Lately

Played a demo of Flotilla. Not impressed.

Played a demo of Osmos. Seems amusing, but I’m not sure it’s worth paying for.

Played Sonic Adventure DX on the gamecube. I really suck at controlling 3D games, and this one isn’t impressing me so far. I’ll give it a little more time, though, before I dismiss it.

Played Sonic Heroes, also on the gamecube. Not perfect, but it seems kind of fun. The switching characters thing seems like an interesting mechanic. It does seem to switch on its own sometimes, though, and I don’t know why. Also, I still suck at controlling 3D games. Nice graphics, though.

Played Audiosurf. Great game.

Restarted Trilby: The Art of Theft. That’s one cool game. I’ve only done the first level so far, this time through, but it’s still great. I’ll have to beat this one some time.

Played a little Super Mario Galaxy 2. Got another star or three and a comet coin. I need to spend a little more time on this one.

Played some Jumper. Got a couple of screens further along. This game is hard and sometimes frustrating. I did discover what was causing me so much trouble on the stage I was on (3-2, I think): if you land on a block that can fall and don’t jump right away, your jump will actually be your double-jump, even though you seem to be standing on the block. This got me killed loads of times. Finally figured it out. I had thought that I was just stupidly failing to hit jump in time or something.

Also recently played (about two minutes of) Dragon Quest on the NES, in order to see how my Japanese skills are progressing. The answer: slowly. Oh well.

Played some Alien Hominid on the gamecube. That game is really hard. Or else I just suck. Either way, I don’t do so well. It is a really cool game, though.

Played an hour or so of Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles. Not impressed. The boss battles take forever, and the minor battles aren’t really interesting. Since the magic things disappear when you leave the level, there’s no building up on those over time, and it seems to me like the physical attack is pretty useless. Well, I’ll probably play it a little more before I give up on it. Maybe the story will turn out to be interesting (though, also not high hopes of that happening).

Played some Diablo II recently. Got an item or two, though I don’t recall what.

Recently

Played more pinball, and some more SMG2, though not much of that. It’s really good, I just haven’t gotten around to playing it much.

Played an hour of Half-Life 2 that I was fortunate enough to be given. It’s really quite good so far. One annoyance: guy-whose-name-I-forget says “I’ll meet you in the plaza.” I get there and wander around a little. He’s not there. I wander around a bit more. I decide that clearly I need to trigger his appearance somehow. I go around poking everyone and everything in the place, as well as going back inside and poking everyone and everything there in case I missed something. Result: no guy. Actual correct action: jump over a fence and wander around a bit. Eventually guy shows up elsewhere. Doesn’t say “Oh, yeah, sorry about leaving you to be zapped and beat to death. I was getting a coffee.” Said something more like “Oh, you’re finally here.” as I recall. Bah. I hate wandering around lost. The environment is neat and all, and I don’t mind exploring (I enjoy it quite a bit, actually), but if I feel like I’m meant to be doing one thing and I can’t then I tend to get a bit frustrated.

Related annoyance from another game: I tried out… Modern Warfare 2? Maybe? Some shooty thingy… a while back and there are all these soldier types and they’re all like ‘follow me’ and I’m all like ‘sure!’. But then they simply will not move forward unless I stupidly charge ahead and run into bullets with my face. Hint to game developers: if a character tells me to follow them, I expect them to move and me to follow, not the other way around. If a character says they’ll meet me in the plaza, I expect that they will do that unless I’m given some reason to think otherwise. Don’t force me to ignore all reason in order to move the game along. That is annoying.