Here’s the answer to the headline:

Dave3 is playing…

HALO

I’ve been the on the Halo train since the very beginning. When it was just a whisper on back-alley gaming boards, just a rumor in MacAddict magazine.

I was there at Macworld, in the second row, when the Bungie team debuted the very first glimpses of it to the world, as they announced it was going to be entirely for Macs only. I was right there, watching as it grew and developed, playing beta builds, knowing full well that it was going to be the best game the Mac platform had ever seen.

Then, I stood in horror as Bungie was bought out by Micro$loth, and development of Halo as a Macintosh entity was murdered in it’s tracks. I screamed to the heavens! I cried to my gamerfriends over the great tragedy that had just befallen our kind.

Yet out of the ashes rose Xbox- a device wholly Micro$loth in concept, yet it was the only way that I would be able to play the finished release. I had watched it grow, and waited patiently for a chance to play for almost five years. I was forced to make a deal with the devil.

In summary: Halo II, fuck off. Xbox live, eat shit. 360, get bent.

Give me classic Halo, campaign or multi-player. Doesn’t matter. They’re both the epoch of the FPS gaming universe.

Groovespook is playing…

SONIC THE HEDGEHOG

OUCH, when I was asked “What am I playing” by my peers at Geeks of Doom, I sheepishly replied, “um, er… Sonic the Hedgehog”. Turns out that a friend of mine had it on CD from the Mega collection of Sonic games on his Game-Cube and when he was not looking, I loaded it up. I love the music, the levels, hell, I used to be able to crack my Sega and load any level I wanted to back in the day. Some trick with pressing certain buttons during certain introductory sections.

What I did not realize at the time is that “back in the day” was 15 years ago. There are now over 20 different versions of Sonic and he has just celebrated his 15th birthday!

As a collection of pixels roughly resembling a hedgehog, searching for Rings and trapped animals whilst defying the Evil Dr Robotnik and who knows what other evil foes, Sonic is awesome. These older games lack any need for a processor that’s more powerful than your average alarm clock these days I will grant you, but I still find them thoroughly entertaining.

Or could that be that I can only get my head around forward, backward, jump, jump really high, shoot and “GO REALLY FRIGGIN FAST FOR A SHORT TIME”

Ho hum.

Dr. Geek Ph.D. is playing…

PITFALL

I’ve been playing Pitfall! on my wife’s Atari 2600 (mine is still my parents’ attic.) I saw an article about a new world record for the game on Slashdot not long ago that included a solution map. I never finished this game once back in the day, and I want to reach the end just once!