Yes, it’s been a busy couple of weeks, but just to keep you apprised of what I’ve been up to, I thought I’d bring back our old friend, the Five-Line Friday!  With a three day weekend coming up, I’ve got my DS charged up and a fresh new copy of Might & Magic: Heroes of Battle ready to roll; I’d heard many good things about this when it first came out, and it’s high time I got around to playing it myself.  Super Mario Galaxy 2 now has its place of residence in the Wii, and the wife and I have been making slow but steady progress through the first few levels (multi-target Yoshi tongue action?  Fantastic!).  Part of the reason that I’ve been playing less games than usual is that Chris and I have been busily working on finalizing our next release for Twofold Secret; we’ve been in beta for the past three weeks, and we’re looking to have the final release sometime very shortly; it’s been tough work, but it’s the kind of work you can love.  Lastly, I’ve been playing an inordinate amount of Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe when I have some spare moments, as, after ten years of playing this game, I finally grasped how to properly use signals the other day; it’s been a major advance in train scheduling.

-Joel

While Joel hasn’t been gaming as much, I feel like I’m on the opposite end of the spectrum, in that I have far too many games that I’m trying to get through.  Mario Galaxy has also taken up residence in my home, and it’s hard to tear myself away from it; I played through the entire first world in one sitting, and I’ve had to judiciously decide when I’m going to play it, since I know as soon as I start, the next thing I know it’ll be 3 hours later.  I’m also working on a couple of features for the site that I’m pretty excited about, that will be going up in the next couple of weeks, so that’s been occupying some time as well.  The other “main” game that’s sucking up my time is Split/Second, which aside from some truly awful rubber-band AI has been a fantastic experience – I’m not sure how well it will hold up to long-term play, once I’ve seen all the power plays the game has to offer, but until then, it’s been nothing but sheer gaming bliss. I also decided to go back and re-play Portal, to see if it’s as good the subsequent times through as it was the first time – and it totally is.

-Jeff

Alan Wake is a game that I had long dismissed as complete and utter vaporware.  Given that fact, even when they started a full-court media press about it after last year’s E3, a small part of me still believed that it was never coming out, and so I paid it no mind.  This willful ignorance actually had a positive effect on my overall experience with the game, as I went in knowing absolutely nothing about what this game was about, save for the fact that it came to me billed as a game filled with “Stephen King style horror.”  Being a complete horror apologist and fan, that was all it took to sell me on the game, and so with a steeled heart, a darkened room, and headphones cranked to 11, I ventured into the world of Alan Wake.

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There is a very strange moment in Final Fantasy VI that has always baffled me.

Relatively early in the game, after your party splits into three separate groups to take on their individual branches of the story, you are presented with a section dedicated to the character of Locke.  Locke, your party’s “treasure hunter” extraordinaire, travels back to the now-occupied-by-the-Empire town of South Figaro to cause some mayhem in the hopes of slowing up the Imperial advance. 

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