The game went through all its necessary setup but when I've tried to launch it it's just displayed a crash report with no real detail on what's gone wrong. I've deleted the local content and am currently downloading it again from Steam. Looks like I may have a bit of a problem on my hands.

I've also been playing a bit of Team Fortress 2 and all the content in the Soldier/Demoman update is great. The war between the Soldier and the Demoman also got really tense towards the end, who would have known it would be so close? The last thing I was expecting though was for Valve to announce after the Soldier/Demoman update that they were working on a new update to add bots to the game. With them pulling out all the stops for this stuff it makes me wonder what they could possibly have up their sleeve for the final class update but knowing Valve they'll find some way to impress us.

Lastly I've played some of my brother's copy of Borderlands since I've been back down here for Christmas. Everything about the game seems like it really has the potential to be awesome but I'm finding it a little hard to get into. I think this might be another case where I'll need to put the game to one side until I know I can focus on it properly. Still, there's nothing like slaughtering a huge Skag nest with an incendiary pistol and a turret.

That's it for this blog. I hope you all enjoy the New Year and I'll leave you with this rather impressive piece of work, the Halo Periodic Table.

-Gamer_152