Just a quick update (entering this straight into the message field in GS - please excuse spelling/grammar errors) - i've been away a lot lately and am going away again this Saturday for another week. My absence can be attributed to work, and vacation, the latter of which was rather exciting as I got to climb some of the highest mountains in the lower 48 states of the USA - the highest of which was about 14,500 feet tall, called Mt. Massive, which is the third highest mountain in the lower 48. I climbed 2 other mountains over 14,000 feet, and i'm pretty damn proud of it. I also drove for an entire day which was terrible, all the way from Price, Utah to Vancouver, Canada, which was a 1,700km drive. Well, the way I put it was a bit misleading, I didn't do all the driving, but I was in a car that drove said distance. You know what I mean.

Now onto the free games - when I got back from the trip I quickly found out about Alien Swarm, the free co-op game released by Valve recently, based on a mod. Its pretty fun, I played through the game LAN with a friend and we had a good time. I've spent about 6 hours in the game and i'll probably play a bit more because its pretty fun, but I cant see myself playing it a lot.

More significantly, I managed to get into the beta for Company of Heroes online, which i'm super excited about because Relic is my favorite developer, and Company of Heroes is my favorite RTS of all time and one of my favorite games of all time. So far i'm absolutely astounded by how much you get in this game - which will be free on release - its basically the original Company of Heroes with a more flushed out multiplayer component. You get the entire singleplayer campaign, the full set of tutorial missions + a new set of tutorial missions for the Axis faction. You get 17 maps and 4 game sizes (1vs 1 - 4 vs 4) across 2 game modes, each of which can be played online with humans or against AI - which is pretty damn good. I can barely get my head around the fact that this is all free - and still in beta - since its already pretty polished and balanced, although so far there are barely any people online.

I'll be getting Starcraft 2 when it comes out on Tuesday, a fact which may shock some of you is that I have never played a Blizzard game before, so i'm interested to see how I like it. From what i've seen, I doubt it will become one of my favorite RTS games, but i'm guessing that I will still enjoy it. I hope there are other incompetent players online. I will probably be reviewing the game at NGN at some point, maybe mid August, but it may be later than that.

I Recently finished System Shock 2 for the first time which was an incredible experience, it would probably go in my list at around #4 but its fresh in my memory so that may change.