this shouldn’t be necessary

This site might be called “Shouts From the Couch,” but I haven’t truly been angry, like shouting-level angry, in a long time.   I might get ornery from time to time, but I’m in my mid-30s, and being ornery sorta comes with the territory.  But the essential point I’m driving towards is that at this point in my life, I feel like I shouldn’t have to put up with the stuff that annoys me, and so I don’t.  If this means that I’m missing out on something important, then so be it; it’s my life, and I’d rather spend my time (and my money) on stuff that doesn’t drive me crazy.

This is partly why I don’t do a lot of online multiplayer – or, rather, why I don’t go online with people that I don’t know.  I’m a lot more competitive than I care to admit, and I hate losing; that’s on me.  But some 13-year-old kid calling me a faggot because he shot me in the face with a shotgun before I could shoot him in the face with a shotgun – that’s on him, and it makes my blood pressure boil just thinking about it.  This is also why I tend to stay out of comment sections on gaming websites; there can be – not all the time, of course, but it happens enough – there can be a level of ignorance and casual racism/sexism/hate-ism found there that simply can’t be ignored unless you stay away from it altogether.

And what pisses me off about this the most is that it’s this particular level of bullshit that tends to define the community as a whole.  None of my friends do this; none of my favorite writers do this; the gaming sites I visit crack down on this as much as they can.   But ultimately, it doesn’t matter how much money the Child’s Play charity raises; it just takes one homophobic, racist asshole in a Halo match or a comment section to spoil the party for everyone.

And if I seem to be taking this a little personally, well, it’s because it is personal.  I happen to have a very good friend who inadvertently blew up the internet a little bit yesterday, and it wasn’t even her fault.  All she was doing was giving a video review on L.A. Noire for Gamespot.  It’s a well-written, informative review, and she did an excellent job translating the written word into the video review.  There’s no controversy in that, right?  The fact that she’s transgender is totally incidental and has nothing to do with anything, except that a bunch of idiots kept writing ignorant and hateful and totally stupid comments, and that’s the part of the story that took on a life of its own and ended up on Kotaku.

She is a much better writer than I, and she has her own response to the story here.

Hate is hate, and ignorance is ignorance.  She did not choose to become transgender; nobody chooses that, in the same way that nobody chooses to be gay or straight or black or white.  You are what you are.  And considering how much bullshit she’s had to put up with even before she became a professional games writer – I mean, nobody in their right mind would choose to live a life that invited such ignorance and hatred.   I don’t want to speak for her, but it seems to me that all she wants to do is to be happy and live the life that she wants to live.   She’s not inviting anything.  That doesn’t require anything from anybody else.  The people that were offended by her video review – that’s on them.  That’s their problem.  And while a great deal of the GS community rushed to her defense and shut those assholes up, it still reflects poorly on the community as a whole.

I don’t really know what to do about this.  I’m not sure that my friend does, either.  She didn’t sign up for this job in order to be a spokesperson for the transgender community; she signed up for this job because she’s been passionate about videogames for her entire life, and she got hired because she’s an excellent writer and knows her stuff and she makes the gaming press better as a result.  If we as the community can’t deal with her sexuality, which is something that is totally irrelevant to her actual job, then we don’t deserve her.  And I think we would suffer as a result.

L.A. Noire – first impressions

According to Rockstar’s Social Club, I’m 3 cases into L.A. Noire; that includes the tutorial stuff that leads off the game.  So maybe narrow that down to 2 real, full-length cases, combining all the different gameplay elements:  evidence collecting, witness interviews, and interrogations.* I’ve hunted down 2 hidden cars, found 1 landmark (without meaning to), and I think I’m up to level 5.

It’s an incredible experience, is the short version.  It feels, in many ways, like the natural evolution of the classic adventure game – you explore environments and objects, you converse with a colorful cast of characters, you’re essentially solving puzzles.  There are comparisons to be made to other games – Phoenix Wright, Heavy Rain – but this still feels very much like its own thing.

It most certainly is not Grand Theft Auto 1947, and that’s to be applauded.  It’s an open world in the sense that you can drive around and explore, but you don’t get your missions from random people on the street, and you can’t cause wonton destruction on a whim.  The detail of the world – the little that I’ve seen of it, at any rate – is amazing.  You’ll want to take your time and take it all in, rather than zooming by and blowing things up.

The much-ballyhooed facial animation is, in a word, stunning.  Jaw-dropping.  It’s so good, in fact, that it has a tendency to work against itself at times; it’s very clear that these incredible faces are attached to normal, video-game bodies.  Most of the time, this isn’t that big a deal – when you’re interviewing someone and trying to determine if they’re lying or not, almost 99% of the time they’re sitting down, behind a desk or table.  But when you’re walking around (or chasing someone), the animation feels canned – and this is only noticeable because the facial animation is in a different class entirely.

It also brings up a somewhat disconcerting point, which is that – at least in the early going, when everything is purposefully exaggerated in order to emphasize how to play the game – the animation is so good that it ends up revealing the actor acting, as opposed to the character reacting.  Again, I understand that in these first few cases, everybody’s probably being told by the director to really emphasize their emotional state, but it’s a little jarring and unintentionally, weirdly meta.  The dialogue is somewhat stilted to fit the period, and none of the lines are delivered in any sort of naturalistic way.  (And I’m probably hyper-aware of this particular bit because Stephen Merchant’s performance as Portal 2’s Wheatley is possibly the best example of what a naturalistic approach should be.  To wit:  it sounds like a real person talking, instead of someone reading words off of a script.)

This last bit dovetails into the question of whether this technology has a viable future in the videogame industry.  I have absolutely no idea how expensive it is to produce, but it’s clearly the best option out there by far, and as videogames get more and more complex (and attract more A-list talent), one could see this technology really taking off (especially in stuff like, say, Mass Effect).  But it also means that videogame scripts can’t be as terrible and generic as they currently are, because a disinterested actor will produce an especially disinterested performance.  The biggest thing holding videogames back – and certainly the main quality that separates the truly great games from the pretty good ones – is the quality of the script.  The best voice acting (and facial animation) in the world can’t disguise terrible dialogue.

Lastly, I wish the mini-map was a little better at telling you how to get to your chosen destination.

__________________

*I botched some of the questions in the second case (the one involving an abandoned car by the railway) but still got it resolved – I think I’m going to play it again, just to make sure I understand the technical difference between “Doubt” and “Lie” in the interrogations.  (It seems to me that the main difference between the two is that if you think someone is lying but don’t have any evidence to back it up, you select “Doubt”.  It’s a minor semantics issue; I feel like “Doubt” is too passive a description when faced with an obvious liar, but didn’t understand what it actually meant in literal gameplay terms until the game clearly told me that I’d made a mistake.)

dusting off

Sorry, again, for the hiatus.  Couldn’t be helped.

A quick rundown of the last few weeks:

1.  Finished Mortal Kombat‘s story mode, albeit on Beginner difficulty.  Shao Kahn is a jerk.  It really is a fantastic game, and I really wish I was better at fighting games – or even really just gave a crap about the genre in general, because it’s an incredible experience and a great value.

2.  Did as much damage with Virtua Tennis 4 as I was willing to do.  It would be difficult to choose between VT4 and Top Spin 4 in terms of value, but if we’re just talking about the actual tennis, Top Spin cleans up and it’s not even close.

3.  Put about an hour into Motorstorm Apocalypse, in spite of the PSN being down.  Big fat “meh”, is all I have to say.  I’d rather play Split/Second – which I ended up doing, at least for a little while.

4.  Bought too many iPhone games:

  • 100 Rogues (a rogue-like which was free for a day; haven’t touched it)
  • Falling Fred (free; meh)
  • Frisbee (free; meh)
  • Coin Drop (.99; would rather play Peggle)
  • Gears (beautiful, but got difficult very fast)

Still haven’t finished Sword & Sworcery; got hung up on a boss fight and haven’t come back to it, which is stupid.

5.  Tonight is all about L.A. Noire; impressions will happen tomorrow.

Weekend recap: so much blood

My stated intentions last week were, to be sure, a bit vague; with Tiger 12 out of the house and out of my life I had nothing solid to commit to besides finally sinking my teeth into Sword & Sworcery for the iPhone.  Steam had nothing I wanted for sale.  I had a bizarre urge to play GTA4 on the PC, but somewhere between last summer and now they installed some SecuROM bullshit and I couldn’t get my perfectly valid and paid-for copy to open correctly.

I did spend some time – not a lot, but enough – with Mortal Kombat, which arrived via Gamefly on Saturday.  I’m no fighting game enthusiast – it’s the genre I suck at the most, besides real-time strategy – but even I must concede that this is the most complete package ever put on disc.  And it genuinely seems to want me to get better at it.  I dove right in to the Story mode, which is completely insane but very well done, I must admit.  After a few chapters, though, I realized that the enemies were getting tougher and I wasn’t getting any better, and I probably needed to try some tutorials and dive into the Challenge Tower.  I can’t say that my game has improved at all, but I think I understand it a bit easier.  It’s certainly very accessible, in a way that Street Fighter 4 wasn’t.  I’ve been debating whether or not to keep it; I don’t know if I’ll ever be any good at it, but I can’t deny that it’s pretty goddamned fun.

But ultimately the weekend belonged to Sword & Sworcery, which is, on the one hand, a very slow action/adventure game, but on the other hand is an incredibly immersive and atmospheric experience with one of the best soundtracks I’ve ever heard.  (Seriously – I even bought the soundtrack.)  The game doesn’t really have a lot of depth, but I’m not sure that’s really the point; it’s just a remarkable experience.

WAYPTW: April 29

In this week’s edition of What Are You Playing This Weekend, I find I don’t have a solid answer.

1.  I gave up on Tiger Woods 12.  I kinda feel stupid and sheepish about admitting it – it’s just a game, it’s not a big deal, I don’t know why I’m taking it so personally that (a) I gave up on it and (b) I hated it so much.  But, I mean, look – I’m a grown man.  I don’t have to play anything I don’t want to play, and if the putting game feels less of a reflection of my actual skill and more like a rubber-band AI cheat, and it’s going to cause me to throw my controller through a window, then I have every right to send the game back to Gamefly and not think about it ever again.  It’s just a shame because the rest of it was really quite enjoyable, and I was kinda looking forward to spending some more quality time with it.  Truth be told, I wouldn’t be surprised if I found myself renting it again.  I’m so goddamned weak.

2.  I had been looking forward to the impending release of Duke Nukem Forever – Amazon still had my pre-order listed as arriving on Tuesday, May 3rd.  Alas, I’d forgotten that Gearbox had delayed it until June.  In any event, I still might play a bit more Duke 3D on XBLA.

3.  I’m also going to try and get the one last single-player achievement in Portal 2 that I haven’t gotten yet – Smash TV.

4.  Maybe Steam has something on sale?  I bought Metro 2033 last weekend and played the first 10 minutes or so.  Very atmospheric; very Russian.  I’m kinda itching to try Fallout New Vegas on the PC, also; I can’t explain where that particular itch is coming from.

5.  I’ve got a TON of new-ish iPhone games to play:  Sword & Sworcery, Gears, Zenonia 3.

And so:  what are you playing this weekend?

Putts

I guess there is nothing that will get your mind off everything like golf will. I have never been depressed enough to take up the game, but they say you can get so sore at yourself that you forget to hate your enemies.
– Will Rogers

I am trying to enjoy Tiger Woods ’12, but the putting game is making me angry.  Like, literally angry, like I want to throw my controller through the TV angry, like rage-quitting-and-going-to-bed-angry angry.

The more I practice, the luckier I get.
– unknown

I appreciate that in real life, putting is difficult.  I appreciate that in real life, golf in general is difficult, and there are lots of pithy witticisms about golf being a “good walk spoiled” and all that.  But this is not real life.  This is a videogame.  And so when I correctly line up my putt, and pull back on my swing at the correct strength, and when the putt is three goddamned feet away, I expect to make that shot.  And the only reason why it doesn’t go in is because of some arbitrary algorithm that says that my golfer’s putting skills aren’t high enough to make gimme putts.  It doesn’t matter that I’ve been playing Tiger games for 8 years now; it only matters that this year’s edition of Jervo McNervo has weak putting skills.

The least thing upsets him on the links. He missed short putts because of the uproar of butterflies in the adjoining meadows.
– P.G. Wodehouse

Putting business aside, the rest of the game is actually pretty good.  The omnipresent caddy can get annoying, but you can always ignore him.  The career mode is the nicest surprise – it actually makes sense.  You start by trying to get onto the Amateur Tour, and eventually you’ll make your way to the Masters.  You earn XP based on your actual performance in an event, and then you spend that XP on the skills you want to improve.  For what it’s worth, though, I’ve put the vast majority of my XP into making my putting better, and it’s actually gotten worse.

Hopefully this is the last of my Tiger ranting.

————–

Sony finally offered up an explanation of sorts yesterday, none of which made me feel any better about the state of things over there.  What a goddamned mess.  The Twitter-verse made me feel a lot better, though, and this Tumblr post cracked me up:

Tiger Woods 12: the first 10 minutes

Before I get started on Tiger ’12, I want to add my voice to the growing chorus that is (a) disappointed by the PSN outage and (b) utterly perplexed by Sony’s total lack of transparency and disclosure regarding the outage.

Couple things:

Not to keep bringing the console wars into this, but seriously:  you get what you pay for.   If Xbox Live is down even for an hour, Major Nelson and the rest of the Xbox crew are on top of it, tweeting and blogging and keeping the community as well-informed about what’s going on as possible.  Sure, people are going to bitch and moan, but those people are going to bitch and moan about everything.  The rest of us understand that shit happens; it’s just nice to know what’s going on.  It is a service that a lot of us pay for, and as such it’s nice to know that Microsoft is at least appearing to be concerned on our behalf.

On the other hand, Sony’s been pretty much totally quiet.  All they’ve said is that they suffered an “external intrusion,” which sounds downright naughty, but still it’s pretty goddamned vague.  Then there are other theories involving Anonymous, or, Steam, or some sort of custom firmware hack, or maybe the hamster wheel powering the network went offline.  There’s been some concern that PSN users’ credit card information may have been stolen; Sony hasn’t said a word about that.  They haven’t really said anything, and it’s now been almost a week.

(I’ll tell you what – I was going to buy Portal 2 on the Xbox360 anyway, but I’m really glad I did because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to play online co-op with anybody.  And if I’d bought Mortal Kombat, or SOCOM 4, I’d be totally screwed.)

I’m not quite ready to be outraged, but that’s probably because I do most of my gaming on the 360, which also has Netflix and all the other online stuff I’d be using.  I’m not a Plus member, so I’m not missing out on whatever I’d be missing out on.  Still, though:  this is embarrassing.

——————–

OK, back to Tiger.

Looking over my previous Tiger Woods posts, it appears that ’09 was my favorite (at least in terms of the current generation – I’m still awfully fond of the original Xbox games in the ’03-’04 era, which were full of crazy courses and had a much more arcade-y sensibility).  ’10 pissed me off right from the very start, and I can’t honestly remember if I played ’11.

In any event, ’12’s biggest change (aside from being slathered in MASTERS-ness, which is apparently a big deal to golf nerds) is the caddy feature, which more or less takes all the challenge out of setting up a shot.  The caddy gives you several shot options to choose from, and then you either pick one of them or set up your own.  I tend to like picking my own, and the problem I’m having is that for the most part, all I want to do is take one of the caddy’s suggestions and move it over a few feet, but if I even so much as gently nudge the thumbstick, I’m suddenly 20 yards away from where I want to be – the “custom” shot defaults to the max yardage for each club, which is a pain in the ass.

I will admit to liking the new caddy putting assist, which removes pretty much all of the challenge of reading the green – not that I don’t want some challenge when I putt, but it’s just that in previous Tiger games the putting game was dreadfully inconsistent in terms of sensitivity and control.  I’ve still muffed a few putts even with this new assist, but I can’t blame the game – one of the putts was messed up because one of my dogs jumped on my stomach during my wind-up and I ended up overshooting a 6-foot gimme by about 20 yards.

Anyway – I’ve played the introductory 9-hole course and went -2, and I’m generally liking the feel of the game so far.  I expect that this will tide me over for the next few weeks, right in time for L.A. Noire.

more Portal 2 ramblings

My official Examiner review of Portal 2 can be found here.  I literally just received an email from them saying that “it does not meet [their] criteria for local coverage.”  I’m not entirely sure what that means, or if it’s been removed from the site.  I’m not entirely sure that I care, either, but whatever.

I spent the weekend wrapped up in Portal 2.   I hunted down pretty much every single-player Achievement I could get (besides one), and I played co-op with a bunch of different people.  I ultimately finished the co-op campaign with my wife last night, which was a wonderful experience on a variety of levels but mostly because it’s fun playing games with my wife, and she legitimately appeared to have a good time.  I didn’t get the 360 achievement for it, though, and I guess that’s because I’d been playing it on both PC and 360 and lost track of which system I’d finished a given level on.*

The co-op campaign is brilliant.  The puzzles in the single-player are pretty complex already, but the co-op campaign takes that complexity and quadruples it.  But the euphoria of figuring out one of these puzzles is all the more intoxicating, because it really does require teamwork and cooperation and execution, and it’s absolutely thrilling to get it right.

I’ve been obsessing with post-release interviews with Erik Wolpaw and Chet and the rest of the team.  You can tell that Erik really likes talking about the Stephen Merchant recording sessions; Erik is one of the funniest guys on the planet and it sounds to me like it must have been tremendously gratifying for him to have someone with Stephen Merchant’s comedic skill translating those words into a one-of-a-kind performance.

I’ll say this:  I’m no longer obsessing with Portal 3 speculation.  I am well sated at the moment, to be honest; I’ve put in over 20 hours in both campaigns on all 3 systems I own it for, and I will eat up the DLC (which sounds like it’s coming very soon, actually) and will enjoy it and savor it, and I would eventually like to get all the Achievements on at least one system.  But thinking about P3 feels like wasted energy.  Valve is already saying some strange things about the future of single-player campaigns, so who knows if they’ll even go there.  The one thing I’ve come away with from my time with Portal 2 is that Valve is made up of a bunch of people that are 1000 times smarter than I’ll ever be, and it is highly unlikely that I’ll come up with something on my own that will be more impressive than what they’ll come up with.

* I know that sentence is grammatically fucked, and I’m too tired to figure out the right way to say it.

some ramblings about Portal 2

(I’m kinda working on a Portal 2 review, but in the meantime I’m just rambling.  There will be spoilers at the bottom, mostly consisting of guesses about Portal 3.  You’ll be warned.)

Portal 2 is a big deal.  That it has become a big deal is kind of awesome, when you think about it; Portal began as a student project (Narbacular Drop), and now it is the first full-length, single-player first-person game Valve has released since Half Life 2.  It also features no blood, (almost) no violence, and no other living characters.  You don’t have an inventory – indeed, you don’t even have a voice.  You have a gun, but you don’t kill anything with it – at least not directly, and the things you indirectly kill are robotic turrets.  Indeed, for the most part you aren’t killing anything – you’re solving puzzles.

Even more fascinating – at least to me – is that while it’s true that you can only really “solve” the puzzles once (and thus only generate that genuine, exhilarating “a-ha!” moment once as well), the game never stops being entertaining upon multiple playthroughs.  I’ve played the original Portal maybe a dozen times, and I’ve already beaten Portal 2 twice after only owning the game for 3 days.  Some of the puzzle solutions are just awesome.  They are fulfilling to solve, absolutely, but they’re also incredibly fulfilling just in the pure act of execution, and as you get better at the game you find more efficient ways of solving each puzzle, which is also fulfilling.

For example, there’s a puzzle in Portal 2 (I believe it’s the first puzzle in Chapter 3, the one that begins with repeated aerial faith plate malfunctions) that I solved without much difficultly on my first run, although I’d found it somewhat tedious to keep walking back and forth between portal openings.  On my second playthrough, I suddenly realized that I could simply jump into one of the portals I’d just created, thus making everything move a lot quicker.  So it’s not just the thrill of the initial solution to a problem; it’s the subsequent discovery of more efficient solutions that’s just as thrilling.

I think for me, though, the main reasons why I keep coming back to Portal and Portal 2 are:

      • The world.  Every game that’s out these days is either set in some post-apocalyptic wasteland or some variation on the standard platformer themes – forest, desert, lava, ice.  The original Portal had a very simple and very distinctive look to it, and it was all the more thrilling when the curtain was pulled back in the final act.  Portal 2’s environments are even more varied and diverse, as well as still being incredibly unique, and the fact that so much of it takes place “behind the scenes” makes it all the more special.  Portal already has somewhat of a “meta” vibe in the first place but this notion of being off the beaten path is thrilling, especially when the settings are so epic in scope.
    • The attention to detail.  It’s easy to fly past a lot of the little things in Portal 2, and for the most part it’s not at all necessary to stop and inspect every single piece of litter you come across.  And yet there’s actual writing on each coffee can and fuse box; it goes an incredibly long way towards making the world believable, even while you’re doing unbelievable things.  Everything is in its right place, even when it’s out of place.  The best games generally get this – Bioshock, GTA4 and Red Dead Redemption certainly get it.
    • The quality of the storytelling.   They’re paced incredibly well, and Portal 2’s pace is among the best of all time.  Puzzle concepts are introduced gradually, and eventually you’ll be doing some completely insane things in order to solve them, and as a reward there’ll be an exhilarating chase sequence or an extended, slow exploration sequence when you get to a new area.  And it’s not just the Portal games are hilarious – it’s also that they’re smart enough to both tell you what’s happening, and also let you infer what’s happening indirectly.  (And there’s quite a lot happening, and we’ll get to that in a bit. )
  • The love.  I know that’s a ridiculous thing to say.  But you can tell when a development team genuinely cares about the game they make, and it’s very, very clear that Valve cares.  The original Portal is a game that people adore, and as such the expectations for a sequel were astronomically high – even though it would be impossible to guess just what, if anything, the sequel would look like.  There’s not a single bum note in either of the two games, and that’s not because of luck – that’s because an enormous amount of time went into polishing everything, from the graphics to the dialogue to the puzzles themselves.  In a recent interview with Gamespot, writer Erik Wolpaw (one of my personal heroes) said that it doesn’t matter to him whether games can exist as art – games need to be entertaining, first and foremost, or else what’s the point?

OK: HERE THERE BE SPOILERS.

Portal 3 speculation:

    • We now know about Aperture’s origins, and somewhat about how GlaDOS came to be.  But what of Chell?  Where did she come from?  Was she someone’s daughter in “Bring Your Daughter To Work” day?  [EDIT:  Yes, she is.] Was she Cave Johnson’s illegitimate daughter with Caroline?  (Would that even make sense, time-line wise?  Is it ever specified when the first game take place?  Considering that Aperture was already messing around with pretty high-tech stuff in the 50s, the original Portal could conceivably take place in the 60s, right?  They do have some old computers and rotary phones in the original Portal.)  (Also – I never looked at the “Lab Rat” comic, and it’s possible this was explained there.  I should probably look at it first before speculating any more.)
    • OK, I’ve read the Lab Rat comic.  Notes:  Page 8 – Chell’s last name is redacted.  Page 9 – Chell refuses to answer if “anyone would file a police report if [she] went missing.”  Beyond that… the comic is somewhat vague.
    • At the end of the game, when Chell is standing in the field – does she have the Portal gun with her?  I don’t think so – you see both of her hands grabbing on to Wheatley after your final portal hits home.  By the same token, Chell didn’t have the Portal gun at the end  of the first one, either.  In any event – the Lab Rat comic’s final panel says that Chell has remarkable tenacity and stubbornness.  We don’t know why, though.  The point is:  at the end of P2, she is free.  The question remains:  would she go back?  And if so, why?
    • Wheatley has to return, doesn’t he?  You can’t make a character that wonderful and have it be lost forever, right?

An update of sorts

So, yeah.  I am now an official Examiner, and the idea is that I’ll be writing some small pieces over there a few times a week.  I’m still trying to figure out just what kind of stories I can write about over there, but I’m already starting to get the idea of what I can’t write about, and that stuff is more or less what I’d rather write about here.

In the meantime, I’ve actually not been playing very much lately.  I continue to trudge along in Yakuza 4, which I still like although it’s starting to feel a little clumsy and same-y.  I’m in the XBL beta program, so I’ve been sort-of testing the new disc format via Halo Reach, which I realized very quickly that I haven’t really missed since I traded it in.  (One of the things that Microsoft is asking me to do, though, is to play the new-disc Halo, and then play a bunch of other stuff.  I’ve been gladly playing a bunch of other stuff, including revisiting Red Dead Redemption, for no good reason other than that I’ve been thinking about it lately.)

And, also, I’ve been playing the HELL out of the iPhone.  As I mentioned in the initial post, my initial iPhone sync resulted in a ton of apps that I’d either totally forgotten about or just had to move off of my Touch for space reasons.  One thing that sucks about getting a new iDevice is that you lose all your save files; everything I’ve ever played has been set back to zero (even though my Gamecenter achievements still exist).  So I’d have to start all the Angry Birds over again, and Infinity Blade, etc.  I’ve been enjoying my revisit of Sword & Poker 2, though, which I’d forgotten how much I’d missed.

I’ve also bought a few more iPhone games, too, since I’ve got room for them now:  Dead Space, Real Racing 2, Lane Splitter, World of Goo.

I also caved last night and downloaded the Potato Sack Pack over Steam, for some reason.  Oh, that’s right, I’ve got Portal 2 fever like you wouldn’t fucking believe.  I’d very much like to review that for Examiner; I just need to make sure that someone else hasn’t already beaten me to it.  If I can’t review it there, however, you can rest assured I’ll be reviewing it here, and I’ll use as much profanity as I see fit.