Parade of Awesomeness

I know I’ve said a lot about Team Fortress 2 on this blog, but I can’t help it. Valve just keeps making the game more and more awesome!

Yesterday Valve released a new set of updates that give new weapons (and a sandwich) to the Heavy, their big fun Russian gunman. More interesting to me: They also added a huge new map, Badwater Basin, which I’ve only gotten to play part of and only once, but which was one of the best games I’ve played in a long time.

The other really nifty thing they added is a new game mode, the Arena mode. Everyone gets one life; the first team to eliminate all the other players is the winner. “But what if someone on the other team decides to hide in a corner behind a sentry gun?!!” you ask? Well, after a minute of play, a control point opens up in the center of the map. If your team captures it, you win.

The arena games last for less than five minutes each. They’re silly bite-sized games that I absolutely love. It’s great for small groups of players, and great for playing when people start taking the game too seriously.

Thanks, Valve, for continuing to make this game MOAR AWESOME.

Agricola is a fun new board game from Z-Man Games. In it, you play a family living just after the Dark Ages, trying to build your farm, raise a family, and keep everybody fed.

You start off with a farmer and his wife, and a small wooden hut. Each turn, each of your people can do one action, like gathering wood, building a fence to hold animals, or plowing a field. Throughout the game, you can grow your family, and do more actions, but you’ve got to make sure you can feed everyone come harvest time.

It’s a lot of fun, and it has exceptional replay value in the form of a deck of cards. Each person takes a small handful of vocations (like “meat seller” or “dancer”) and minor improvements (like “canoe” or “water trough”). This deck changes depending on how many players you have and how experienced everyone is with the game. Beginning players get basic cards, while experts can choose to have more complex cards.

I’ve only gotten to play it once so far, but this has definitely moved to the top of my “to buy” list.

This is an amazing innovation in computing technology: a toaster that fits into a standard 5.25 inch drive bay. It also include softwares to adjust the heat and toasting time.

You know, I’ve got an empty slot just below my DVD burner…

I’ve just finished playing through the entire Half Life 2 series for the first time. It is a stunningly good game.

You play as Gordon Freeman, a scientist who (in Half Life 1) fought his way out of the Black Mesa science facility after a failed experiment opened portals to another dimension containing hostile aliens. At the end of HL1, a mysterious entity, who appears in the form of a government agent, offers you the choice of a job with him or certain death.

At the start of Half Life 2, the entity deposits you on a train twenty years in the future. More hostile aliens have come to Earth in that time and have conquered it. Soon, however, you meet with members of a resistance movement, headed by some of your colleagues from Black Mesa. Before long, you are helping the resistance take down the Combine forces on Earth.

HL2 is a linear first-person shooter, which I actually prefer to the more open games where it’s easy to get lost. You start off with no weapons, but quickly get a crowbar, then a pistol, then an arsenal of larger guns. Most interesting is the Gravity Gun, with which you can pick up objects and throw them around. You end up using this to solve a lot of physics puzzles, and to throw exploding barrels at enemies.

The series has a ton of memorable moments, from high-speed jumps off of ramps in an airboat to the dark and scary Ravenholm, and from riding in a van thrown across a chasm by a giant robot to the incredible final battle of HL2:Episode 2.

Where Half Life 2 really shines is in the characters. Each of the main characters is memorable and likable, from the absent-minded Dr. Kleiner to the security guard Barney to your spunky sidekick Alyx Vance.

This last character stays with you for a good portion of the series, and for the first time in a FPS I was glad to have a computer-controlled companion. In most games, AI companions tend to get in your way, barely contribute to the fighting, and tend to be irritating. Valve did a great job with this character, making her both fun to have around and effective in combat. In fact, in one portion of the series you are trapped in a dark tunnel with no weapons and have to shine a flashlight on enemies so that Alyx can shoot them.

Fantastic from start to finish, Half Life 2 may be the finest first person shooter ever created. I can’t recommend it highly enough.