I'm sure by now, everyone here has heard of Braid so there's no need for me to introduce it. I bet there's quite a few people who scoffed at it's initial $15 price point and never picked it up. Well, for this weekend only, Braid is $5 on Steam. 

 Go get it. Best $5 game I ever purchased 

Well, hello TAG. It's been a whole week without me seeing you! I've been away from my comfortable home in Connecticut for the last week with my family in North Carolina. I'll be lurking the forums and catching up on my RSS feeds [Over 1000 unread, yikes] for a few days. I feel out of touch with the world :P

 To summarize; I've returned from my internet slumber and I'll be around the site again. 

Before diving into the main point of this entry, I'll detail my recent experiences as a gamer so it all has some context. I'd always been primarily a console gamer, apart from a few bouts with free mmo's and old fps' on my old dusty computer I am now typing this on. Being young, I didn't [and still don't] have the money to own all three consoles, and as a result, I fell into console fanboy-ism. In this case, my preferred console was the Xbox.

Fast forward to August of last year. I Built myself a brand new, beautiful computer and I dove into PC gaming. Even though I own an Xbox 360 and a PS3, I am currently playing all my games on my PC. This has been a liberating change. No longer do I care about who "wins" the console "war." All I want to do, is play the games.

The reason I bring this up now, [apart from me being up way too late and having nothing to do] is that it's E3. The big corporate contest to determine which company has the biggest manhood. This week leading up to E3 and this first day have shown some mind-numbingly dumb instances of console fanboy-ism. Most internet peoples these days tend to be more concerned with critiquing the pressers than looking forward to the new and wonderful games each company has coming their way. 

I figure that we all need to take a step back, remember why the hell we care about this stuff in the first place, and play some damn games.

Thanks for listening to my insomnia fueled rant.

Today browsing my local Target I cam across a boxed copy of World of Goo for $15. I figured I'd grab it. I got home and began to play. Initially I enjoyed it, I blew through the tutorial-esc levels with ease.

 Then the "Real" game began. Now, I'll preface this by saying I'm not big into puzzle games. For whatever reason I can execute complex strategies in an RTS but can't clear a puzzle game. I then got to what I see as the first proper level where the object is to essentially just build a large tower very high into the sky. I tried and I tried but I could not pass this level. There are a number of factors working against the player in that level but I feel as if it's just my inability to think conceptually that keeps my tower crumbling to the ground. 

` As far as I can tell World of Goo is a very player driven, creative game. It has very few rules and those it does have are more akin to loose guidelines. This I think is where I fail. I've spent my entire gaming life devoted to understanding the constraints of games. Today I came across a game with few more constraints than physics, and failed. I'm intrigued by my own failing. I feel as if it's a consequence of my own past with videogames that I can't exell at World of Goo. I wouldn't be surprised if my 6 year old nephew were able to strive at this game, him being uninitiated in the common constraints of videogames.

  Or maybe my ramblings are useless and baseless. I just needed something to do while Quake Live downloaded. 

Oh hey, it's my first blog, yip-ee.