Ah TF2. If it weren’t for you I’d be suffering from some serious withdrawal from WoW right now…

Thankfully this has been keeping me busy most nights while Betty studies. Truth be told, this post has an ulterior motive. I’m really just testing out the expandable post thing I’ve (poorly) implemented onto my blog. However props and huge thanks to Hackosphere for getting me on the right track. The Hackosphere version just expands and contracts the post. I’ve modded it (read: ripped away huge chunks) so that it’ll just jump to the post URL instead. Why did I do this? Well I really just wanted a short version of my posts to show up on Facebook. However, the “short version solution” provided by Blogger, was… short of my expectations. So I’ve been trying to find a way to solve this. And hopefully this will work, and here it is

OK, For those who were suckered in. I won’t lie. I have been playing a lot of TF2 lately. Unfortunately I’m not really getting any better at shooting people in the face. Suffice to say I am getting really good at supporting the team as an engineer and with proper use of teleporters and dispensers have been able to help hold the front quite well.

If you’re sick of CS, and want something light hearted to restart the FPS heart, come join me Steam name: Bakuu

I’ll even let you kick my ass

This has been around for a few months already. And I’m now just a late echo-er. But I did find this little gem of a game, if you can call it that. It certainly masks itself as a game, but I think it does achieve much more.

I first heard about Passage from sites like Joystiq and Kotaku. At first I didn’t pay it much attention. It looked like any other pixelated indie game. Until I started to read the comments. Seriously, comments are like the best viral marketing tool around (well as long as it’s praise and not scorn). “A game which has a deeper message”, “A work of art” etc. It piqued my interest. I’m a sucker for things with deeper meanings. Believe it or not I’m a sucker for movies, literature or artwork which speak to you on a deeper level than what’s first perceived. Hence my love for movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich(sic?) and the like. And when I heard that this game can be deep (and can be finished in 5 minutes!) I thought “why not?”

Let me start with this. Not everyone will understand this game. Like a painting or a piece of artwork. I can see a lot of people will view this game and just say ‘What the heck?!’ and walk away. That’s cool. I wanted to do that the first time I played it. You’re a little, REALLY pixelated, man walking from the left side of the screen to the right. That’s it. Yay.

[Spoiler alert: Don't read this if you intend to play the game and want to work out what it means to you!]

It wasn’t until my second or third play through that I noticed the subtleties. There’s a point score in the top right corner. You gain points by finding treasure. Or by exploring. Some treasure appears to be unobtainable. If you partner up with the women at the start of the game, a LOT of the treasure is unobtainable! As the game goes on the right side of the screen becomes slightly clearer and the left side becomes more blurred as time goes on. Your character ages. No matter how you play, you die.

While it hurt my eyes as things blurred and cleared and blurred again it was painfully clear that this game was an allegory about life. The whole game was your own life time line. You start off alone, you strive to achieve your goals and dreams (treasure chests), while you will have many successes, there will always be something which is just out of your reach (the unobtainable treasure chests). You can decide to go it alone or with a partner. With a partner you will find that there are a lot of areas you won’t be able to navigate and hence more goals you won’t achieve. However, your score doubles when exploring with a partner, so it’s a nice trade-off Yet no matter which way you decide to play it death will come for you. And it’s sudden too. I was traveling through the game and thinking to myself ‘hey, we haven’t gone down that way yet, I wonder what’s there.” when *bam!* my partner dies. She was old as could be told from the white hair, but at the same time it’s strange that we know death will happen, yet are still taken back when it does.

As I’m writing this I’ve just thought of a way to explain the blurriness and the pixelation of the game. It’s almost as if it’s saying life, even where we stand right now, might appear in focus, but every time we move the scenery changes and things really aren’t as clear as we thought it would be. Things we thought would be there aren’t, and because we move too fast we miss out on the finer details of things around us.

Ok, now I’m looking too deep into this.

I guess it’s official. The spammers are now majority British owned. Curse ya ya limey bastards!

No it’s cool. I’m not angry

Had coffee with Josh today before he flew off to Hong Kong for two months before going off to roost in the UK (seems like everyone is going there nowadays). It’s not new, we said farewell to him once before when he went to work in Japan. But I guess goodbyes are always sort of… well, they’re not exactly happy dappy fan-tappy.

Oh and JJ, thanks for saying bye before flying off ya cur! Nah I kid. Have a blast, bring home some nice pommie lass

Still, it was weird to say to him “See you in Greece!” That’s not something you say everyday. But at least there is light up ahead.

Incidentally that picture up above is my first foray into photoshopping. And yes, my photoshopping skills are the major suck. But what the hey, it was fun. Well sort of fun. Trying to erase the extra sections around Josh’s head was creepy, having to zoom in on his face for ages was enough to give me nightmares Ugh, and fixing up Andrea’s face *shudder* (Hahaha I kid )

Anyhow, to all you Londoners. Take care of each other, I can’t wait to bum around the Greek Isle’s with you guys later this year

(*JAFA = Just Another Frickin’ Aussie)

Whoops, spoiler alert! ^^^

This has been the year of the FPS. With fine offerings from Bioshock to Half Life episode 2 to Portal (not really a shooter, well ok, you shoot portals) to Team Fortress 2 (yes I understand they all came in one package). And now another game which I give 3 thumbs up on. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

I’m not a fan of the CoD series, especially when it was purely a World War 2 affair. I hated WW2 shooters, the guns were crap and it just wasn’t a war I really wanted to fight in. Now after playing CoD4 however, I know for certain I don’t ever want to be a military combatant in any war. Ever. More on this point later. ‘Modern Warfare’ converted me to the CoD brand.

If you’ve ever read a Tom Clancy novel, and I’m speaking of the John Clark variety (the Ryan-verse is good too, but I prefer the gritty shoot-someone-in-the-face-before-they-see-you Clark-verse). The Rainbow 6 world. Where soldiers with guns matter. This game is like reading a fricking good Clancy novel. In fact it was like reading Rainbow Six. Which brings me to point, if it was like reading Rainbow Six, why the hell didn’t I just play Rainbow Six and this? Simple. I’m not a thinker. Rainbow Six requires that added tax to your brain in having to plan your missions out before hand. Not so in CoD4. Sure you need to be quick thinking in how to flush out that barricaded hole full of Ara..rabbits, but you don’t need to plan on how to get there or how to set your team up. This time you are one of the followers, not one of the leaders. And I love that. I don’t need to think, I just need to shoot and stay alive. Awesome.

That being said, this game hit home hard for me. I remember playing paintball and thinking, “Man, it’s easy to get shot in real life”. Playing this game, being a combatant in an urban battleground. I’m glad it’s virtual, otherwise I’d just be glad I’m wearing brown pants, cause I’d be sh*tting myself. The action can get that intense. In the first few levels I had a lot of trouble trying to keep tabs at who was shooting me and where they were coming from. It was chaos. I’m glad I could reload from save. I needed to do that quite a bit at the start. But the ease of which you died was troubling. Yes I was pretty crap when trying to get the ropes of the game, but the amount of times I got flushed out by a well placed grenade, flash banged and then deceased before the glare dissipated, eaten a bullet sandwich because I didn’t check the room before charging in. The list goes on. Long story short, if I ever have to fight in a war, it’d be by the Grace of God that I survive.

However, the ‘realism’ (and I use that term subjectively, since I’ve never been in a war) was only one aspect which affected me. The way the game gives you the perspective a certain people in certain situations (I don’t want to give too many spoilers, but the picture above is one such situation) is chilling and makes the game all the more personal. And all this is excellent, like a gripping novel, this game will help you forget time (much to the dismay of my wife…)

There’s a ton of other things I would like to say about the game, but to do that would make this post much longer than it is, and it’s far too long already. All I can say is get this game. I know a lot of you like to “buy your games online… for free” but seriously, great games like this need our support.

Happy hunting.

Ahh, men in their natural habitat. What’s ‘cutlery’?

Went up to the Blue Mountains over the weekend for the annual Men’s Katoomba Convention. Four thousand burly blokes (expect for the NS contingent) up in the sticks listening to the word of God and singing His praise.

Most things worked out pretty well. I think the biggest shift this year was the number of young’uns up there this time. Us oldies just don’t have the energy to not sleep for two nights (Well I survived, I’m paying for it now though).

Still the convention was good, in that the message to live by faith was challenging. I hope everyone had a good time. I still think we (being men) don’t get together enough to just be ourselves. We’re good husbands to wives, sons to mothers and fathers, brothers to sisters, but sometimes what we need is just time out to be brothers for each other. Whether it be sitting down with some coffee and just to chat, or it be throwing off the yoke of daily life to just enjoy time playing games and having a laugh. And laughter is good food for the soul

“Why have you neglected me? We were having a good time weren’t we?”

Wow… (no pun intended) I was so close to lapsing back into the delicious land of Azeroth and the fiery delights of the Outlands tonight. I feel so dirty… It’s been over six months now since my last dalliance with the land of orcs and humans (yes I know there are other races, but it started with these two!). And while I loved every minute while I was there, even during the nights where raids would just end with one wipe after another and all I ended up with was a repair bill the size of a small country, we had to go our separate ways. The game was asking for too much. The time commitment to raiding for epix just to be able to keep up in PvP; the need to farm for herbs to either make potions or sell for gold. I just couldn’t keep up. So I cancelled my subscription. It was a hard pill to swallow.

Six months down the track and I there have been many days where I wished to play an RPG in which I could interact with real people, not scripted NPCs. Where when I wanted to I could switch from questing to throwing myself into a full blown battle. Where I could feel part of a team, that even if I wasn’t the strongest there, I knew that with enough skill I could be a thorn to the enemy’s side, just long enough for the powerhouses on my team to start steam rolling.

But alas, that wasn’t to be. Every time I thought about lapsing back into the game, I realized I just don’t have the spare capacity as I once did to indulge in this activity. Gone are the days where gaming all night meant the only consequence was that I just missed one lecture the next day. Where if I wanted to continue to game all throughout the day, it didn’t really matter all that much, because my schedule was flexible. Friends would arrange to meet around your schedule, assignments were done on your terms and classes were… optional. But now the game’s all changed, I work set hours and gaming all night means I’m screwed for the next day. The days I want to game can no longer be done on a whim, I have social appointments to attend, a wife to keep happy, and many different adhoc tasks to complete. Gaming is now something done only when everything else is done, not the other way around.

However, it’s not all doom and gloom. On the bright side, I’ve gained a life partner, and we spend a lot of time together watching anime. I’ve learned to control my time use (even though it still needs a lot of work) and have seen vast improvements in the quality of my work and in some of my relationships. And I’m learning to be a better listener. When you realise that for such a long time in your life that all you ever had to talk to someone about was games or a particular game, it brings things back into perspective as to how small my world really was.

Still, WoW gave me a lot of good memories. Who knows, maybe one day (like when the next expansion comes out) I might jump into it again. But for now, I think if I get the urge I’ll just continue to write posts like this. Or maybe learn the guitar…or read a book, incidentally I finished reading The Alchemist the other day, it’s a nice book, I endorse it!

Zug zug!

It was nice to see some of the old uni people again. Yes I did say old, cos that’s what we are. As much as we don’t like to admit it, it’s been almost 5 years since we left the joint, and 10 years since I left high school. OMG…

Still we’re completely young and juvenile at heart, and that’s what really matters. You can be numerically old, but hey, as long as we’re still laughing, we’re going down kicking and screaming

The rest of the weekend was spent down in Canberra visiting the Cambodia crew. That was nice. Just hanging out with them felt so comfortable. We just sat around talking and sharing about the things that have happened since we came back. I really miss those guys. Who knew three weeks would have such a big impact on me. I remember when I got to Hong Kong after we all parted ways, that first morning was weird, we didn’t have to wake up at some obscene hour to have breakfast, we didn’t have to meet up in a room to discuss the day’s plan. It felt almost lonely. It felt good seeing them all again, who knows, maybe next time we meet we might have grown apart, I most certainly hope that isn’t the case. But until then, here’s to friends, both old and new

But then again, don’t we all? The view of the quiet dead silent office, the depressing nature of the office cubicle. Slowly doing our time till we’re let out. I guess it doesn’t have to be like this. But it’s so hard to keep your eyes open when your eyes are shielded by sheer boredom.

*Yawn*

In other news, anyone got any game recommendations? Nintendo’s been kicking me in the nuts and laughing with their constant delays and push back of Mario Kart and Smash Bros. Brawl…

We were discussing what our contingency would be since none of us could make one last lunch with a friend who was flying overseas, and someone (notice how I’m not using names? Yeah, too many people on my facebook… blame that)then replied “See you in Greece.”

And then it hit me. When I was younger I thought it’d be hecka mad to have jet setting friends, and of course to be one myself. We would all work in different corners of the globe and we’d “catch up” in some exotic location.

Now? Well this has pretty much happened. Is it cool that all my friends are everywhere and I now get the chance to meet up with them in funky countries? Most definitely. Are there unforeseen consequences? ab-sa-doodly-lutely

It seems now the only time I’ll see them is when we meet up in those odd occasions. And let’s be realistic. Having a job which doesn’t require me to fly around the world constantly. When will I ever really catch up with these old chums? Hardly ever. And to know that the only times I’ll ever really see these people again are on the rare occasion as opposed to constantly, I can’t help but feel a little saddened.

It reminds me of the story about the energy efficient light bulbs that only need to be changed once every twenty years or so (I forget the actual number). And how when the guy goes to change the lightbulb he’s suddenly reminded that he might only ever have to change this light less than a handful of times ever. That’s kind of how this is. The time after next I meet some of these people, I’m sure most of us would’ve moved on into the next season of life.

Hmm…

SOLER – SAVING GRACE

Adam and Eve and all the strangeness of humanity
Sent my soul into an orbit of anxiety
Then one night my father appeared to me in my dream
And this is what he said
‘Forgive and then forget’
So I asked him what of all the pain I’m going through
And if it’s right to hate the one you think is hurting you
As I lay there in despair
He placed his hands upon my head
And as I wept
This is what he said
‘Son you’ll see oceans
Mountains high and low
You’ll have snowflakes slowly melting on your nose
And oh that feeling of the sun warming your face
The light of saving grace’
After everything I’ve said
And all the stupid things I’ve done
The snow has melted and today I’m dancing in the sun
I still believe that he’s up there
Watching over me
I swear sometimes I hear
A whisper in my ear
Son you’ll see oceans
Mountains high and low
You’ll have snowflakes slowly melting on your nose
And oh that feeling of the light of saving grace

(p.s. I’m too lazy to write anything atm)