When it comes to games, I’m not much of a puzzle guy. But since I got LIMBO a few months ago and enjoyed it quite a lot, I decided to give Machinarium a try when it was on sale on Steam a while back.

Machinarium is a point-and-click adventure game with heavy use of puzzles and brain teasers. It’s created by Amanita Design, a small, independent game developing studio based in the Czech Republic. The game was released in 2009, but that something is “old” doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s bad. “Old” in this case means that us patient gamers can get it on sale. “Old” in this case also means that the game is written in Flash, but we’ll come back to that later. Machinarium tells the story about Josef, a little robot who finds himself dumped on a scrapheap. After re-assembling himself he sets off towards the city to look for a friend. The story, which is told without the use of text or dialogue, unfolds as you play, and even though it’s not the most intriguing and creative story I’ve seen – you’ll probably feel it’s very familiar – it’s very well told.

The story’s backdrop is beautiful, hand-drawn scenes accompanied to a lovely soundtrack by Floex, Amanita Design’s own in-house “sound maker”, as he is entitled on their website. The soundtrack is available here if you want to listen to it. If I’d have to label it, I’d call it “industrial chill”, which is perfect for Machinarium – except for some plants and a bit of water, everything in the game is mechanized and industrial, including the local wild life. The game design is extraordinary well thought-through and the attention to detail is impressive.

The puzzles you stumble across in Machinarium are mostly about pattern recognition. How to interact with the environment is also often part of the puzzles, which are very well balanced and just challenging enough for Average Joe. I got stuck once, but even if that happens, there is hope. Josef will have a small clue for you most of the time and if you find yourself feeling like a moron for not being able to solve a puzzle even with his help, you can play a little mini-game that will reveal the solution, or at least give you some very good clues on how to solve it.

But Machinarium, like all games, has its flaws. The game is written in Flash, and clicking the right mouse button brings up the Flash menu with its “About Flash” and whatnot. Since clicking the right mouse button is usually some kind of action in other point-and-click adventure games – for instance that you automatically put whatever you are holding back in to your inventory – the Flash menu got a bit annoying after a while. It’s mostly my own fault though, for not being able to memorize that I could not use the right mouse button to return whatever the little robot was holding in his hand back to the inventory. Instead the inventory had to be opened before the item could be returned. Point-and-click adventure games often involves a lot of pointing and clicking – hence the genre’s name – with items from the inventory, a process that got rather tedious.

The game lagged considerably on my computer when played in fullscreen. It have to be said that my hardware isn’t what you would call state of the art, but it should be able to handle a game from 2009. Hardware acceleration was turned on in the Flash settings, but that didn’t help at all. I ended up playing the game in windowed mode, which worked a lot better and was fine since fullscreen didn’t really add anything to the game: The resolution used in both fullscreen and window mode is the same. The immense detail of the background images also proved to be a challenge: In one of the scenes, it was virtually impossible to see that the main character could interact with an object on the screen, and it was only by accident I clicked on it.

But in spite of these minor issues, Machinarium is a great game. If you like puzzle games and brain teasers, you should go right ahead and buy it. It won’t entertain you that long, it took me only 6 hours to complete the game and I really suck at puzzles, but at the asking price of USD 10 it’s certainly worth it. You can buy the game straight from the creators.

I tested the Machinarium on Windows, but it’s also available on Mac OS X, Linux (probably through Wine), PlayStation 3 (PSN), iPad 2, BlackBerry PlayBook, and soon, Android. So pick your poison.

Not convinced yet?

Without doubt the greatest graphics you’ve every seen in a computer game. Everything is of course captured on a state-of-the-art PC, but still. Personally, I didn’t try the public beta, and I probably won’t buy the game either: The reviewers are reporting a very short single player campaign and my two-year old computer is barely within the minimum requirements for running Battlefield 3.

But even if I won’t buy the game (at least not before it’s available at a discount because Battlefield 4 is about to be released) an interesting aspect of the new internet based computer game ecosystem has surfaced with the release of Battlefield 3: Digital copies and license agreements. BF3 will not be available on Steam, digital copies will only sold through EA’s own digital platform, Origin. When this was revealed by EA, people started to look at the Origin license agreement and discovered that the Origin client would call home, telling EA what kind of software you had installed on you computer. This, of course, created some commotion, but the more great BF3 videos EA released, the more people forgot about the license agreement and instead started to ask if they could please to throw their money at them instead.

Still, license agreements are interesting. You never read them, but there are some incredible things you agree to. It’s easy to pick on EA, because they have messed up good in the past, for instance with the introduction of SecuROM. Valve, on the other hand, has, with their Steam digital service, always been considered the good guys of the industry. They surely don’t have any evil clauses in the license agreement i blindly agreed to a few years back. Right? I decided to compare the Origin and Steam license agreements to see how different they really are.

Valve’s Steam Subscriber Agreement is pretty straight forwards, with little lawyer-speak. The first thing that strikes me as interesting is this part of section 2A, License Terms:

Steam and your Subscription(s) require the automatic download and installation of software and other content and updates onto your computer (“Software”).

[...]

Valve hereby grants, and you accept, a limited, terminable, non-exclusive license and right to use the Software for your personal use in accordance with this Agreement and the Subscription Terms. The Software is licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Software.

If I interpret this correctly, and it’s pretty clear-cut, a game you buy and download is considered “software” and you don’t actually get ownership of the game that is being stored on your hard drive. You are only buying a license to play the game. So, in theory, Valve can revoke this license and you won’t be able to play the game. This makes me miss the good old days when you got the game on some form of physical medium and there was no online registration or always-on requirements.

The license part is also mentioned in section 2D, Ownership:

All title, ownership rights and intellectual property rights in and to the Software and any and all copies thereof are owned by Valve and/or its licensors. All rights reserved, except as expressly stated herein. The Software is protected by the copyright laws of the United States, international copyright treaties and conventions and other laws. The Software contains certain licensed materials and Valve’s licensors may protect their rights in the event of any violation of this Agreement.

Apart from this, I really don’t find anything really interesting in the user agreement, except in section 5, ONLINE CONDUCT, CHEATING AND ILLEGAL BEHAVIOR:

Steam and the Software may include functionality designed to identify software or hardware processes or functionality that may give a player an unfair competitive advantage when playing multiplayer versions of any Software, other Valve products, or modifications thereof (“Cheats”).

In short, Steam and the software (the games) will be monitoring applications installed on your computer and your hardware to figure out if you’re a cheating son of a bitch or not. This is borderline in terms of privacy, but necessary to prevent people from shooting you in the head through walls from a million miles away and similar no-nos.

The Origin End User License Agreement is also not that hard to read, with little lawyer jargon. The EULA starts out interesting pretty early, with section 1C, License Validation:

The Application and an internet connection are required to validate the license for certain products distributed by EA. You acknowledge and agree that the Application can automatically validate license rights for some or all EA products without separate notice to you. This means that in order to use the Application and certain EA products, you must leave the Application installed on your computer. You acknowledge and agree that the Application may use information regarding your computer, hardware, media, software and your use of the Application to validate your license rights and to update the Application.

This is basically an always-on requirement. You have to have an internet connection so that EA can check your license at any time without notifying you. If your ISP is down for some reason, you might not be allowed to play a game, even if it’s single player only.

There is also a clause that is very similar to Valve’s “you don’t actually own the game you buy”-paragraph. 1E, Reservation of Rights and Restrictions:

The Application is licensed, and not sold, to you for use only under the terms of this License. Except as expressly licensed to you herein, EA reserves all right, title and interest in the Application and all software delivered through the
Application (including all characters, storyline, images, photographs, animations, video, music, text), and all associated copyrights, trademarks, and other intellectual property rights therein.

I didn’t read the first version of the EULA, (the version that created all the interweb-boycott-evil-EA-talk) but I’m pretty sure that particular clause has been rewritten in the version I’ve been reading. Section 2 covers this, and it’s written so straight forward it’s not possible to get it wrong. From section 2, Consent to Collection and Use of Data:

In addition to information that you give EA directly, EA collects non-personally identifiable (or anonymous) information for purposes of improving our products and services, providing services to you, facilitating the provision of software updates, dynamically served content and product support as well as communicating with you. The non-personally identifiable information that EA collects includes technical and related information that identifies your computer (including the Internet Protocol Address) and operating system, as well as information about your Application usage (including but not limited to successful installation and/or removal), software, software usage and peripheral hardware.

As long as it’s “non-personally identifiable information”, I guess I’m OK with it, even if I don’t really see how EA knowing that people have, say, GIMP installed will improve their products and services.

If you don’t reside in Quebec, Russia, Switzerland and the Member States of the European Union, the Origin EULA gets really interesting in chapter 17, Dispute Resolution By Binding Arbitration, section A:

By entering into this Agreement, you and EA expressly waive the right to a trial by jury or to participate in a class action.

Americans really love their class action lawsuit. But not with this license agreement, as you effectively waive your right to gather a few friends and take EA to court if you install Origin. And it doesn’t stop there. EA effectively stops you from participating in any class action lawsuit in the future (even after the license agreement between you and EA has been terminated) and any class action lawsuit that might arise from issues that occurred even before you agreed to this particular license:

This agreement is intended to be interpreted broadly. It covers any and all disputes between us (“Disputes”), including without limitation:
(a) claims arising out of or relating to any aspect of the relationship between us, whether based in contract, tort, statute, fraud, misrepresentation or any other legal theory;
(b) claims that arose before this Agreement or any prior agreement (including, but not limited to, claims relating to advertising);
(c) claims that are currently the subject of purported class action litigation in which you are not a member of a certified class; and
(d) claims that may arise after the termination of this Agreement.

Wow. That’s pretty hard core. Chapter 17 is, in its entirety, devoted to defining how disputes between you and EA should be resolved. This chapter make up the bulk of the license agreement, so EA is really going all in to cover its ass. As far I can tell – but I might be wrong on this one – Section A is the only section that explicitly excludes Quebec, Russia, Switzerland and the Member States of the European Union; the rest of the chapter also covers these regions. By agreeing to the license, you say it’s OK that you and EA resolve all disputes out of court. From chapter 17, section C, Binding Arbitration:

YOU UNDERSTAND THAT BY THIS PROVISION, YOU AND EA FOREGO THE RIGHT TO SUE IN COURT AND HAVE A JURY TRIAL.

In addition to the class action waiver, EA also stops you from ganging up on them in section D, Restrictions:

YOU AND EA AGREE THAT EACH MAY BRING CLAIMS AGAINST THE OTHER ONLY IN YOUR OR ITS INDIVIDUAL CAPACITY, AND NOT AS A PLAINTIFF OR CLASS MEMBER IN ANY PURPORTED CLASS OR REPRESENTATIVE PROCEEDING. Further, unless both you and EA agree otherwise, the arbitrator may not consolidate more than one person’s claims, and may not otherwise preside over any form of a representative or class proceeding.

The obvious incentive for this that settling disputes cost money, and if there are no people there to split the bill, few people will have the money to pay for a lawyer.

So, there you have it. Unless you plan to take EA to court or piggyback on a class action lawsuit, there is nothing in the Valve and Origin license agreements that should scare anyone away from enjoy great games. But keep in mind that you don’t own the games you have paid for. If Valve or EA decides that you for some reason is violating the license agreement, they can easily pull the plug on you.

Sources:
ORIGIN END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT (PDF, the latest version is available on EA.com)
Steam Subscriber Agreement

1. Do not connect the receiver yet.
2. Download the driver for your operating system from the Microsoft download site (direct link to Windows 7 64-bit version).
3. Install the drivers.
4. Connect the receiver.
5. Windows will try to install the drivers for the connected device and fail miserably. But there’s no need to panic!
6. Open the start menu, right click on “Computer” and click “Properties”.
7. Select “Device Manager” from the menu on the left.
8. You should see an “Unknown device” under “Other devices” in the device tree.
9. Right click the “Unknown device” and click “Update Driver Software…”.
10. Select “Browse my computer for driver software”.
11. Select “Let me pick from a list of devices drivers on my computer”.
12. From the list, select “Microsoft Common Controller for Windows Class” and click “Next”.
13. From the list, select “Xbox 360 Controller For Windows Version: 2.1.0.1349 [13.08.2009]” and click “Next”.
14. Click “Yes” when the “Update Driver Warning” dialogue box is displayed.
15. The drivers should be installed successfully. Click “Close”.
16. Turn on your wireless controller by pressing the Xbox button for a couple of seconds.
17. To sync the controller and the receiver, first hold the little white button the the front of the controller. The green lights on the controller should start to rotate clockwise.
18. While the lights on the controller rotate, click the button on the receiver connected to your computer.
19. The controller and the device will sync and the upper left green light on your controller will eventually be the only green light turned on. You can now enjoy console gaming on your Windows 7 computer.

Quite early we got seats by one of the cocktail arcade tables and we held on to those seats for our dear lives for most of the evening, playing old classics like 1942, Dig Dug and of course Galaga. I’m not going to pretend that I know a lot about these games as they appeared in the arcades in the early eighties; I was only 3 years old when Galaga was released in 1983 and arcades were never an important part of my youth. I did, however, make up for all of this when my father bought a Commodore 64 during summer between 5th and 6th grade. That C64 pretty much laid the basis for my computer engineering career.

I spent countless hours in front of the television screen with River Raid, Ghost ‘n Goblins and tons of other games. The first program I ever wrote was a text based BASIC game and I have no idea how many C64 demos I got my hands on; Kanon-Korven by Noice being one of the absolute highlights.

So playing on some of these marvelous 8-bit games again this weekend brought back a lot of fond memories. So now I’m considering building my own cocktail arcade table.

After a little research on Sunday afternoon I found Gremlin Solutions in the UK who sells exactly the same arcade table they had at Tilt. But at £999 plus P&P and VAT it’s way over my budget. Also, the table only has 60 preinstalled games and I doubt that it will allow me to install more.

A better solution would be to buy the Retro Cocktail Arcade Cabinet Kit, which is only a third of the price of the other package. It doesn’t come with a computer, screen, any games, controls or anything else, but the controls are fairly cheap and I’ve got some computer equipment laying around I can use. The only issue, really, is the P&P to Norway. I’ve contacted the store to get a quote, but I’ve still to hear anything from them and it’s been three days since I sent the mail. Not a good sign, in terms of costumer service, but we’ll see.

This can either be a lot of fun or a no-go, it’s all a matter of money, really. Or I could buy a coin mech, invite some people over and finance everything that way.

Sounds like a plan!

The game is probably great entertainment as well.

In other news; we’ve moved to the new apartment and are about half-way done painting the old one. It’s been an exciting month…

LIMBO is the brainchild of Arnt Jensen, who conceived the game around 2004. It was not released until July 21, 2010, however, then as an exclusive title on Xbox Live Marketplace. It only recently made its way to the PS3 and PC platforms. In the game you play a nameless boy who has entered Limbo in search for his missing sister. You start the game in a forest, and as you solve the various puzzles, you move into a creepy urban setting where the puzzles get tougher, but not impossible. I’m really not that good at puzzle games, but only found myself stuck once.

The game features a simple, yet beautiful black and white scenery and ambient sounds and music that blends perfectly together with the graphics. The atmosphere of the game is masterly created and even though its not a horror game per se, I found myself getting goosebumps every so often. The boy is a breeze to control, but this does not stop him from being killed in the most imaginative ways and you’ll feel sorry for him when he does.

This is a great game for the casual gamer who enjoys brain teasers that are not too hard and timed jumping that you won’t fail so many times you’d rather rip out every hair on your body with a set of tweezers than try one more time. You’re only in for 3 to 5 hours of entertainment, though, and be prepared to feel a little bit cheated when you finish the game, because LIMBO just makes you want more.

Buy the game on Steam.

I’m suspecting that it’s the non-challenge about it all that I like. After a long week of facing challenge after challenge at work, it’s great to kick back and do something that doesn’t require any brain activity whatsoever. So, inspired by the Street Cleaning Simulator review, I decided to try out another game by the same publisher; Garbage Truck Simulator 2011¹⁾.

Ah, the garbage truck. Without it, we would be knee deep in our own filth in no-time, just ask the citizens of Naples. So we can safely say that driving a garbage truck is one of the cornerstone professions of any modern society. Acing the simulator would probably give me enough experience to have another job to fall back to should my current career crumble for whatever reason. I downloaded the Garbage Truck Simulation, installed it and started the game. It took a least three minutes to load and there was no indication that anything was happening. Things started to look grim, and when a message telling me about a missing DLL, I was pretty sure my days as a garbage truck driver had ended even before I had the chance to start.

But the game miraculously started, even without the DLL file present. My joy was short lived, however, as everything crashed with the message “Invalid pointer or handle in” when trying to create a in-game profile. I set off on a quest on the interwebs to find the missing DLL file, but even if the error message about the DLL file was now gone, the game still crashed miserably during profile creation. I should probably mention that I’m on Windows 7 x64, this might have contributed to the problems.

But a broken simulation is just a minor setback for someone who once flew a virtual Boing 737-400 from Oslo to Copenhagen in real time only to accidentally crash it into the ground 100 meters from the runway. There are plenty of weird simulators out there to pick and chose from and German Astragon seems to be the most dedicated of the publishers. What about a quarry simulator? Hell, yeah! Unfortunately, Astragon’s games are available in German only (English language versions might be available somewhere) and only a few of them have demo versions. But the Gabelstapler (forklift) Simulator 2009 had, so I decided to download that. Forklifting is, like driving a garbage truck, essential to modern society. What would happen if boxes and parcels were just randomly thrown into trucks and freight trains? Chaos!

After installation I started the game and everything went smooth until the everything froze up when the name of the game’s developer was displayed. They’d chosen the very fitting name “Still” for their game company. At this point I have to admit that I was getting a little annoyed. Everything was turning into a challenge to get any simulator to work on my computer, not to play the simulator itself. As a third and final attempt, I downloaded Bagger (excavator) Simulator 2011, hoping that it would not be plagued by the same kind of bugs as the other simulators.

And believe it or not, this game actually started without any error messages and didn’t crash within the first ten seconds. How everything went from there, I think I’ll save for another incoherent, rambling entry. It’s getting late and I’m being told it’s time to go to bed.

¹⁾ Fredrik, you can safely skip reading this entry.

But, no. I’ve got a few titles, like Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, but I won’t have the time to play them much. I’m just behaving like women do when it’s a shoe sale going on; buying the games because they are too cheap to pass and I know that I will “have the time to play them soon”. No, instead of playing computer games¹⁾, Anniken and I are spending one week somewhere hot with her family and then another week cleaning and painting our old apartment. Good times!

During the week of hot air and high humidity, I predict there will be a lot of beach time, but I’m well prepared with a copy of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower, the last book in the series. It’s big as two bricks laid on top of each other and the text is remarkably tiny. My best guess is that I won’t be even close to finishing it when we return home. Apart from reading, I’m hoping to practice a little bit of bar tending on the trip, and follow up on the success of the Summer Surprise.

Originally, Summer Surprise was supposed to the first drink in a series of four; one for each season. Because I have a sorry excuse for a liquor cabinet and that liquor is ridiculously expensive in Norway, I never got around to make the three other drinks. But now, since we’re going to a country where alcohol is cheaper than water, I thought I should take the opportunity to make drinks for fall, winter and spring as well. The colours are important. Orange, white and green? I realize that Hans Olav and I messed up a little when we picked green to represent summer, since it’s more of a spring colour. Maybe we should have picked blue instead?

Well, these are the kind of things I’m thinking of right now. I can’t complain.

¹⁾ Anniken probably wouldn’t have played that much computer games anyway, to be honest.

With further ado, say hello to Tom Cruise.

Yes, you’ve probably heard the name before, but the name is the only thing they share. The Scientology Church Tom Cruise’ The Sims 3 namesake is slightly overweight, has a weird fashion sense, is neurotic, insane, inappropriate, a kleptomaniac and evil. He loves Egyptian music, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and his favorite color is yellow¹⁾.

The original idea was to control Tom, to get him to do all kinds of weird stuff. But before I was even able to take a screen shot for his portrait, he ran off. For I while I struggled to figure out where the hell he’d run off to, but eventually I found him skinny dipping in the top floor pool of Bridgeport’s celebrity gym. I kid you not. At that point I ditched the original plan and decided to let Mr. Cruise control his own faith.

After he got out of the pool, Tom walked up to a thread mill that he looked at for ages before he decided to give it a go. And he really got into it. It was so fun that he totally forgot to change into his gym outfit and kept his causal jeans on. Unfortunately, he sucked at running and managed to fall down quite a lot. That the weird kid in the sofa kept staring him in the back probably didn’t help.

After an impressive four hours of running and falling down he got off, took “an evil shower” and changed into his swim wear – a white muscle t-shirt and a pair of very small blue shorts. He strolled back to the thread mills where he sat down to watch TV, but as you can see from the picture below watching TV was just a lame excuse for staring at a woman in high heels and a dress (hmmm?) who tried her best to stand upright on the thread mill.

Even though Tom found watching TV entertaining for a while, he eventually got bored and left the gym. He didn’t go far, though. Still in his swim wear, the sat down behind a hot dog stand where he spent an hour staring into the void, only interrupted by the occasional monologue. Sitting there looked both cold and boring and I considered making him change into something more comfortable and go get a hot dog to do something about his growing hunger – but before I got that far Tom got up and bought a hot dog all by himself. Good call.

With the hot dog secured, Tom returned to the table where he was shortly after joined by – somewhat surprisingly – the dress clad woman he stalked at the gym. She had also bought a hot dog and they ate their skin wrapped meat and shared stories about the Loch Ness monster and the economy. Unfortunately, talking about money got Tom a little bit too excited and he made it very hard for people around him to eat in peace. He also spiced the conversation with the odd rude comment, but the unknown woman didn’t scare easily and right before Tom’s bladder was about to burst, he made his first friend, Lala Angelista.

It later turns out that Lala is insane, something that explains a lot. The name seem appropriate, at least.

Tom then returned to the gym to empty his bladder just seconds before he had an accident. He had now spent hours discussing with Lala and it was getting very, very late and Tom was getting very, very tired. In spite of that, he decided to work out a little, but gave up after about an hour. In the haze of sleep deprivation, he went over to a woman who apparently had a thing for nuclear power and started telling her about his new apartment – which he hadn’t even seen yet, by the way. And what do you know, he made yet another friend at the gym, Moxie Logan.

Starting to get even more sleepy, Tom went to have another dive in the pool, this time with his clothes on. At this point we were a bit worried he’d fall asleep while swimming and drown. That would have been quite an embarrassment, managing to kill of my Sim after twenty minutes of gameplay. But in the end he got out, walked to the elevator and started talking to himself.

After a while, Tom snapped out of his The Shining moment and decided to go home and get some sleep. Little did he know that I’ve totally forgotten to buy the poor man a bed, meaning that there was no place for him to sleep. His apartment is amongst the more sparsely furnished I’ve seen, to be honest.

Realizing that he got totally screwed when he bought the apartment, it totally snapped for Tom. He started screaming and pulling out what little hair he had left. Look at that face – that’s a face of pure desperation.

But as the sun rose over Bridgeport, he did what everyone with no shoes, no bed and an unhealthy obsession for Egyptian music would do: He went to the park and fell asleep on a bench.

At the end of the day, I’m surprised how well Tom managed his first twenty four hours in Bridgeport. After all, he has all the attributes of someone who shouldn’t have a single friend and that the first building he decided to run into was a celebrity gym was quite a shocker. He also manged to make three friends; Lala, Moxie and some woman playing the guitar at the gym.

I’m tempted to have my computer turned on over night to see how Tom will do when left unattended for a while, but I’m afraid I’ll find him tomorrow morning, sitting in a corner of his dark living room, in a pool of his own urine with the refrigerator stuffed with body parts.

¹⁾ So it might be that they are not so different after all, what do I know…

Back home I started the optional 8GB install, made myself some pancakes and hooked up the Logitech G25 racing wheel. Using the racing wheel takes a bit of livingroom refurnishing, but since Anniken was at the cat sanctuary today I had the whole apartment for myself. Or, she was supposed to be at the sanctuary, but came home when I was about half way through the install and my pancakes.

But I still managed to cram in almost two hours of racing – Anniken even tried a few laps.

So, GT5, what can I say? The graphics, oh, the graphics. And the audio, oh, the audio. Very, very impressive. The G25 racing wheel works great, like it has done in every game I’ve tried it with. Two hours of gaming doesn’t show much of a game the size of Grand Turismo 5 – 26 different locations, 71 different tracks and more than one thousand cars makes this a game that just gives and gives and gives.

I’m often complaining about the lack of time, and I’ll take this opportunity to do it again. We need more than 24 hours in a day, because there just isn’t enough hours to do all the stuff I would like to do. And I just realized that Steam has started one of their damn sales again – more games for me to buy at an incredibly low price. Probably won’t have the time to play any of them to the end, but…they…are…so…cheap…

But despite the lack of time, I’m seeing the guys, beers and GT5 on a Friday night in the not so distant future.

This, by the way, was this year’s 100^th entry, meaning that I’ve surprisingly enough managed to reach my goal of posting 100 entries in 2010. And with over a month to spare!