The Common Sense Cowboy

I don't know if you've heard yet, but Trine is way past awesome. I mentioned I was excited a while back, but man, has it ever not disappointed. Exceeds expectations. The artwork is gorgeous, the music is fantastic, and it contains both a wizard and a grappling hook. I don't know what more you could ask for. Except maybe local co-op...which it also has!

Things I have really wanted from my iPhone since day one: A2DP support.
Things inexplicably unsupported by the iPhone, which have led to actual loss of usability for me personally because the workaround is so stupid and broken: MMS.

Things added to the iPhone 3G in the latest update: A2DP, MMS, Copy/Paste.
Things added to the iPhone in the latest update: Copy/Paste.

Fuck you, Apple.

Turns out the bathroom we spent 3 months and over $800 rebuilding is leaking through the walls again.

I need to buy a sledgehammer tomorrow. ...Unless, of course, anyone knows where I can find some detcord.

No matter how often I kept hearing World of Goo was super awesome, I avoided it. This is mostly because I had played its precursor, Tower of Goo which is not at all engaging or entertaining. I mean, if you're going to make a physics game, it's not going to be fun if your physics are terrible. Building a bridge or tower out of overcooked macaroni is not my idea of a good time, and worse, if your gooballs start wobbling, more often than not instead of settling down, their motion will actually amplify--with no action on your part--until your structure reaches catastrophic failure. I was afraid World of Goo would be plagued by all the same problems as Tower of Goo, and just couldn't imagine a game built around that premise being at all enjoyable.

It turns out I was half right. World of Goo does, in fact, incorporate all the mechanics that made Tower of Goo a miserable experience. Yet somehow, for the vast majority of the time, the game is ridiculously fun. A lot of it has to do with the excellent art and the awesomely understated--yet at the same time often rather epic--ambient music (you can download the soundtrack for free, and I recommend you do so). But most of the reason its fun is that while the overall building mechanic remains the same, its broken down into (generally) smaller and far more manageable challenges with a varied array of additional gameplay mechanics mixed in with the basic gooball stacking. In fact, in many levels, there's no actual "building" taking place at all.

Now, there were a few exceptionally frustrating places (almost all of them involving large free-standing structures) where I was still stymied by the gooballs' flagrant disregard for entropy, but for the most part, the game was a fun, light puzzler. Much like Braid, the gameplay concepts were constantly built upon from level to level, so you never found yourself doing exactly the same thing twice. This kept the experience very fresh, and helped keep me engaged even during the frustrating portions.

As far as I'm concerned, every game should do this, and just thinking about it makes me want to cancel my WoW account and swear off JRPGs for good. I mean, I'm not in school anymore, and I just don't have the kind of time I used to. Show me what you've got to offer and wrap it up, I've got stuff to do. World of Goo, Braid, Portal; I could get used to the idea of the $20, super-tight, 4-hour video game experience.

And the Amateur Marketing Award for the most unintentionally vindictive box quote goes to the 1996 PC game Obsidian for this gem:

"We hope you have as many sleepless nights playing Obsidian as we had making it."
- Adam Wolff, Howard Cushnir, Scott Kim, Obsidian Game Designers