Well my break from game programming lasted longer than planned, but I got a whole lot done on my websites and gaming. I ended up beating skyward sword a while ago, overall it was pretty great. Certainly up to the quality we've come to expect from console zelda games, though not the best one. I do think they overdid that giant boss, they should have cut out the second fight with him so that the 3rd (and 4th? I lost count) wouldn't be so annoying.

Also annoying is that you can't save after the final battle, probably due to a single avoidable plot point. I didn't know about this and didn't copy my save file before the fight, so now I'll have to refight the final boss to start the "master quest" version in the my copied file.

Now I'm working on Pikmin 2 Wii, I'm already around the halfway point. It's been fun playing the game again and the port is higher quality than Pikmin 1 Wii. The only porting issue I found was that its a bit harder to use the berry sprays while in combat, though I'm not sure if a better control layout would have even been possible. The game doesn't add any new features as far as I can tell, just a few minor graphical/bug improvements, but at $20 its hard to complain. The other issue I'm having is that I'm much more of a perfectionist this time around, for example if I lose a purple pikmin I almost always restart the floor/day.

Anyway, as for programming: As I predicted, Minecraft 1.3 is probably one or two weeks away, so I need to get back into programming CheeseMod. I'm hoping that bukkit will add a ton of new features in the following weeks.

I already know for a fact they've been working new modding features into the vanilla game such as fancier mob spawners (you can choose things like charged creepers) and with the single player multiplayer update I'm guessing a lot of stuff that used to be handled client side (and thus unmoddable via bukkit) will now be controlled from the server.

It's been a while since I talked about my game collection, but just this week the 360 became the second console I own 50+ games on (gamecube is the first). Theres just so many cheap decently rated 360 games =] I ended up getting C&C: Red Alert 3 because it was on sale for a good price.