I’m finally back from my Thanksgiving holiday at my parents’ house, and I can hardly believe it’s already December!  Where has this year gone?

Anyway, I had a couple of things I wanted to post today, the first being a duo of clips from The Simpsons, found earlier on Engadget (and which I assume aired last night), where Apple becomes the target of Matt Groening’s irreverent humor when the Springfield mall gets its first Mapple store.  The funniest part of the two clips is when Bart hijacks the audio system in the store and puts some (quite truthful) words into Steve Jobs’ Mobs’ mouth.  Good stuff!

Update - Well, the YouTube videos are down, but if you live in the U.S., you can watch for free on Hulu.

The next thing I wanted to post, also a video, is a new trailer released yesterday for the Black Mesa mod - a Half-Life 2 mod that is looking to recreate the original Half-Life with the Source engine, but with more content, higher resolution textures and models, and environments that take better advantage of the engine than Valve’s original port of the game.  Normally I don’t get too excited over Source engine mods, since they rarely make good on their promises, or even get finished for that matter, but the amount of polish that has gone into this trailer makes me hope otherwise for Black Mesa.  You can view the trailer below, and find out more about the mod at the official site.

I played through a huge chunk of Half-Life 2 this holiday weekend, so I guess I’m a little bit excited about Half-Life in general again.

I’m glad to see that people found my recent set of examples interesting too, and I hope to get a fixed GM6 version of the 3D Rain example up sometime tonight.  Sorry about the slow rain example, I’ll play with it and see if I can get something up that’s a little easier on the older machines soon as well!

That’s all for now - thanks for reading, and I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving (or just a good weekend if you’re not from the U.S.)!

Update - I’ve made a new GM6 file that should run better than the previous rain example, and which should load correctly in GM6.  The area that the rain covers is a bit smaller than the original example, and the rain is a bit more sparse, but you should get the idea.

You can download the new example here (1.26 mb).

This is just a short post - I hope everyone had a great Halloween this year!  I know I did, and I didn’t even go trick-or-treating!

I was quite surprised when I fired up Steam yesterday and found that on Halloween, Valve released the intro movie for Left 4 Dead, a game which looks like it’s going to be tons of fun.  The video looks good and scary, and it makes the wait for this game even more tough than before!

There are so many games coming out lately though…  it’s getting difficult to spend time on all of them.  Hopefully after the holidays are all over we’ll get some sort of reprieve while game developers get back to working on next year’s line-up of hits.

I’ll be back here later to post about tomorrow’s elections, I think.  There’s just too much going on not for me to comment about it at some point.  Until then, thanks for reading, and enjoy the L4D video above!

My boss sent me the link to this video earlier today.  Remember the old Anheuser-Busch “Waaasssuuuup?” commercials from 2000?  This is an update to those classic ads, but with a better message to push.

I actually thought the last bit was somewhat touching.  After all the laughs of the first section, it’s a solemn and smart note to end on.  It’s funny how big a difference 8 years can make, huh?

With the latest Team Fortress 2 update, which includes the new Heavy class achievements, weapons, and a new game mode, Valve has also released another short trailer for the game: Meet the Sandvich.

The “sandvich” made its debut in the Meet the Scout video, where it changed hands between the Heavy and Scout after a scuffle, and continues to be the source of conflict in the newest video.  It’s also a new unlockable item for the Heavy class. It can heal 120 health, and the Heavy who has it equipped has an unlimited supply.  The downside is that eating it makes a considerable amount of noise, and leaves the Heavy vulnerable for four seconds while he consumes it.

Watch the video below!