Video Games

I have been playing Mirror’s Edge on the iPhone recently, among other things.  Mirror’s Edge is a game about running around and dodging things “with style”.  You run over roofs, down zip lines, and across various objects.  Your only attacks are slides and kicks that disable but don’t kill.  The entire thing is based off something called parkour.  As a friend of mine said, “Leave it to the French to make a game of running away”.  

There are quite a few parkour games on the iPhone, most of them being continuous runners like Mirror’s Edge.  I find it strange that most of the parkour games are based on dystopian societies, but none of them involve ever fighting back.  The goal of the games is simply to get “away”, yet as the Nazis proved in World War 2, there isn’t much of an “away” to get to.  

Moving on…  I’ve also been getting back into Portal, Half-Life 2, and Counter-Strike.  I’ve mostly been playing Half-Life 2, as I find that game to be one of the best made and I haven’t bought many games in a long time.   I was intending to get info Fallout 3 world building, but Fallout 3 doesn’t work well on Windows 7.  And I’m not going to spend 6 hours digging through forum posts to try and get the damn thing working.  That’s just not going to happen.  So I pulled out my old Valve disks and went to town on Half-Life 2 and Portal. 

My son likes to watch me play video games, and plays Angry Birds here and there when I let him.  He’s three, so I’m not expecting a whole lot.  He’s beaten two or three levels, though I’m not sure it’s intentional or just playing around.  He doesn’t like Portal.  I think GlaDos scares him.  He’s had a noise aversion for a long time, and certain sounds just freak him out.  That’s okay.  GlaDos would freak me out if I was three, too. 

I enjoy the possibility of what Half-Life 2 offers, especially in the map building format.  I think there is a method there to create the worlds flowing through peoples’ brains and do it on the cheap, so you can explain to you significant other what you mean.  If you can get your significant other to quit playing Candy Crush.

Looks to be a busy week next week.  Should be interesting.  Or at least I think interesting.  Could be horrible.  I don’t know.  We shall see.