The Flow of Consciousness

Bioshock is the reason I’ve not written in a while. Orange Box isn’t helping, either.

Bioshock is one of the more rivoting (misspelling intentional, har har har) games I’ve played lately. I enjoy single player games with a good story line and atmosphere, and Bioshock hits both.

What else have I been up to?

I finished my first quarter as an adjunct instructor at ITT Tech. It doesn’t look like I’m going to have a class this quarter because of scheduling conflicts, but, AFAIK, I’m on the substitute list.

I have one night left of an Advanced Visual Basic class at RMU. Enough said.

Pittco announced Iron Storm 8, the LAN party group’s ninth event. Sean is heading up the planning for the event and doing a very, very good job. Cat herding is an art.

CES is a little more than a month away. I’ll be covering it for ThinkComputers. I’m in the process of reviewing a new cooler for ThinkComputers, too. It dropped my GPU temperatures by more than 12° C!

I’m going to a rapid application development party this weekend, at which we’re going to attempt to add a payment system to Autonomous LAN Party, a LAN party management system. Unfortunately, the newer versions of ALP at Q Licensed, a license which is incompatible with the GPL. Under the Q License, changes to the software can only be distributed as patches. Users are free to redistributed the source of the software, but their changes must be separate from the source. If this license shenanigans turns out to be that much of a problem, we’re just going to write our own LAN party management software and GPL it.

Within two or three months’ time, there have been so many good game releases that even the most hardcore gamers find their wallets uncomfortably light, or entirely weightless.

BioShock, August 21: $50.
Medal of Honor Airborne, September 4: $42
World In Conflict, September 18: $50
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, October 2: $50
The Orange Box, October 9: $45
Hellgate: London, October 30: $50
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, November 5: $50
Crysis, November 13: $50
Unreal Tournament III, November 19: $50

On top of those, there are a few expansions to major games:

Company Of Heroes: Opposing Fronts, September 24: $40
Neverwinter Nights 2 Expansion Pack: Mask of the Betrayer, October 9: $30

I want almost all of these games. However, I’ve got tops $50 to spend. I played the ETQW and Crysis demos, and I’m sure that UT3 will be good simply because UT2k4 was awesome.

There are too many nearly simultaneous releases. Gamers aren’t going to be ready to go pick up another game—they’re too busy playing a game that just cost them a day’s worth of work.

More than likely, I’m just going to wait until Black Friday to buy any of them. Last year, I got BF2142 and NWN2 for $25 each. I’d like to buy them through Steam, but Steam rarely has price reductions or sales unless the game’s been out for a few months.