Thanks to everyone who entered the raffle to celebrate Marty Blog's 100th 95th post, and congratulations to the winners, listed below! I threw everyone into the mix to receive the special Half-Life 2 + HL2:Ep1 prize - if you won, and you don't want it, let me know and I will raffle it off again.
Third Prize ($5 game via Steam): BenRK
Second Prize ($15 game via Steam): Zeno
Grand Prize (Mass Effect or $30 equivalent via Steam): MischiephX
Special Prize (Half-Life 2 + Half-Life 2: Episode 1): Zakreon
I will be contacting the winners via email. Hope to see you all around the site again soon, and thanks for helping to make this a successful raffle!
I know, I know - this technically isn't my 100th post. Well, no matter - I've been busy with things, and haven't had time to lead up to 100 before my holiday vacation, so I'll make an exception and we'll do the raffle at post 95. It is a good time to be charitable, after all.
I am happy to say that Marty Blog is still going strong into the final weeks of 2008, and I am pleased with the way the year has gone for the blog. I've been able to (semi) consistently post here about things that I care about and find interesting. I've had a great time talking about these things with members of the GMC and Reflect Communities here. And I've even moved past the default theme (and hopefully will move past my current theme with something better in 2009). In short, it's been a fun year, and I look forward to a continuation of that for the next.
Anyway, enough of the formal stuff - you're probably reading this because you want in on the commemorative raffle, and frankly, I don't blame you. So here goes!
To help celebrate the continuation of Marty Blog, and to give back to everyone who's helped make the blog fun for me, I've put together another little raffle - Marty Blog's second Post & Win!
What can you win?
The grand prize for the raffle is a brand new (digital) copy of BioWare's awesomely fun action-RPG, Mass Effect! If you've already got a copy of Mass Effect, or if it's not really your thing, I'll also let you sub in any other single game of equal or lesser value ($30) that's currently on Steam.
Additionally, second and third prize winners will be chosen, and each will be able to choose from any single game currently on Steam for $15 or less and $5 or less respectively. Steam's catalog has grown impressively since the last raffle, and there are some great new games available now, so there should be something for just about everyone there, for each prize value.
Finally, I've got a spare copy of Half-Life 2 + HL2: Episode 1 just sitting in my Steam account, ready to be gifted. If you're interested in that as well, say so in your post, and once the winners have been chosen, I'll take all the losers (you're all winners to me... really) and do one final drawing for this lovely prize. This one is non-negotiable because it's actually just an extra copy I have.
Note: Many of the games on Steam, including Mass Effect and Half-Life 2, are rated Mature by the ESRB, and may contain violence or sex. I have no way of verifying people's age, so I will assume that if you enter the raffle, you are 18 or older, or you have your parent's permission to play games of this nature.
How do you enter?
Simply post a comment below (make sure to enter an email address I can contact you with in the appropriate area of the comment form). Feel free to post suggestions, criticism, long manifestos of support and encouragement, dear John letters, requests for personal advice, announcements about the sentry gun you just built, or whatever else you can think of. Everything is welcome!
Your name will only be entered into the raffle once, no matter how many comments you leave, and registered users of the site who comment will have a slightly higher chance of being chosen.
Entrants must have a Steam account, or must be willing to register for one if they win. Steam is free, it's a great service, and I am happy to promote it. If you win and I am unable to award you your prize within a reasonable amount of time, the item will be re-raffled. Apologies to anyone who lives outside of the U.S. or who doesn't have access to Steam or it's catalog of games.
Attempts at entering your name into the raffle more than once (or any other kind of cheating) will result in your name, and all aliases thought to be associated with you, removed from the drawing. And of course, Marty Blog reserves all rights to make the final decision on the validity of any entry.
Entries close at the end of the holiday weekend - Sunday, December 28th at 11:59 PM PST - so be sure to make your comment before then! Winners will be announced the following day. I wanted to have winners announced before then, but I figured I'd give everyone out there a chance to enter, and of course, I'd also like to give myself some time off over the next few days. Win/win.
Thanks again to everyone out there who reads Marty Blog now and then. I truly appreciate your visits to this site, and I hope that the site remains fun and enjoyable to you as we move into the future! And yes, I know I recycled that from my previous Post & Win, but I think it's still very applicable. I hope you all have happy holidays this season!
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!
