Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

So there's a meme doing the rounds which requires you to post the sixth screen-shot you have stored from any game of your choice. Thanks to Zoso I have been tagged so I opened my fairly slim Fraps directory to find there are very few games I have even grabbed six screenshots of. I have a bunch of lotro grabs and thats about it. Ah well for what its worth here is my sixt Lotro screenshot: Why is Throg gazing fondly at that Snowbeasts posterior? Hard to tell but I can now reveal to the world the coded meaning of Throgs Kin name: Pog Mo Thoin . I didn't make it up but when I saw a bunch of guys runnign around under that moniker I knew they must be Irish and having a bit of fun with Lotro's name checker. I was in that kin for a few months and nobody ever complained. Now who can I tag back? THis is always an embarasssing moment. How can I tag six people when I barely have six readers of thsi blog and most of those havce been tagged already. Well here goes and apologies if you h...

Needing a pick me up after Far Cry 2's downer I logged into Left 4 Dead for a bit of co-operative zombie killing and quickly got signed up with a random group for the "No Mercy" campaign. It was a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt but raised a few interesting issues none the less. First off let me raise my hand and admit that I was in no small part responsible for our failures. I couldn't shoot straight. I kept running right into the exploding stomach of boomers. Every time the tank appeared I managed to grab his attention and end up splatted. The only thing I didn't do was disturb the witch but my colleagues generally managed to do themselves without my help. The first interesting observation is that our failure was not due to lack of experience. The people I grouped with had played before. This was clear from the way that my colleagues knew the routes, knew where ambushes were likely to occur, knew where to lay trails of fire, knew what corners to hide in and s...

I had a bit of free time last night so I decided to give Far Cry 2 a second chance. Two hours later having struggled through an enormously tedious mission I noticed that the game had actually made me depressed. Whether it was the demoralising setting, the tedious repetitive game-play or the fact that the mission involved me destroying a factory that produced a much needed medicine I don't know. Probably all three. Whatever he reason I don't play games to get depressed. Far Cry 2 ..... Goodbye.

I am writing this on my new Nokia E51 phone. Its the first mobile I have had with built in wifi. Phones have had internet browsers for years but the silly price of data packages has been prohibitive. Wifi allows me to enjoy free internet browsing in any of the growing number of internet hotspots. The E51 is no Iphone but it is a suprisingly capable little phone. The Symbian operating system means you can get a lot of useful apps for it. I have already installed a good scientific calculator and a mobi ebook reader. The screen is quite small but is very clear and has excellent resolution. I got mine with my phone contract but I have seen sim free ones for only €150 which is a great price for such a powerful phone.

You have got to admire Valve's ability to take a concept, simplify it to its essentials and then polish it to an exceptional degree. When it boils down to it there isn't all that much in Left 4 Dead but what is there is solid gold and crafted to perfection. As expected single player mode is no more than an extended tutorial, worth playing through once to get used to the maps. Everyone raves about versus mode where teams alternate between survivors and infected but I haven't gotten the hang of playing infected yet so for the moment I am playing mainly co-op, registered as mbp if anyone wants to look out for me on Steam. MBPs tip - when things go completely haywire and you are over-run with an impossible number of infected thn get your back against a wall and melee melee melee.

Even though I have wanted to play Left 4 Dead for quite some time I still waited until I got it half price in last weeks sale. I do that a lot with games. Price is important to me. Its not that I am badly off. It's just that I am not comfortable spending €40 or €50 on a game. In fact the higher price of console games (€10 to €20 higher last time I checked) is one of the main reasons I haven't embraced console gaming. Thanks to Bill Harris author of the ever entertaining Dubious Quality I now realise that its not just me. Sales of Left 4 Dead went up 3000% last weekend during the sale. It seems I am not alone in wanting better value games.

EDIT: Prompted by DM Osbon's comment I went and re-read The Artful Gamers article and I fear I completely misunderstood it the first time. When TAG said in italics “Game journalism can be just as exciting and enlightening as playing games themselves!” I thought he was poking light hearted fun at criticism that thinks it is art. If he seriously believes that then I have to fundamentally disagree. In fact I think this “criticism as an art form” movement is a big part of the reason why we are currently so badly served by game reviews. Criticism can never be more important than the thing itself. Criticism is a tool to aid the buying process, nothing more nothing less. Once the purchasing decision has been made the critic becomes irrelevant. The game and the playing of it are everything. Anyway - my comments about the difficulty of choosing a decent game still hold so here is the ORIGINAL POST: Thanks to Rock Paper Shotgun for pointing me to a great article at "The Artful Gamer...