Joon

Not much new worth talking about however I am sort of tired of playing Oblivion right now and so I'm taking a break. I started playing Halo 2 again, I bought the DVD on EBay a while back for $12 so I thought I'd actually try and finish the single player mode. Its decent but missing the certain "feel" that the first Halo had. Not to say it's a bad game, just that the single player version of Halo2 doesn't feel as good as the original Halo.

I bought the Episode 1 addon for Half Life 2 which so far I've really been impressed with. People bitch about the fact that the game starts off right where HL2 ended but that's fine by me, I thought it was appropriate and would have found it somewhat odd to start off in a totally different location. I guess people figure that if the episode features totally different locations that somehow the game is "more" worth the $20. Alyxs' AI seems even stronger in this iteration of HL2 and in some instances it's really impressive. I will agree with the commentary that making Alyxs' AI strong makes Gordon feel a little shallow, all they really needed to do was throw in some canned animation and he would have felt a lot stronger emotionally in the game. (eg: pat Alyx on the shoulder when she's sad/scared, put hand on elevator glass door when she does to try and convey some sort of connection with her (rather than point your gun at her since that is all you can do).
Overall the EP1 is really good and a worthy purchase if your PC is able to run HL2. Too bad HL2 still isn't on the 360 yet because HL2 is still one of the best (if not the best) FPS game ever created.

Still waiting on some new games for the 360, in particular Cloning Clyde and LOTR:BFME2 which both should be out in a month or so.