Guess who’s back, back again.

Her site looks way better than mine. And she might be motivated to talk every so often, at least until her new job starts (and no, I don’t know where it is, I just don’t believe she’d bail on the evil empire before lining something else up.)

For almost the past year, the only game I’ve been looking forward to has been Team Fortress 2.

This pretty much shows why. Cry some more.

Here’s a great review. Apparently it’s really, really gory. Cartoonishly so, but still gory.

I’m sitting in the game design class I’ve been “proctoring” for the past three months. Today was supposed to be the final class, but the instructor isn’t here, and unlike the last two sessions, no substitute was located in time. It’s 10 a.m. on a Saturday, it’s a beautiful day outside, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

If I was a little more detached, this might seem like the subject of some obscure psychological experiment. The students were supposed to have game prototypes ready for presentation today, but without an instructor to present to, they’re presenting to each other, giving each other feedback. Their games are being played with cards, dice and charts of hit and attack points, and the stories of their games are bloody duels with cudgels, blades, sorcery and even more fantastic combat scenarios, but the players are laughing and generally being pleasant with each other.

Last week, a high school student of Chinese descent in a suburb of Houston was found to have made a map of his high school. It was a three-dimensional map with supposedly care to detail and proportion (I guess, I’ve never seen the original school.)

But probably in part because the game is violent (no telling if the map had ever been played before this all came to light, but considering the game he made it for is more than five years old, it might have been played for years without anyone knowing) and probably due to the kid being Asian, just like the lunatic who shot up a college campus last month (who apparently didn’t play games, at least any he owned) he got expelled to the “alternative” school for miscreants and got arrested.

Guess he should have done a prototype first. Or presented it at a college program, for credit. But someone really ought to give that kid an internship as a level designer. But that’s just what I think. If anyone’s got Counter-Strike “classic,” they can get the map here.