Holidays | Martin Crownover

With less than a week to go until Father's Day, the ridiculous parade of allegedly dad-focused marketing is already well upon us. On the way to work this morning, I heard a countless number of commercials trying to convince me to buy my dad a new cell phone. On TV, I've survived a constant barrage of pleas to pick up new flat-screen sets, stereo equipment, and various implementations of carpentry hardware. Online, it's been cameras, camcorders, USB memory sticks, hard drives, and all sorts of other computer gadgetry.

Each holiday it gets worse.

I'm not against the idea of getting someone a thoughtful gift, either. I think that if your dad has been pining for something for a while and you've got the means to get it for him, then maybe you should. But isn't the whole idea of the holiday lost when you're stuck in some infinite loop of trying to one-up last year's gift with something more and more expensive and outrageous?

The idea of buying someone a cell phone as a gift is utterly absurd to me. A cell phone is a personal thing that you should shop for yourself, since you're the one who's going to be using it most of the time. Not only that, but if the gift receiver doesn't have a cell phone already, he/she's going to be stuck with a new monthly bill, thanks to your thoughtfulness.

The notion of gifting a new television is just as bad. As if people need another $1,000+ added to their burgeoning credit debt.

Since when did the idea of showing your appreciation for someone include buying them a menagerie of electronic gizmos?

While retail world is busy buzzing in peoples' ears about its newest pile of shiny garbage, I'll be taking a quiet trip up to the country to my parents' house. I'll probably end up wrestling with some technology anyway; I hear my dad's been having some computer problems. But I think that he'll appreciate the help a lot more than being saddled with an unwanted new cell phone.

Unfortunately, the balance of the entire universe will be thrown off anyway - because for Mother's Day, I only sent a card this year. Sorry mom!

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The inevitable end of my holiday vacation has arrived. Actually, it arrived yesterday, since that was my first day back at work after a New Year's four-day weekend, but I was feeling too lazy to post anything. Technically, I guess my brain was still in holiday mode, so maybe it is right to say that my vacation ended today. In any case, it's the new year, I'm back on the blog, and I've got a lot of gameage to talk about.

I had a great Christmas at home - it was nice to spend an extended amount of time with my family, play (and lose horribly) at Trivial Pursuit, Scrabble, and other non-electronic games. We watched movies and sat around talking and joking with each other. I had a lot of fun hanging out with my mom, dad, and brother. And later on, after Christmas was over, I had another fun holiday weekend spent with my girlfriend. This included an awesome birthday (I'm 27 now, yikes!) with a nice dinner with my parents, a lunch the next day with just my girlfriend, a trip to the theater to see Yes Man (which was hilarious), and lots of cake and presents. So maybe you can understand why I've neglected the blog lately!

Like many people out there, I've also been sucked into playing a lot of games lately, since I got a few of them for Christmas. My mom and dad got me Fallout 3 and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, and my brother got me Prince of Persia, so I've had my hands full. Of the three, I think my favorite is Banjo-Kazooie, since you can build just about any kind of vehicle you want, and thus, play the game just about any way you want, but I am enjoying all three for their own merits. Fallout 3 is proving to be the time sink that is par the course for Bethesda games, and Prince of Persia has been a surprisingly fresh and fun experience, akin to the Sands of Time game, though with less frustration (so far).I'll write more about each game individually in the coming week as I continue to play through them, but for now I just wanted to drop a note to let everyone know how things are going for me. Thanks for reading, and I hope everyone had a safe and happy holiday season!

Oh, and I'll be raffling off the copy of Half-Life 2 + HL2: Episode 1 again soon - so stay tuned!

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I'm finally back from my Thanksgiving holiday at my parents' house, and I can hardly believe it's already December! Where has this year gone?

Anyway, I had a couple of things I wanted to post today.

A recent episode of The Simpsons took Apple down a peg, as Springfield mall got its first "Mapple" store. It was quite enjoyable. Of course, all the YouTube links are gone now, so you'll have to find the episode yourself.

The next thing I wanted to post, also a video, is a new trailer released yesterday for the Black Mesa mod - a Half-Life 2 mod that is looking to recreate the original Half-Life with the Source engine, but with more content, higher resolution textures and models, and environments that take better advantage of the engine than Valve's original port of the game. Normally I don't get too excited over Source engine mods, since they rarely make good on their promises, or even get finished for that matter, but the amount of polish that has gone into this trailer makes me hope otherwise for Black Mesa. You can view the trailer below and find out more about the mod at the official site.

I played through a huge chunk of Half-Life 2 this holiday weekend, so I guess I'm a little bit excited about Half-Life in general again.

I'm glad to see that people found my recent set of examples interesting too, and I hope to get a fixed GM6 version of the 3D Rain example up sometime tonight. Sorry about the slow rain example, I'll play with it and see if I can get something up that's a little easier on the older machines soon as well!

That's all for now - thanks for reading, and I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving (or just a good weekend if you're not from the U.S.)!

Update: I've made a new GM6 file that should run better than the previous rain example, and which should load correctly in GM6. The area that the rain covers is a bit smaller than the original example, and the rain is a bit more sparse, but you should get the idea.

You can download the new example at the link above!

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So we've got a lot of good games on deck, and even a few that were just released. Over the last few months, I've been getting progressively more excited about a great number of these games. The problem is, I don't know when I'll have time to play through all these games, and I really don't want to rack up a huge bill by buying all of them at once, either. Christmas is right around the corner, however, and so is my birthday, so I've decided I'm going to separate my hotlist of games into a few groups: must buy, gift request, buy later, and undecided.

Following is the list of all the games I'm looking forward to, and how I've split them up (and if you're reading this, Mom, this might be a good place to start for my Christmas list).

Gears of War 2

Must Buy - Though I've been careful not to spoil any of the surprises of the Gears sequel for myself, each time I get a glance at any new information on the game it seems better than before. This game is going to be awesome, and I'm really looking forward to playing through the campaign with my buddies, as well as jumping back into Gears multiplayer. Grenade sticking FTW!

Fable 2

Undecided - This is another game which I've been anxiously awaiting for some time now, and in only a few days it'll be on store shelves. It's garnering good reviews so far, and like Gears 2, each time I do some research on the title, it seems that much better, and I get more excited about it. Albion never looked better, and it's going to be hard to wait until Christmas or my birthday for this game, if I can go that long.

Left 4 Dead

Must Buy - The co-op multiplayer for L4D looks like it's going to be a lot of fun, and come on, it's a great-looking new Valve game. The only trouble I'm going to have with this decision is which platform to buy it for: PC or Xbox 360.

Fallout 3

Gift Request - Don't get me wrong here; I'm really looking forward to Fallout 3. I like the whole idea of a more modern Oblivion-ish RPG, and all the tweaks Bethesda has made to the game engine in order to create Fallout look both interesting and well done. But since, to my knowledge, the game doesn't feature any multiplayer action, I can shelve it for a few weeks while I play the rest of the games, since the world will be just the same when I decide I'm ready to enter it. And that's why I like single player games.

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

Must Buy - Only 3 weeks are left until the long-awaited second expansion to the World of Warcraft universe is released, and after spending two days at BlizzCon and experiencing all the big changes to the game introduced in last week's 3.0.2 patch, I'm more than ready to start working my way up to level 80, and maybe even turning my main character into a Death Knight. I won't be one of the people who gets in line a few days before the release, and I probably won't even pre-order. But I'll definitely be picking this one up within a day or two of it's release.

Dead Space

Buy Later - Initially I wasn't too excited about Dead Space, as it looked very generic and Doom 3-ish to me. Since I've read a few reviews however, I've changed my mind on the game, and I might just pick it up at some point. I'm not sure if I want to buy it or ask for it as a gift - it probably depends on how long I can hold out on buying all the other titles in the list. This game looks pretty fun though, and I am sure that at some point it will become part of my games library.

Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts

Undecided - The vehicle-crafting platformer gameplay in the new BK game looks like it could be a lot of fun, and pre-orders for the game nab you the original game (updated with a better display resolution and higher resolution textures) on Xbox Live Arcade as well, all for only $40. I'm going to have a hard time passing this game up if it gets good reviews on release.

Chrono Trigger DS

Gift Request - It's Chrono Trigger, but on the DS. I shouldn't even have to explain how awesome that is. It'll take a good gift request though, because it's cheap, and like Fallout, is single player only.

Saint's Row 2

Buy Later - I wasn't too hot on the original game until a few years had gone by and I gave it a second chance. Much to my surprise, the original Saints turned out to be a lot of fun, and was a great deal at only $20. Saints Row 2 looks pretty similar, only with more mayhem. The good reviews have convinced me that I will have to pick the game up sometime, but we'll see if that happens before this one hits $20 as well.

Call of Duty: World at War

Undecided - I came to COD4 a little late in the game, but still had a blast with its multiplayer and a good time working my way through the campaign. I'm hoping COD:WaW will be similar, but I want to see how the game turns out before I make any final decisions on it.

Other games I'm interested in, but weren't worth mentioning in the list yet: Tom Clancy's Endwar, Spore, Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise, Need for Speed: Undercover, Far Cry 2

I'll be back later in the week with more to say about some of this stuff, I'm sure. Thanks for reading!

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Martin Crownover

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