A short rundown of games I’ve been playing

Figured I’d talk about the (newer) games I’ve been playing the few waking hours i have in between work and sleep. Here they are, in no particular order:

Minecraft
If you haven’t heard of Minecraft by now, basically…well I’m not sure how to describe it other than as a full-fledged sandbox game that is definitely worth the roughly $15 USD I paid for it. With procedurally generated worlds and the ability to pretty much do anything (with more being added), it’s a wondrous mix of Legos and Dungeon Crawling. I’d link you to crazy videos regarding Minecraft but seriously you can just search “Minecraft” in youtube and get a bunch of results, and I really don’t know what to recommend.

Halo: Reach
I don’t care if it is just Halo 3 with Jetpacks, it’s awesome. Full stop. End of Discussion. My only regret is that I don’t have enough time to play it more. There’s just something so Zen-like about sneaking up on someone who’s fallen for a teammate’s hologram and stabbing them through the spine with a knife before they even have a chance to realize they’ve been had.

EA Sports NBA Jam
Finally after over a decade of waiting the NBA Jam series goes back to its arcade roots and does an amazing job (and the motion controls are even simple and intuitive!). If you played the original NBA Jam (or Tournament Edition) you will feel right at home. Even if you didn’t and you’re new to the arcade basketball scene, you’ll pick things up very quickly. If you own a Wii you owe it to yourself to get this game. If you have an Xbox 360 or a PS3 you owe it to yourself to get the game on XBLA or PSN when it releases November 17.

ARMA II
Only played this a bit but seeing as how it takes the Operation Flashpoint formula and expands upon it, it satisfies both my FPS and RTS urges. Also comes with a robust mission editor that one of my friends desperately wants me to try and make something with.

Portfolio Update and more KOTH_Aleutia news

Updated my portfolio with information regarding Ablative Starfighter (including a new link to the game). I also went back into Koth_Aleutia, and fixed some of the biggest structural symmetry problems. Sadly there isn’t much that can be done about the terrain asymmetry, but I believe this is now a far more balanced and playable map. I should be uploading it to tf2maps in a few days. You can check my portfolio in the meantime for a quick video fly-through (about 1 minute in length) as well as more screencaps of the map.