….ever. To date anyway. I keep forgetting to post this. I had great fun working my way through Freedom Force which is a great homage to the old golden age comics I grew up with as a kid. Towards the end of the game the heroes are confronting the ultimate bad guy. Straight out of an episode of Batman, he launches into a long screed about why he’s done all the evil deeds he’s done. He concludes with a manaical laugh and a declaration that:

I want to live…..Forever!!! [mwu ha ha ha ha ha]

To which one of the heroes responds:

Good for you. Join a gym

That cracked me up like nothing in a game has in ages. The whole game is full of great Batman-esque dialog; that line takes the cake though.

…in the book of dave. Gothic is an original mix of gameplay elements from Tomb Raider, the classic adventure game types, and action RPG games like System Shock and Deus Ex. When I first got it I spent about an hour playing and decided it was too hard and contained too much dialog, but folks kept popping up on usenet talking about how great it was and how you had to get past the first couple of hours of the game. So after I built my new machine I tried it again and I have to say it’s an awesome, awesome game. The first couple of hours are rough since you have basically no combat skills ….
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I’ve got a new favorite gaming website, gamerankings.com. It comprises everything I love best about community websites, I wish I had thought of it first. You can quickly create an account and begin to rank and leave comments about games for most of the major platforms. The site tracks your contributions over time and each user is assigned a rank based on their contributions. It’s missing the sort of ‘per post’ karma stuff from the slashdot sites which I hope they add, but as a plus they link to external reviews of games and the users can then rank the reviews as well. All in all it’s a very slick system. It occurs to me that I should do the same thing for traditional boardgames, there’s a concept no one has done before.