Vector_black and I tried our hands at some Half-Life coop, specifically using the acclaimed Sven Co-op mod. I don’t want to speak for everyone’s second favorite online personality here, but I personally found the experience ridiculously stupid, acting as an exaggeration of all the reasons I find Half-Life so particularly unenjoyable. To be fair, the mod is obviously intended for use on an online server where more than two people can share in the experience, as the original single player game has been super saturated with enemies, many of which come from the Opposing Force and Blue Shift expansions. Additionally, the mod has some extra fun little features such as spawning you at random points throughout the levels or magically taking away your guns as you travel through loading zones.

Frustrated, but not entirely defeated, I started up a new single player game to see if Valve’s masterpiece was still as boring as I remembered it. The good news is that the game seems much better to me than it once did. The even better news is that I still hate it. The game’s much easier than I recall it being, even on the medium difficulty setting. It’s not quite the constant auto-save, auto-load carnival which I always complained about. This is most likely because I (and most other gamers on the planet) have since faced much more challenging and interesting AI opponents. Additionally, Half-Life was the first FPS I played using both a keyboard and a mouse, as opposed to just using a keyboard. But while it may not be as difficult as I remember, I still don’t enjoy playing the thing. The game’s rigid scripting, and its habit of blowing up a room you’re standing in or instantly killing you via some random environmental hazard still rubs me the wrong way, as surviving such incidents has nothing to do with skill and everything to do with memorizing what’s going to happen next.

So! Half-Life is better than I thought, but I still don’t see it as the gaming masterpiece everyone else agrees it is.

Katamari Damacy, however, is a masterpiece, even though it’s doomed to rot in obscurity. As my second Playstation 2 title for that Playstation 2 I still don’t own, I was expecting Katamari Damacy to be a unique, entertaining experience. What I got was a unique, entertaining experience with an absolutely fantastic soundtrack. I’d call it the best soundtrack since Beyond Good and Evil, but I’ve played very few “new” games between the two titles’ releases. That’s never stopped me before. Katamari Damacy has the best soundtrack since Beyond Good and Evil. It’s ridiculously fun to play as well, and at only $20, you should have no excuse not to buy it. Hell, I don’t even own a Playstation 2 and I tracked down a copy, which was a much easier chore than I had envisioned. Though GameStop #1 had already sold its single copy, the local EB Games still had the one copy they’d received in stock. In fact, vector_black’s Dawn of War (he made it) turned out to be a much more difficult find, as we drove to GameStop #2 in the next town over in order to secure it.

While in this second GameStop, I happened to catch a glimpse of Chris Kohler’s unfortunately titled Power Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life behind the counter. It’s a book, a book which I then purchased. I’ve read about half of it since that encounter so many hours ago, and have found it pretty interesting. There’s a little too much page space devoted to describing the opening and closing sequences of Donkey Kong and Mario games, and a fairly thorough list of Final Fantasy music albums which would be better off as a .txt file at GameFAQs, but overall the book is extremely interesting, even to those of us who spend too much time browsing through gaming sites and lurking through gaming forums. The interviews which Kohler managed to score with the likes of Shigeru Miyamoto, Yasundori Mitsuda, and Masaya Matsuura (Parappa, Vib Ribbon) are especially interesting. I just wish I could figure out how the title relates to the book itself, because after that first chapter, we seemed to have strayed pretty far from Japan saving the world from death, using only the power of video games to resuscitate our planet. Still, worth checking out if you don’t feel really, really dumb paying $20 for a book.

Then I was actually going to watch some Warcraft 3 replays for posting on this very site, only to find that the 1.17 patch had already been released. I’d call that ironic, but it’s really just convenient (and totally false).

I think it’d be pretty interesting if I did something with this website other than update it to say, “Hey, look what I did today!” or “here’s my opinion on this thing I just thinged.” I almost think that used to be the case, that this site once contained more interesting content, but I’m too lazy to look through the (still unformatted) archives to see if that’s true or not. Either way, I win.

And finally, WEWATC~1.doc is now at 351 pages.