Nerdtales

I am too curious

Today I had to bring Devil May Cry 4 back to the rental shop. I managed to beat Dante finally after many attempts but couldn’t finish the 11th mission anymore. As I don’t want to pay another 10 Euros for an additional week, the game has unfortunately to go back. But I’ll keep the save game on the HDD so that I can borrow the game in a couple of weeks from a friend and finish it properly. It may be not the pinnacle of gaming, hack&slashs are however pretty addictive.

On the weekend my damn curiosity led me to have a look in yet another game. I didn’t have a PC for 2 years now and my iMac never let me regret it. I hadn’t upgraded to Leopard yet but Saturday was the day that I bought the new version of OSX. With it comes Bootcamp which made a Windows installation possible. With the prospect of having Steam and it’s huge back catalog again, I decided to run Windows on the iMac. The installation was pretty easy, although it took some time. Having Steam installed the Orange Pack smiled at me alluringly. I am a weak bastard so I grabbed my credit card, entered the 16 digits and after a night of downloading I finally had the full HL2 goodness on my Mac.

I played HL2 when it came out 2 years ago so I was more than curious how Episode 1 would fare. And although the first 2 hours are not the best in the HL franchise they’re still on a very high level. The art direction is refreshing in a time, where the Unreal 3 engine dominates with it’s bright colours and shiny bump mapping everywhere. An apocalyptic yet comprehensible story finishes the good impression so far. I am still in the city, on my way from house to house looking for a way to leave the rotting town with the citadel in the middle.

Yet, Episode 1 (and 2 and Portal) will have to wait a little. From what I’ve read probably some weeks. A friend of mine gave me Mass Effect to play. Yeah, I know, the next game I started. But that is just how I am. Too curious to let a game just wait for it’s time. But I have the feeling that Mass Effect might be worth it. I played a couple of hours yesterday and it feels good, despite the flawed menus and the confusing upgrade system. I finished the first mission on Eden Prime which ended with the destruction of the sender I initially had to retrieve. Bad luck. I arrived at a huge space station called The Citadel looking for the next missions. As I’ve said, it feels great so far, even the localization - the game got synchronized for Germany - is surprisingly good and in sync with the motion of the lips.