Bit behind on the old blogging, so here’s all the news fit to print… Or something like that. Generally I try to post about pleasant subjects but events of late have not been conducive to doing so, but I am trying to post more this year so bear with me.

Picked up Guitar Hero World Tour (Wii Edition) the other day. I’ve played some of the previous Guitar Hero games but hadn’t purchased any of them until now. Then Amazon had a lightning deal on it and I was able to pick it up for $60 (vs the normal $100). Talked about it with my supervisor at work and she made the interesting comment of comparing the concept of Guitar Hero to Simon. Now that I wrote that I’m not sure why I found it so amusing or apt, but I did. *shrug* In any case, I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. We did try picking up a second controller for the game, so the wife and I could play the game together but most places around us are sold out currently. One of the used, game shops had a used controller but it was missing the plastic cover which holds the Wiimote inside the controller. Meh.

Yesterday our failing US economy hit home a bit more directly. The company I work for announced all employees will be taking a 8.33% paycut effective April 1 through at least June 30th and if that wasn’t bad enough we all have to take 1 week off without pay. Either one of those is bad enough but both at once really hurts. Especially since that paycut effectively wipes out 2+ years of raises. I’m trying to be positive about it (e.g. I’m still employed and I’ll get a week to do some work around the house) but that’s hard when you see new reports indicating the company’s board of directors paid themselves 2 million dollars in bonuses and changed the rules on their bonuses so they could take the entire bonus in cash1. *sigh* The situation blows away all our plans for having fun this summer and kills any plans we had for painting the house this year. Epic suck.

1 In previous years, they were required to take a minimum 25% of their bonus in company stock. Rather disheartening to have them grabbing all that cash for themselves while they cut our pay.

I’m pretty hyped to see this come out. And the new direction of being cartoony/pixar-ish is something I really like about it. Too many games are taking themselves far too seriously these days going for the ultra realism and what not. Along those lines, I have heard the Heavy Weapons Guy actually grins and laughs as you kill opponents and supposedly Valve will give each of the characters some sort of appropriate killshot animation. It sounds like it will be hella fun. The only problem is I’ll have to seriously upgrade my PC as my current box only just manages to play Half-Life 2 in single-player and can’t handle multi-player (too old/slow). *sigh*

In reply to Valve teases us with Team Fortress 2 – Meet the Heavy.

I used to love playing video games and would waste entire days doing nothing else, but over the last couple of years I’ve started slipping away from that hobby. The expense of keeping my computer updated to handle the latest games combined with the pain I’d get in my wrists just kind of killed the fun. Particularly since I wasn’t seeing a lot of new games to keep up my interest. Well, if the game behind this trailer plays anywhere close to as good as it looks; then I’ll be back to burning the midnight oil to lay waste to the enemy. *grin*

You see, one of my all-time favorite video games was the original Team Fortress mod for Half-Life. The class choices, mayhem and fun were an unbeatable combination1. Then as other mods were developed further; Valve announced they were going to go all out on making TF2. This was 5 years ago and was the last we heard from Valve about it. At least the last we heard until this month when they released the official trailer for TF2. The new character models are wicked cool and oddly enough something about the trailer reminds me of No One Lives Forever (another great video game).

Just wow! I cannot think of any better description of how cool this trailer looks. Go on, hit the link and watch it yourself!

1 At least I’ve always thought so, but others have preferred that POS called Counter-Strike.

This week’s selection of links from Pukka include:

Not from Pukka, but still worthy of notice: