I've been meaning to blog a particular thing for ages, but I keep not getting around to preparing the required picture; thus I have ended up blogging nothing for a long time. Well, because of that and because of another Guild Wars beta weekend, which you might think would only cause three days of non-blogging, but then you'd be neglecting to take into account the fact that I would be doing three days worth of extra work in the four days previous, so as to not have Guild Wars result in decreased productivity. It's still a good game, and the new bit they've stuck on the beginning is nice, but it wasn't quite as compelling this time because I've already played through a lot of the quests, and didn't want to do them all again now only to have to do them all again when it's released before being able to move on to later things. So this time I was mostly experimenting with the players-versus-players combat arenas, which was fun too, but not in the same "must keep playing" way that a good (or amusingly bad) plot can be.
In other gamey news (note: the word 'news' in this context is not to be taken to imply the presence of news), I discovered that Yahoo have some reasonably polished shareware-type games for download. The downloads only let you play for an hour, but that's okay because by that point you're half way through the game and bored anyway so the $20 price tag to continue just seems ridiculous and you get to stop with fond memories. In decreasing order of preference, I quite enjoyed Betrapped, Mah Jong Quest, Magic Ball 2 and Fiber Twig.
I also discovered that Yahoo have a decent-seeming deal akin to those DVD places that post you DVDs as quick as you can watch them, only for games, in Games On Demand. It's via download, which is good in that it means you get the thing quicker than you would by post, but bad in that it means your internet connection gets saturated by downloading games. $15 a month for unlimited games from the list or $10 a month for three games a month seems like a reasonable deal, but it has one horrible flaw - if I got the $15 package my skinflintly Scottish nature would compel me to play the games constantly so as to get value for money, so I wouldn't get any work done at all until I'd played the entire selection and then cancelled the subscription. So on balance, I shouldn't subscribe to the service. Which is a shame, because I'd quite like to support services of that nature, and they do have some quite good games in the list (eg. Beyond Good and Evil and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time). But no. Unless perhaps I can persuade myself to pretend it's $1 per four hours of game, and thus arbitrarily limit myself to two hours a day. Hm. It would still be a far better deal than buying games, which generally have about 6-12 hours of play each, minus the "game might turn out to be crap" gamble which is eliminated entirely by a subscription-based system. I shall decide by relaxing my brain and see which way it falls - either convincing me it's a good idea next week or so, or forgetting about it entirely in a couple of days.
As you can see, I still haven't got around to the picture for the blog entry I've been meaning to do. And it's not even going to be all that good, I'm afraid.
[13:34]
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