Since I bought Audiosurf for almost no money last week, I browsed through the Steam store bins and decided to buy some more nice goodies. Now I almost have that female feeling of satisfaction after having bought something, but I actually already have that after buying any new game, music CD, DVD or any gadget or PC item. This time I added Ninja Reflex, Everyday Shooter and the Best of Underground Pack which includes Eets, Rag Doll Kung Fu, Gumboy Crazy Adventures and Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved. I love my kung-fu .

It's good to have some casual/indie titles to refresh my mind at times in-between my longer sessions playing either ETQW or TF2, which are my most played MP titles. TF2 probably takes the win atm though. After playing ETQW for 1400 hours I needed a little breather into another title.

The only thing still missing in DD is the true bargain bin. Just going to a store around the corner and finding a game dirt cheap because they need the shelf space. But maybe that also means my ever growing games collection will finally slow down and will allow me to be able to play the games that I have been buying.

A few weeks ago, I already decided to leave my clan and at the same time reset my stats. The latter simply because the only thing I was focused on was trying to get better in the melee top 10, trying to get back on the first page of the statistics page.

I was actually more focused on stats and thus stats whoring than enjoying the game and gaming in general. This is one of the reasons I quit playing World of Warcraft in the past. Luckily I asked myself again, why do I play games and have I been playing games for so long now (at the unrespectable age I am ). I play to have fun, to enjoy myself, to kick it, to funk around, to fly out of my mind, to take a trip, to immerse myself in the story, to doodly dee as an extension of real life NOT WORK . I have work that pays so there I need to work. And stat whoring, farming, grinding, raiding, gathering is all a big **** to turn the actual game into work again.

This week I made the switch from pure ETQW to a mixed bunch. I bought some smaller games: Audiosurf, which is a lot of fun to play with your music, Ninja Reflex, which is just a casual game to train visual reflexes, and I bought Gears of War and SWAT4 (bargain bin).

I also picked up TF2 again, which is a lot of fun and makes for a hell of a lot of mayhem.

Just worked my way through DOOM 3 RoE level 3, so I have that sitting for another day.

Time spend to date:
694 hours

Rank:

Supreme Commander

Overall Ranking: 29th
Melee Ranking: 20th (Back Stabbing for the win)

http://stats.enemyterritory.com/profile/bFunk?page=summary

I've been playing Quake Wars now for some 10 hours and I just have to say that I love it. It's an improved Wolfenstein:ET. Finally a game without a WW2 theme, it's got vehicles and it's very objective focused, which I must say is harder on public servers. So far I've only been exploring some of the classes (soldier, engineer, part of covert ops). It's a game that allows for more flexibility in enjoying the game. Even within classes you can still make a choice. Do I go for camp/sniping as Covert Ops or do I go for sabotage/killing undercover as Covert Ops.

Once the Orange Box is released I'll see what happens between the different MPs I have. I am not playing three different MP games. The choice between Counter-Strike, TF2 and QW will be a hard one, although I won't miss CSS as much. There haven't been any new official maps for ages now, and I don't expect new maps either. TF2 and QW on the other hand are relatively new (they are ofcourse update). So I hope there will be some updates from the game developer on some new maps also after release.

Well, I got back from Mexico last Sunday. It was a hell of a flight back because my oldest son threw up twice in the plane. He must have been dead tired from friday's party and then the next day a very long trip home. Anyway, after about a week now, I am more or less back in this time-zone (I've already spent a full week atwork).

I started back on my regular visits to Rapture which is still blowing me away, the game has such beauty. I get immersed in a world that feels so out of the ordinary and yet so much fun to visit. The only thing that has bugged me today is that I have constant crashes of the game, so I am now waiting for a reinstall to finish to see if that does the trick. I already downgraded to the last WHQL drivers under XP, but if this works I will upgrade again to the latest beta driver which supposedly has BioShock fixes.

Well, I'm off for some well deserved vacation. I will spend 2.5 weeks in sunny Mexico and will wager a trip into the US. Let's see if there's some nice game bargains I can pick up while on the other side of the Atlantic. My hard euros will give me loads of dollar value atm.

I might update these pages, but on the other hand, I might not