Happy New Year! (a bit late)

It's that time of year! The time of year when the year just begins. Also, my birthday was the 3rd!

I've been terribly busy between work and play, so my apologies for the lack of posts.

I took some paid time off of work from Christmas Eve until New Year's day. I feel like I really got in the relaxation and fun time I was craving.

I got Bioshock and the Orange Box for Christmas (finally!) from my brother and parents, respectively. I'm only over a year behind, but I look forward to playing them all. I also bought Left 4 Dead after playing my friend Drew's copy for the XBox 360. I loved everything about the game except that it was not on a high-res screen and console joysticks are always clunky and unwieldy for first-person shooters. I solved both of those problems by buying the pc version. It was on sale for $37.49!

I finished Portal, and that was ridiculously fun and had a lot of little things that made me laugh. If you've played it, you know. If you haven't, you won't understand until you play it. So play it.

I finished all four Left 4 Dead campaigns on both Easy and Normal difficulties. It took me two attempts at the Hospital Finale on No Mercy to escape with all survivors on Advanced difficulty, but it was friggin' fun and challenging! I look forward to doing campaigns on higher difficulties with friends instead of NPC AIs.

I recommend L4D for anyone who likes the zombie genre and is enthralled at the concept of surviving a zombie apocalypse with your closest friends. This game has tapped into something that I haven't experienced before. The in-game commentary (which is cool to play through) explains this concept as "small co-op group versus a horde" that was inspired by Counter-strike games featuring a few players with guns versus an army of bots with daggers.

The zombie mob for CS:Source was fun, and Zombie Panic! took that a step further, but they hit the jackpot with this one. The idea is not that you have to prove your skills as better than anyone, but rather that you must coordinate your skills with your fellow survivors and rely on one another to be a potent team.

This does not appeal to everybody, as I was arguing why I love the game with another FFXI player who was denouncing it heavily. The great part about this game, though, is that the people it DOES appeal to are exactly the kind of people you would want on your survivor team working with you.

Win-win.

Altana be with you.

Guntar.