Okay, so why am I starting this blog?

First, it's free.  Second, I rather like Stardock and Impulse.  I have Galciv 1 & 2 and Sins of a Solar Empire, and I can honestly say that Stardock has yet to have let me down.  Of course, I haven't tried Demigod yet (innocent whistling).  Impulse also works very well.  I especially appreciate the fact that it doesn't need to be running all the time, like Steam (which I also love). 

Third, did I mention this was fee?

I started toying with the idea of a gaming blog late last year.  My New Years resolution for 2008 was that I would actually finish a game.  In October, I realized that the time was ticking.  After I finished Mirror's Edge, I went on a bit of a binge with pushing through and finishing games.  And I was writing about it in my LiveJournal . . . noticing that no one really cared.  People go to my LiveJournal to hear about the various crises of my life, like a soap opera . . . not to hear me talk about the latest Prince of Persia game!

So, my first post.  What do I have to say right now?

(1) I found a second-hand copy of Killzone 2 the other day.  I played a few minutes of the single player campaign and a half hour of multiplayer.  In multiplayer, I managed to . . . not successfully kill anyone.  I suck.  The graphics in this game, by the way, are really amazing, but it doesn't take long to notice that your main character is a wee bit short.  I haven't seen this first person shooter phenomenon in years -- when they were figuring out the height of the main character's eyes, they set it a wee bit low.  Walk up to people, find you'll find you come up to their shoulders. 

(2) I've been playing the death out of Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure on the DS.  This was one of those cases where I picked up a game without really knowing what it was, and after some initial "um . . . huh?", I've found myself really enjoying it.  I'll write more about it soon.

(3) I keep trying to play The Path.  I bought it on Steam (during one of their sales).  I played it for around 2 hours, not getting anywhere.  Then, due to a tiny scheduling mistake when we were switching to FIOS service, we had to go a week without Internet access.  No problem: I could run this on Steam's "offline" mode, right?  Wrong: Steam wouldn't connect to "offline" mode.  I then took my laptop to work and downloaded The Path there.  On my laptop, Steam DID run in "offline" mode . . . except that my laptop has a crappy Intel video card and is running Vista with 1-gig RAM, so it was an agonizing experience.  Soon, we had FIOS installed, so I could connect to Steam again and run this on my main computer . . . except my main computer broke.  I went through some ordeals with upgrading my laptop to 2-gigs of RAM, and if I ran The Path in low resolution, it would run fine.  Now, I managed to fix my main computer.  Put it all together, and I'm back to where I was: not getting anywhere.  Actually, I did make some good progress with this game on my laptop, but that was because I reduced detail (going from "Draw Everything" to "Just draw tree trunks") to the point where I could see things at a distance.  I was able to finish the game with two of the characters . . . and it made no sense at all.  I'll still keep trying, however: maybe it will make sense when I've finished with everyone!