In a fit of apparent masochism, I have tried playing Demigod using my laptop's glide-pad.  It actually works, but . . . well . . . why?  Anyway, last night I encountered a bug, and I'm not sure if it is with Demigod or if it is some sort of "gotcha" with the glidepad-and-Demigod combination.

Basically, the mouse cursor worked fine for clicking on, say, the Citadel or right-clicking to tell my character where to go.  No problem there.  The problem was that the HUD stopped working.  I could click on the Citadel and get the screen where I could select upgrades, but I couldn't select any upgrades!  Nothing happened when I clicked on spells or the upgrade icon (actually, it looked like the game was seeing the clicks, but it was acting as though the upgrade screen wasn't there -- if I right clicked, my character moved to the cursor, for example).  In fact, the keyboard stopped working too.  Heck, I couldn't even press F10 to select the menu to get out of the game!  I was able to alt-tab to get out of the game, so I could close it from Windows.  I've never seen this before, so I'm figuring it was just alignment-of-the-stars, but I'm keeping an eye on it.

Anyway, I spent some time playing The Path last night.  The Path looks like an adventure game, but it really isn't.  It's the gaming equivalent of an art-house uber-deep movie, the kind that has you going "huh?" and sitting and pondering the deep meaning of what you just saw.  The premise is that you take one of several girls through the forest, to "Grandma's house".  You find things and watch how your character responds.  Eventually, you encounter the "wolf": you find a place and watch the resulting movie sequence, and then your character wakes up in the rain in front of Grandma's house.  Then, you guide her (she is now walking slowly, head lowered) into Grandma's house, and watch the nightmare-like imagery . . . and say "huh?"  The funny thing about this game is that when I play it on my main system or on my new laptop, I wind up getting lost in the forest.  I had much more luck when I was playing this on my old laptop, and I lowered some settings: the lush forest became a forbidding-looking forest of tree stumps . . . so I could actually see where I was supposed to go!  I recommend it as it's only $10 and it's very interesting.  Remember, though: there's not much of a real game here.

Finally, I was playing some Dawn of War 2 this morning.  I haven't touched this game for a little while, and I understand that Relic has done some work on the online match-making.  I think I saw this in action: for the first time, I was actually on a team that won, and I actually felt halfway-useful at times!  And, in case anyone is wondering, no I didn't play using the glide-pad!