I'm actually behind on news since there's been so much and I've been unexpectedly busy.

I've only seen WWDC's and Sony's keynotes so far from the stuff that happened this week. I still need to catch Nintendo's and MS', and then I plan to just read up on the various publisher keynotes, rather than watching them.

As far as games go, the only one that was revealed this week that interests me (at least, of the stuff I know...like I said, I'm behind) is Mirror's Edge 2. Mirror's Edge was one of those games that a lot of gamers tried to treat as something other than it was (i.e. a shooter) and ended up being disappointed by it as a result. But if you played it as it was meant to be played, it was a remarkably tight and fun game, and I've been wanting a sequel for years.

As for overall impressions, I seem to agree with the gaming community in thinking that MS shot itself in the foot with their DRM, phoning home daily, and policies towards used games, and that the console is not worth my attention since the PS4 looks to be similar but superior in pretty much every area that counts. The PS4 has me excited, but I'm probably not going to pick one up this year anyway, since I prefer to wait until there are a number of games that I want already out and the console's price has dropped.

Of other games that are coming up but weren't necessarily revealed at E3, The Witness is definitely the one I'm most interested in. It's done by the guy that did Braid, and he's said that he's going for it being one giant set of "ah ha!" moments as you realize things that you can't believe you missed before. Watch Dogs has a LOT of potential, but I'm taking a wait-and-see attitude with it.

And with WWDC, the keynote was amazing and well worth watching. That said, the announcements themselves were definitely polarizing. I love iOS' new direction for iOS 7 under Ive's care, and look forward to it being fleshed out in the next few years, but I can understand the complaints being leveled against it. Similarly, the new Mac Pro is an awesome feat of engineering, but I'm not sure if it'll capture the mainstream pro market in the way it needs to, since those dual pro-level GPUs have got to be adding $1500-2000 to the cost of the default model. And OS X Mavericks has some nice touches that I'll welcome, but nothing that blew me away.

Et tu?

Responded to one of your old e-mail addresses. The [FirstInitial][MiddleInitial][LastName]@gmail.com one that you had. Not sure if you still use that or not.

Again, not expecting a response anytime soon, but since it's gaming-related, I figured I'd post here and let you find it in your own time.

So, it turns out that Chris and April will be in Houston in a few weeks, and they'll be swinging through College Station to grab lunch with me and whatnot. Pretty awesome to finally meet them after all this time. I was trying to think how long it's been since we were doing all of that RPing stuff. As best I can figure, I started it my senior year of high school and you joined in during our freshman years of college, so that puts it 10+ years ago. Kinda scary how fast things move, though judging by your guys' various blogs, I think you've had plenty of other milestones to help mark your progress through life.

Congrats on #3, by the way!

As an aside, I'm still in B/CS, working full-time these days at an awesome company that I was fortunate to find. Not much to report. Plugged in at a great church, planning to buy a house at some point soon-ish, and even more of a nerd than before, probably (well, maybe not, since I remember that one of the first conversations I had with you after we met was regarding various theories about the nature of Sephiroth and the ending of FF7 ).

No worries, I wasn't expecting a fast response.

That sounds like good news all around. Congratulations on a third being on their way!

As for catching up, feel free to call me up pretty much any evening. I work during the day and seem to be busy with friends, church, or something else about half of the days after work, but I'm typically awake until 1am Central, and I rarely have anything going on past 9 or 10pm Central anyway.

Or else there's always e-mail. Any of my non-TAMU ones still work (my TAMU one does too, I think, though not for much longer, I'd imagine).

This is a poke.

How's life? Also, play Journey if you haven't. Quick, easy, and worth every penny. I imagine it's right up your alley.

still out there? Hope all is well

So, what're you up to these days? Virro's in town at the moment, it looks like I have a job lined up (assuming I graduate...seriously >_> ), and last I had heard you had another on the way.

I was fooling around with the server software on my host earlier, but apparently I only have access to something like 64MB of RAM before they lock me out, which is only enough to keep the server up until people have explored about as much as you'd explore in that amount of walking. After that, it simply stops working since it can't hold the map in memory, it seems. Oh well.

That said, I can run it on my Mini just fine, but then I have to deal with port forwarding nonsense and having half my CPU cycles go to it.

Anyway, I'd love to hear updates as you go along with what you're working on or exploring. And if you're curious about any of the mechanics of lighting, mob spawning, tree growth, crafting, etc., I'm more than willing to field questions, of course.

See, I was the opposite. I actually loaded a whole lot of new maps until I found one that had a cool mountain near my spawn point, then I went into it. Turns out that it actually had a natural tunnel right through the middle of the mountain, so I built into the tunnel and expanded it quite a bit.

I've actually been thinking about trying out some multiplayer action, but haven't done so yet. If you check out Drumble's page here on Backloggery, he has some info for a Backloggery multiplayer server, which I've been considering, but I haven't joined yet. I think it'd be really cool to work on some collaborative stuff though.

As an aside, while you're nowhere close to accessing it yet, since I'm guessing you don't have diamonds yet, let alone obsidian, whenever you do make/find a portal to the Nether, do not, DO NOT, go in there with anything valuable. You almost assuredly will die your first time in there, and it can sometimes be very difficult to recover anything from the Nether, especially if there were ghasts launching fireballs at you when you died.

Yeah, I completely agree. The concept sounds incredibly boring, until you start to grasp at just how deep the gameplay actually goes. And you still haven't even seen the monsters or the spelunking of cave systems yet, though those may be better saved for your own game.

If at some point you want to see the stuff that I've built, I'll be happy to share my save file. There's a lot of works in progress, but there's also a lot of cool things spread around. I haven't really gone all zany and finished an awesome project yet, though I do have a few utilitarian projects of pretty large scale. I don't want to bias you towards making things any particular way, however, so I'll let you get started (doesn't have to be anytime soon, of course) before I talk about anything in particular that I've made. That said, seeing stuff that other people have made is one of the best sources for inspiration, in my opinion.