I've been playing a whole lot of Super Mario Galaxy. As I finally got a Wii, I figured it would be an excellent game to really get into, and I have not been dissapointed. Save for a couple of what the heck moments that are just a little too cutesy Super Mario Sunshine-ish, it is an excellent game that I highly recommend. Interestingly enough, I think my Wii is getting a little confused on the save games for it, as it seems to swallow a few of my lives everytime I load my save on it. I'm serious when I say that it ate my lives from 11 down to 5 when I loaded a save...something I'll have to figure out before I get too much further in.

As the Left 4 Dead gigantic update just came out, I've been playing that pretty heavily the last 2 days. Survivor mode is the biggest new addition, and I will say its awesome to a point...and then the AI director decides to throw two tanks, two smokers, and three hunters at you right after the entire team gets boomered on. There are three medal levels for time survived...4 minutes for bronze, 7 for silver, and 10 for gold. 4 minutes is doable maybe 1/3 of the time on any given map, but much beyond that and you better have good teammates and a better strategy. 7 minutes is very difficult and probably happens 1/15, and I've yet to hit gold on any surivor map. They seem to have a "remove any exploit/strategy that makes things easy" strategy, which ends up meaning there is no longer a room under the stairs in the Death Toll concluding level, and that stuff that may be relatively doable in Campaign is really tough. In the elevator wait level in Survivor mode, I played with a team that wandered around trying to break down locked doors to best find a room that had only one entry. Eventually they found one, and we finally got silver on the level after playing through it about 15 times.

Finally, I'm putting together my review and video for my review of No One Lives Forever. I hope to have the video and review out within the next few days. I took probably a full terabyte of fraps video of the game, which I cut down on heavily to just the good stuff that'll work in a video (hint...VDUB is your friend). One thing I'm thinking about for future reviews is whether or not I actually I should beat a game before reviewing it, or if I should just play it until my opinion of it has stopped changing. So far I've done reviews only on games I have played all the way through in preparation for review. I'm thinking I'll continue that process for really good games, and perhaps play lesser games until my opinion is formed (in the case of some Dreamcast games, 15 minutes is more than adequate).

As always, comments or questions can be directed to my email at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it