Unfocused Rambling, chapter the first

Well, now that I've got THAT out of my system...

But seriously, though, I'd just downloaded Portal last night, and, naturally, had finished it before dinner. But what it lacks in length, it makes up for in brevity. Also awesome, awesome gameplay. And an excellent Half-Life 2-ian story. It is mysterious, chilling, and darkly hilarious.

Between Portal ("The cake is a lie") and Psychonauts ("Take that, genetic memory of Napoleon!"), which I also recently downloaded on our glacier-slow Steam connection, I believe I have found the motherlode of sheer quotable awesomeness.

I am, naturally, a little late to the Psychonauts train, which departed for Sleeper-Hit Station in 2005. However, I can tell you with confidence that it is perhaps the most enjoyable 20 bucks you will ever spend in gaming. It, like Portal, is not terribly long, but it is consistently hilarious and enjoyable on many levels. Part of the fun is looking at a situation you're in and realizing that no other game could possibly feature such circumstances. For instance, when you're doing acrobatics in a circus made out of raw meat, which is a mental landscape you've entered, produced by the co-mingling of your own brain and the brain of an insane military general, which occurred because you sneezed your own brain out of your head and then used psychic powers to throw it into the cockpit of a brain-powered tank. It is every bit as awesome as it sounds.

So, I hope you leave this post with two impressions: First, Portal and Psychonauts are things of purest beauty. Secondly, this blog will ramble. I will talk about all sorts of things that I like and that, by extension, you should like as well, and not necessarily about my trip to Europe. Because, honestly, that will get boring, and plus I haven't even left yet. So let it be known that if you don't want to hear about my DnD characters, cool video games, or other pointless junk, I advise you to read a different blog.

However, that different blog will likely be as unfocused and self-obsessed as this one, but with far worse grammar, so maybe you're better off just staying here. Perhaps it is best if we die.