Hello everybody!

My final 6-week holiday is over - that's right, I'm now in my final year of school. Didn't do too much during the holidays, except for the last two weeks which I spent in southern England (Hastings to be exact) with my family and (some of) the family of a friend of my mother and the GamesCom in Cologne which I visited last friday.

Let's talk about England first. We didn't do anything remarkable there, if you ask me. I got myself X-Men Origins: Wolverine (cool game) and Fallout 3 GOTY (not played this one much yet) for the PC (those are harder to come by in Germany) and some new shoes but that's about it. We lived in a trailer that wasn't really comfortable and did some trips that weren't overly interesting, oh well...

The GamesCom was better. It was very useful that I just turned 18 and could see everything - everything there was, that is; some things, e.g. Bulletstorm, weren't shown.

I got to try out Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2, which is pretty much like The Force Unleashed 1, and Torchlight 2, which is pretty much like Torchlight 1 except with multiplayer and different classes.

I could also try out the Crysis 2 Multiplayer, unfortunately on the XBox 360 (would've preferred a PC but there were twice as many 360s), still it was pretty playable, in fact I was the best in my team and my team won. Looking good, even on the 360, and was fun. We also saw a Trailer in 3D, which looked nice as well, and I got a Crysis 2 "I love NY" shirt. I like getting merchandise.

I also watched a Portal 2 presentation with some new scenes, though by now they're online as well... But I got a Portal 2 T-Shirt, one of the last ones in fact. It later turned out that they cost 20$ in the valve shop, that makes me even happier. And to advertise Steam Valve gave away free Keys, now two of my friends have Left 4 Dead 2. Very nice of them.

I wanted to have a look at Darksiders because it sure sounds interesting, but since the only new thing in the PC version is mouse/keyboard support you had to play with mouse and keyboard there, and Darksiders is one of those games which I want to play with a controller. Well, those playing didn't feel like stopping anyway. I took that as a good sign.

Red Faction Armageddon was another game which I saw, they played it in a presentation and the destruction's still nice. Didn't see any Witcher 2 related presentations, though I stopped looking after I found the posters - now I've got 2 nice Witcher 2 posters. I've still got to finish the first game but I'm looking forward to the second.

Another T-Shirt I got was from Fallout: New Vegas. I believe that was playable. I didn't try it though, I let Andy (I think that was his name) show me and a couple of others Rage, while Tim explained stuff. Since id Software is now owned by Zenimax/Bethesda both Rage and Fallout: New Vegas where at the same booth, though in different rooms. Brink was there as well, though I only looked at Rage, at the final presentation in fact. Looks like a good old id Software shooter with some racing/vehicle combat. Tim told me they'll include the editor and that eventually the Doom 3 Engine will be opensourced, just like the Quake 3 Engine before it.

So while the GamesCom wasn't as spectacular as I'd hoped I still got a lot of T-Shirts etc. and it was a nice thing nonetheless. I'll probably go there again next year.

17 or so days of absence from the internet... In my case that means 113 new mails, a quarter of them newsletters, another quarter spam, and one mailing list mails. Though those were mostly spam as well.

So no more holidays... Now it's school again. Thankfully I've got a new English teacher, Mr. Adler, who so far I like very much. He seems like a nice guy. This semester's topic will be London - a pretty vague topic - and I just missed the chance to go there... Well, I didn't really know why I should go there so I didn't. I don't really regret it. (Yet?)

Willi

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