Io has been living up to her name, stuck running windows pretty much every night for the last week or so. It all started with Doug and George during last weekend’s 24hr-videogameathon. I brought down the new toy, we watched George play Final Fantasy VII (probably the best RPG I’ve ever played) while Doug and I tried to conquer the civilized world in Civilization IV:
The damned game is as addictive as ever–I think we played for about 6 hours straight while sitting there. We lost, tragically, outpaced in the prehistoric land-grab by wiley Abe Lincoln of the Americans (each civilization has one representative leader throughout history; I was Ghandi). We were never really able to recover, since we had sunk all our resources into building space ships instead of caravels in a world filled with islands.
The other part of my windows gaming renaissance has been Half Life 2. Unlike most games that primarily involve running around shooting people with increasingly large guns, this game entertains the heck out of me. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic dystopia where some sort of aliens from another dimension have come to dominate the human race. In the future, you can tell whether someone is evil merely by the presence of a gas mask:
I also just noticed today that comments have been busted for maybe a month. Now that I’ve fixed it I expect the customary torrent of adulation to resume.