Back in April I wrote a bit about a few of the games that I was looking forward to most this year. That article has remained pretty popular over the months, and since the future which that feature referred to is now, I thought I would do a follow-up. A few gaming trade shows, a major merger of two gaming juggernauts and a development delay or two later, not quite all of the games on my list have been released yet, but I have gotten my hands on several.

Let’s revisit these in order, shall we?
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You can’t really have a list of cheap games without mentioning 3rd-party modifications, widely known as “mods” for short. A game not considered cheap might suddenly become a value proposition when combined with a strong mod community. Mods themselves are cheap, but they require the original game on which they’re built. In this case, you’ll need Portal.

Portal: Prelude is a full, lengthy campaign, set before the events in Portal. It was developed mostly by a small team of three living in Europe. It came as quite a surprise when it was announced shortly before its release, something very unusual in the mod community. The intent was to create a much more challenging Portal experience while retaining the atmosphere. This differs from other map packs in that those focus purely on the puzzles.
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From accursedfarms.com (episode 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10)

Think the choice for this month is a good fit…

Drop Dead Sexy

This month’s artist lives right in my own neighborhood of the Los Angeles area. He does wonderful and interesting things on the digital front of art. He’s a vector artist who takes simple forms and turns out complex things with the vectoring heaven of artisty. He tends to focus on things of dark nature mixed with the female form, and out comes something that will leave you longing for a taste of sinful pleasures. The horned demonic women depicted in his pieces stood out to me, other than the intricate and hypnotizing designs that make up the frequent backgrounds in his work.
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I wanted to quickly share with you a video that has me geeking out. This is a video of a Lunar Lander Challenge in which Armadillo Aerospace competes with TrueZer0 for a prize of $350,000. Armadillo Aerospace is a private aerospace group that was founded in 2000 by John Carmack. Carmack is co-founder and lead programmer at id Software, a pioneer in the gaming industry which has developed such games as Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake and are currently developing Rage. I’m no rocket scientist (har), so I’m not sure how unique an accomplishment this actually is in the world of privatized aerospace, but I still think it’s pretty damn cool to watch.

Back in July, shortly after I started offering regular Comic Tips, I recommended everybody check out Rasl, a psychedelic sci-fi comic written and drawn by Jeff Smith with covers by Steve Hamaker. I just want to sent out a reminder that issue #3 finally dropped with the 10/15/08 week of comics. Up to this point it would appear that the book has been on a schedule of four months/issue. Unfortunately, at the back of issue #3 is an ad saying that the next issue won’t be dropping March of 2009. Thus, it looks like four months has now been stretched out to five, but it’s well worth the wait. Things really start to pick up in issue #3 and you start to get a good idea of what’s going on with Rasl, the extra-dimensional art thief.

With such an unfortunate release schedule as two to three times a year, I am worried that interest for Rasl will dwindle and it would cease to exist. Don’t let that happen! If you need a little bit more of a nudge, you can check out a five page preview of Rasl #3 over at Boneville, Jeff Smith’s website.

If you’re a reader or listener of ExtraLife you’ve probably heard of Scott Johnson’s gaming podcast Final Score. You also know it’s been on hiatus for a good many months. Recently he put out a call for people with recording ability and a gaming-related story to tell. I decided I’d give it a shot, so I wrote some stuff down, opened up Audacity and recorded a story. I sent him my submission, and apparently he liked it. My story is featured on the premiere episode of the re-launch of Final Score. It’s pretty corny but it’s a true story from several years back that I look back on fondly and often. Anyway, check it out, I am at the tail end of the show.