Got Spore on Saturday and I’ve been playing it more or less non-stop since then. It was very, very fun! A lot more fun than I expected from the reviews. I don’t blame the reviewers since the game had been hyped for the past three years. I think the cell stage sucks and I don’t know if I’ll ever play it again. It’s very boring and there isn’t much to do other than eat red or green dots. The tribal stage was also boring and needs some tweaking - perhaps a la expansion pack. All the other stages have been a lot of fun - especially the creature stage.

I played some Beyond the Sword this weekend.  First game was my first civ game in what has to be at least half a year.  I’ve just been busy with other hobbies/games.  This was the first time I was actually able to have a Corporation.  I built the Sushi and Cereal corporations.  Pretty interesting concept.  And I founded one or two cities in my neighbor civ and they opened branches all over their land.  (More money for me!)

I heard this on The Linux Outlaws Episode 42 and I thought it was a pretty awesome idea.  Up until now Valve has been pretty hostile towards people asking them to release onto Linux, even threatening to ban anyone who brought it up in the forums.  Apparently someone has convinced them of the merits because here’s the story that led Linux Outlaws to report the headline.

My brother, who is really into video games, has informed me that pretty much every computer game developer plans to release via Steam in the near future.  This means that most people, who are always mentioning their only reason for keeping Windows around is to play games, can finally get rid of Windows for good!

This song is awesome and, best of all, it’s been released under a Creative Commons license, so I can share it with you all without fear of the RIAA breathing down my neck!

I first heard Code Monkey on a recent episode of Linux Outlaws. It’s a song about a code monkey who is having a hard time with his boss and with unrequited office love. It’s a tale any code monkeys will find familiar. You can either download it at this post or, if that takes too long, off of Jonathan Coulton’s blog. His l ast.fm page says he came out with a new song a year for a whole year, so check that out. There may be some other really awesome ones.

Ever since I first started playing computer games in elementary school there have been three categories of games that I’ve loved: puzzle games (eg Lemmings, Tetris, Puzzle Bobble), simulation games (eg Sim City), and real-time strategy games and the related turn-based strategy games (eg Command and Conquer, Warcraft, Civilization).  I play other types of games periodically, but these are the ones I always return to.

There are essentially 3 main RTS games and all other games usually license their game engines.  These are Command and Conquer (C&C), Warcraft (WC), and Age of Empires (AoE).  I cut my teeth, so to speak, on C&C with a disc a friend lent me so we could play against each other over the net.  I then played a shareware version of WC and a demo version of AoE.

I’m writing this Sunday, but I am trying to limit my blog posts to one a day so that there can be something for my readers each and every day.

I couldn’t wait for Mario Kart Wii to come out. The Mario Kart series has been my favorite on the Nintendo and Mario Kart Double Dash is the reason why my wife bought a Gamecube. We’ve had countless hours of fun playing and when the release got post postponed until today we were pretty bummed. So today we were at Best Buy right when it opened to make sure we’d be able to get a copy. There were enough, although I wouldn’t be surprised if they sold out by the end of the day.

I received Super Mario Galaxy for Christmas and I must say that I’m quite happy with the gift.  This is the most talked about Wii game for the end of 2007 and not without reason.  Everyone who’s into gaming kept mentioning that Mario Galaxy is the true successor to Super Mario 64 on the Gamecube.  Pretty much everyone, myself included, thinks that Mario Sunshine was a piece of sod that should never have been made.  Mario Galaxy, on the other hand, has a lot of the same charm that made SM64 so much fun to play.  My only complaint, and this is a very tiny one, is that the puzzles are a bit easier than Mario 64.  I remember racking my brain with my brother trying to figure out how to get the each of the stars for SM64.  With Mario Galaxy, I feel that most of the stars are a lot easier to get.  However, as I write this blog post I realize that I played Super Mario 64 approximately 10 years ago, so it’s possible that the puzzles that were so hard for me back then would not be quite as hard now.  That said, I beat the game in two days with about 20 hours of gameplay.  That is, I beat the final Bowser, but was only about half way through collecting all of the stars.

The word irreverent is tossed around way too flippantly these days, however, if there’s one site that deserves it, it’s ZeroPunctuation. ZeroPunctuation is a site where a British guy living in Australia reviews video games within a video format weekly. He often makes fun of games and the genres they belong in. The animation is extremely simple, yet remarkably effective. It’s slightly more than xkcd, but not much more than stick figures. The way he does this is brilliant and it must be seen in order to explain it correctly. Just one warning, if you get queasy over profanity, do NOT visit his site.

My brother introduced me to “Guitar Hero” over the summer. I couldn’t really get into it at the time. There were basically two reasons for this. First of all, I just wasn’t in the mood for that type of game on the day he brought it over. However, the concept stayed with me and whenever I hear rock songs, I imagine how easy or hard they would be to play in “Guitar Hero”. The other reason I didn’t get into the game when Dan brought it over is that I didn’t know any of the songs, but one or two. It’s really hard to get into playing the guitar for a song you’re not really into.

Sales have been low however. Read about it in this fine newspaper.