Hey everyone!  I decided that since I'm paying for the space anyway, I should move my blogging to my webspace.  It'll be the same content, just in a different spot.  Hopefully it'll also be updated more often.

New URL: http://www.mattand.net/blog

Please bookmark it and check it out now and again and you'll get punch and pie!

I felt pretty accomplished as a gamer yesterday.  I finished Donkey Kong '94 or the first time!  I picked up a used copy for my Game Boy a few weeks ago.  It's an amazing little puzzle-platformer that I had borrowed from my neighbor way back in the day but I didn't have the skills or brains to figure out a few levels and therefore was never able to get all the way to the end.  But that all changed yesterday.  It took quite a few tries on some of those later levels but I was finally able to defeat that cunning ape.



Yesterday I also finished Portal.  I finally picked up a copy of the Orange Box last week and while I haven't gotten psyched up enough to see if I'm still any good at Team Fortress I gave Portal a good run through. This one was kind of a puzzle-first-person-shooter where you're given a room full of obstacles, a gun that shoots teleporting portals and a promise of some cake at the end.  It was a pretty short game, but all of it was so much fun that I can't complain to much.  Plus almost everything that GLADos (the oppressive computer AI running the game) says is hilarious.



I really love games like these where good puzzles are one of the main gameplay elements like Braid, ICO, Shadow of the Colossus, or even Gain Ground (how awesome was that one Chris?)



I also really love graphic adventure games where the puzzles are the whole game like Monkey Island, Full Throttle, Sam & Max, etc.  It always gives me a great sense of accomplishment to figure out puzzles that really have me stumped at first.  Back before I had the internet I used to get extremely stuck in a lot of games but that only made it that much sweeter when I finally figured out the solution.

Speaking of being stuck in a game, maybe now I'll go back to playing Braid and try to get some of those missing puzzle pieces so I can cross that game off the list.