After hearing about it and knowing what it does and even seeing a few examples my curiosity finally got the better of me and I decided to mess around with some CSS3 stuff. For those of you who may be less web developer-y, it's just CSS but with some added wackiness that actually goes beyond just simple styling and into crazy territory. Of course it also goes into browser support territory and ends up being woefully inconsistent among most browsers (shocking, I kn0w), so it's ultimately useless right now unless you want to force people to use Chrome or Safari (which is not recommended).

Clicking 'Read More' will get you some quickly done examples of a couple of CSS3 properties, including some Webkit specific animation stuff. So if you want the full effect I recommend you read this post in Chrome or Safari or your Webkit nightly build of choice. Firefox 3.5 will work for some, but not all, and Internet Explorer will fail in every way. See how annoying that was?

I have some other stuff half written but not completed which includes my 'best of 2009' list (February isn't too late to put that out, right?) and one or two other random articles. Before I potentially get around to finishing those I would like to note that since my video games update I have actually completed Trine, Machinarium and Hitman: Blood Money from that list. I also played a good deal of Torchlight though I didn't beat it. On top of that I purchased Crysis and Crysis Warhead and beat both of them. So I'm pretty happy about that too! Still a lot of other stuff waiting to be checked out, but I never expected to finish all of that. Oh, all of those games are totally worth checking out, by the way. Blood Money in particular is pretty great. Video games!

While I will probably write up some kind of non-definitive list of games I liked best in 2009, there is one game not released in 2009 I feel deserves some attention. Somehow Team Fortress 2 has been getting constant, content-heavy updates since its release in 2007. While there's the usual new maps and game modes (which sometimes piggyback existing maps and modes) the concept of adding new weapons to each class that need to be unlocked (or found) is a highly interesting concept.

One of the most recent additions is the WAR! update, which comprised of new unlocks for both the soldier and demoman. The latter class I barely ever play as because of my complete inability to face off against anyone coming directly after me. I've mostly taken to wearing a top hat and running around with a sword (which I got as a random drop). The soldier, however, is a bit more my speed. It's the most 'classic' of all the classes, as you get a shotgun and rocket launcher (and a nearly useless melee weapon). My main gripe with the soldier was always the speed of the rockets.



As a way of perhaps trying to keep them from being overpowered, soldiers can only chamber four rockets at a time and they are rather slow and the reload animation is fairly lengthy. My main issue was the rocket speed, as it forced most soldiers into a mid-to-short range game of shooting people in the feet. But no more! The new weapon, dubbed The Direct Hit, rewards people who hit guys directly. The damage is 25% higher and the speed is 80% greater, making them pretty fast. The downside is that there's almost no splash damage, so if you miss even by a little it's mostly wasted. I was never amazing at Quake 3, but I always enjoyed the hell out of it, with the rocket launcher being a primary reason.

None of the unlockable weapons are a huge improvement over what they replace. The scout's melee replacement, the Sandman, is a bat that's identical to the default one, except that you can also hit a baseball that stuns any enemies it hits from within a certain distance. The downside is that you have 30 hit points fewer, but with a scout that doesn't necessarily matter.

Some unlockables are just plain fun. The sniper can use a bow and arrow called the Huntsman. It's inferior to the sniper rifle in every way possible, except that you can shoot arrows which can pin bodies to the wall or stick out of them if you connect but fail to make a kill.

Valve deserves a lot of credit for breathing new life into this game on a pretty constant basis. It's not something many game companies could ever afford to do, which is why the situation is so unique. Since TF2's initial release I've dropped it and come back a number of times (probably four or five), when generally with online multiplayer games the first time I drop it ends up being the only time.

It's not a game that was released in 2009, but it's certainly one that I enjoyed a lot in 2009, and that's pretty cool.

I've suddenly become overwhelmed with games I own (or am planning on buying) but haven't completed (or bought) yet. It's a lame ass problem to have for sure, but I can't recall this being much of an issue in my life before.

• Red Faction: Guerrilla - I really want to finish this but I haven't had the time. Nevermind that I never played the second one (though the first one was great), I'm trying not to think about that. It's fun but kind of repetitive, but it also fuels my desire to be a gigantic asshole (in space).
  
  
• Trine - I put off buying this even though I loved the demo and now it's $20 on Steam and I pretty much need to buy it.
  
  
• Machinarium - I played the demo and I liked it a lot, plus I like the stuff these guys have done before this game. It probably won't take me too long to beat either, maybe I can put it off or something.
  
  
• Hitman: Blood Money - Highly recommended and bought during a $5 Steam sale. I am pretty sure I will love this game, but it's also probably going to sit in my Steam list, uninstalled, for a while. Kind of like Beyond Good & Evil did.
  
  
• Time Gentlemen, Please! and Ben There, Dan That - Also bought for $5 on Steam! I heard these are good and funny and I wanted to support the developers. I haven't had time! I think I might play these on my laptop over Thanksgiving (possibly along with Machinarium).
  
  
• Torchlight - I'm not even sure why I want to buy this, but it sounds neat and everyone is heaping positive praise onto it. I've never played Diablo (which angers many, many people apparently) so I guess maybe I don't know what I'm getting myself into. I haven't bought this yet, but I probably will!
  
  
• STALKER - I got this for $5 on D2D. I'm pretty sure I'll think it's great, but it's going to sit around for a while like Blood Money.
  
  
• Brutal Legend - I have a copy but I haven't started it at all yet! I might hate 50% of it! I'll probably like the world design a ton though.
  
  
• Uncharted: Drake's Fortune and Uncharted 2: Among Thieves - I don't even own a PS3 yet but I need to play these! The first one is like $28 or something so that's pretty cheap.
  
  
• Super Metroid - Some day I'll play this game!

So there you go. Video games.

For some reason I can't get enough of these Chicago reaction shots. It's like everyone in the city was suddenly dumped three seconds before they were about to propose. Not that I like to revel in other people's misery (okay, maybe a little) but it's all very humorous to me.

"I can't believe it," said Parker, whose hometown is the Chicago suburb of Naperville, Ill. "We sent Obama and Oprah. We had a lot of people behind our bid. I'm disappointed but it will be great to go to Rio."

Candace Parker in USA Today

I mean, how can you go wrong when you send Oprah somewhere? Oprah for fucks sake!

Scribblenauts is a game you may have heard of. Made by 5th Cell (makers of no games I've ever played, though Drawn to Life is easily their most popular release) this game just kind of popped out of nowhere during E3 this year. It ended up winning a number of 'Best In Show' awards (extremely rare for a DS game) and certainly was the most popular DS game shown off during that time period.

If you don't already know, the basic premise of Scribblenauts is that you solve puzzles by conjuring items. More or less any item can be spawned, from mundane things like types of food, to useful items like guns and swords, to animals, to mythical creatures (Kraken, Cuthlulu, Spring Heeled Jack, Jersey Devil, the list goes on) to downright ridiculous things like 'Ninja Shark' and 'Robosaur'. The levels of the game come in two types: action and puzzle. Puzzle levels generally you need to spawn something that someone (or something) in the level will find useful. For example early in the game you need to give a fireman, chef, policeman and doctor an item they will find useful. So, spawning an ax, butcher knife, billy club and stethoscope will win you the level. Action levels are more general and usually involve you murdering something and arranging items in order to complete the level.

Now bear with me, because I'm about to say something not overly flattering about Scribblenauts. The main issue with the game is that it feels very clumsy. Interaction between items is usually pretty limited and things usually only try and eat each other. And while there is a huge (and impressive) collection of things you can spawn, many of them are useless or even extraneous (I mean, will I ever really need to use baklava?). You end up using only a small collection of items to solve most of the puzzles, and of course you can purposely attempt to be more creative, but it often ends up sinking your proverbial ship.

An example, a few missions require you to get a person or thing to a new location on the map. In your way could be treachery and many perils. You could lead the thing along and fight off threats as they come, or you could spawn a helicopter, rope, and just airlift your subject to safety. I have attempted some kind of crazy scheme involving a ton of items or a crazy contraption numerous times, but often it ends with a colossal amount of failure. When that happens enough you end up busting out the old standbys and you finish the puzzle, but it feels sort of empty. It's weird to have so much at your disposal and potentially never using more than a small fraction of it.

That all said, when the game works, it works really well. As you play through the puzzles and they get more difficult you can end up stitching together some very elaborate things that don't always work exactly as planned, but many times a horrible failure can lead to a ridiculous victory. These moments make you feel like some kind of clumsy MacGuyver, where instead of inexplicably pulling off a ridiculous escape in your coffin jetski maybe the jetski hits a rock and does a flip in the air, explodes, catches a rope on fire and drops the starrite into your lap. Sure it wasn't elegant or at all what you intended, but it was pretty damned fun.

Weirdly Scribblenauts shares a lot in common with Far Cry 2. Not in any semblance of the gameplay of course, but in what exactly makes the game interesting to play. Far Cry 2 was very much about the experience of playing the game. The unpredictability that came with broken weapons and having Malaria. The war stories you told of the time you were sniping at some guys and an RPG exploded the truck next to you and you had to make a ridiculous run for cover because the grass you were standing in caught fire. Scribblenauts war stories are of course a bit more ridiculous (a lot more ridiculous, really) but that's where the true draw of the game lies. Telling your friends how you spawned a tiger to kill the leprechaun or that you discovered some insane thing.

That's really what games are about, or what the best games are about anyway. A major failing of game companies is thinking that the GTA3 series of games were popular because of the open world, and the subsequent burst of GTA3 'clones'. When people talk about GTA3, they don't talk about how big the world is, or how many missions the game has, they talk about the time they holed up at the car dealership and held off the army for 10 minutes before making a mad dash to a fast car and fleeing only to hit a ramp wrong and meet a watery demise.

Scribblenauts has that ability, and any game that can manage to make the player's individual experience the star of the show is okay by me. It's not perfect, but then again, I don't know if I'd want it to be. When everything goes terribly wrong and explodes in your face it's not frustrating, because now you have a story to tell for your troubles. Hitting reload isn't something you dread, it becomes something you almost look forward to, and there's something pretty great about that.

I can't wait to get a Dreamcast!

Also my stupid RSS feed shows updates without regard for the date, so I think my cheating is now public record. Fixed that at any rate, for the two people who subscribe (if even).

I have a fairly substantial write-up coming where I outline all the totally sweet (and totally lame) games I played or watched someone play at PAX, but it turns out there are an asston of them and it takes a long time to write about an asston of games. Asston, by the way, is a real unit of measurement. I think it's British.

At any rate, I have had some thoughts about PAX kicking around, and after reading both Simon Carless' analysis on why PAX works and Steve Gaynor's blog post about game experience (which isn't related to PAX at all, but I think it applies) I feel I can pretty well put it into words, though perhaps only words that have already been spoken by those two.

Having never attended PAX before, I have to say I really enjoyed it. At the surface PAX is a pretty huge convention (2009's being the biggest yet), which would quickly bring up comparisons to E3 or San Diego Comic-Con (neither of which I have ever attended, though I know a lot about both). If you look at it from afar, and this is probably true for non-gamers, PAX is similar. A huge convention about video games and other geekery. Granted Comic-Con is spread out over a number of other things, but E3 seems like it would share a lot of similarities with PAX. This is not the case however.

I've heard PAX described as 'a large convention with a small convention feel' and that is pretty much the most accurate of a description you will get. Somehow a huge amalgam of gamers, both video and tabletop, have gathered in Seattle for one weekend solely due to promises of sweet games, cool events and of course game-related junk (free or otherwise). It's entirely a consumer show, catering to the people who, at the end of the day, make the video game industry run. Gamers. It's a pretty novel idea.

And PAX seems to be very genuine, which I think is the key to everything. There are areas where you can just go play games (PC, console, tabletop) if you don't want to take in any presentations or wait in any lines. You can preview some anticipated titles, or just goof around with friends. Or if you really want you can sit on a beanbag chair and play DS all day, because there are two or three hallways filled with the things. Can you imagine that happening at E3?

It's really something special to see it, really. Just tons and tons of people who love games and are there to enjoy themselves. It's something special, and I have to say in spite of what I thought, I really enjoyed myself. Pretty awesome.