The Walking Dead (14 hours) - I played the latest episode of The Walking Dead.  Because you can’t just save wherever you want, I ended up with 14 hours of playtime.  I still haven’t finished episode 4.

I started a new feature over on Dan’s blog since his blog is so focused on video games.  It’s called You Never Forget Your First Time and it’s about reliving the first moments with a game.  The first entry is here.

Team Fortress 2 (5 hrs) - a lot of this time was spent testing out my new private server which I described setting up in this post.

Civilization V (1 hr) - played a little bit in the game I’m documenting at onemoreturn.ericsbinaryworld.com .  Been too busy to play much more than that.

Saints Row: The Third (<1 hr) - Saints Row’s lack of a tight narrative may make it easy for me to step back into it when I have some free time, but it also makes it lack a compelling reason to come back.

I first heard about virtual machines about six to seven years ago.  I couldn’t see a point in wanting to run another computer inside your computer.  A few years ago I used VMs to test and blog about Linux distros.  In the past year I’ve used it to preview new features in Fedora while the next version was in beta.  This week I used them in the most useful way yet: to test server software before implementing them on my public, paid server.  These were some of easiest installs I’ve ever done - even easier than Wordpress’ famous Five Minute Install.

The Walking Dead  (7 hrs) - I had no reason to play this game.  I like point and click adventure games, but I don’t read The Walking Dead or watch the TV show.  I don’t really care much for zombie games although I’m not opposed to them.  But the same was on sale during the Steam Summer Sale and Dan bought it for me.  This is a really, really good game.  While you can probably really appreciate it if you’re a fan of the comic or TV show, I’m enjoying it without the need to know anything about what happens in that fiction.  I think is easily accomplished because the game serves as a prequel to the comic (and, by extension, loosely a prequel to the tv show as well).  So I don’t need to really know anything or have unnecessary character exposition to set up the world.  You’re playing as the zombie apocalypse happens.

Civ V (11 Hrs) - talk of the expansion pack made me want to play some more Civ.  I played a scenario and then I played a regular game.  I had a blast and I can’t wait to buy the expansion pack.

Peggle Deluxe (5 hrs) - Worked on some of the challenge puzzles

Team Fortress 2 - (3 hrs) - played when the Pyro pack came out.  Really enjoyed the new mode.

Just one game while waiting to feed my daughter

Portal 2  (1 hour) - Just played some commentary levels.  It was fun, but the inability to save in that mode kept me from doing it more

Got a little bit of time to play games while waiting to do midnight feeds.  I’ve already spoken about these games a bunch of times, so it’s going to be a short post.

Civilization V (2 hrs)

Team Fortress 2 (2 hrs)

Cities XL (1 hr) - fun, but I can’t wait for Sim City 5 to come out!

Peggle Deluxe (1 hr)

Mass Effect 2 (19 hrs) - I knew my wife was getting close to delivering our first child, so I was rushing as quickly as I could to save the galaxy.  I got to it with one week to spare.  Phew!  I didn’t enjoy the story as much as Mass Effect 1, but the gameplay was orders of magnitude better.  For one thing I didn’t have to worry about having too many guns.  (A frequent problem in the first entry)  I also enjoyed the characters a little more (some of them, anyway).  I ended up doing a lot more side missions and I felt they were well designed.  If too much time doesn’t pass between when I finished the game and when I get free time to blog, I’ll do a writeup on Mass Effect 2 and how I liked it vs the first one.  However, it would mostly be a long-winded version of what I said above and with the baby…. well, don’t hold your breath.

There aren’t any new games on here, so I’m only going to mention some quick comments on each.

Plants vs Zombies (29  hrs) - threw a bunch of hours into this game because I just had a handful of achievements left and for some reason I wanted to finish it off.  2 or 3 to go

Civilization V (9 hrs) - still love this game.  I wish I had more time for it