I’ve been really hooked on Call of Duty: Black Ops. In fact, so much so that I started a clan called The Honor Squad – www.thehonorsquad.com If you play Black Ops or Modern Warfare 2, stop by and enlist! :)

Some of the other games I’ve given a try:

• Borderlands – why do creatures respawn everytime I go back to an area?? annoying.
• Left for Dead 2 – why does this seem like thy’ve gotten more Serious Sam with the game?
• Metro 2033 – interesting, why they enable the joystick by default so keyboard/mouse doesn’t work?
• Super Meat Boy – Mario Brothers on steroids. Damn this game is challenging without save points.
• Wings of Prey – the tutorials seem good, unless you want them to help you learn the controls.
• Battlefield 2 – Single player doesn’t have enough save points, multi-player is still growing on me.

For future releases, I’m really interested in seeing Portal 2 and I’m told Modern Warfare 2 is coming out end of 2011? Sigh, Raven is involved. I’m not sure I should be excited.

The Community Talk section of the front page is coming along. I’ve integrated post counts, views and replies which are kinda kewl, but I still have to figure out a way to handle quote blocks better. Instead of bothering with images, I took the lazy way out for now and simply replaced all images with [img]. I’ve also capped the posts so it only shows an excerpt. I had to use an iFrame to integrate the forum which I’m not a fan of, but it works. I always hate seeing that white box on initial page load.

I finally got access to the old Planetwolfenstein website so I downloaded everything from there and I’ve started to move things over to tramdesign.net. I’m happy that I didn’t lose that stuff. I’m finding a bunch of things I didn’t even know I had such as development screenshots and such. I think I may post some of them in the forums.

Meanwhile, I’ve setup the Projects page and also the Community page so those are checked off the list. The Contact page works, but it’s got some ways to go.

Eh, I guess I won’t bother listing what I have left to do since it appears I have more to do than I’ve done so far, but I have to admit I feel good getting this site up and running again even if there’s no traffic anymore.

I also read they were going to start to charge for hosting. This of course is sending searching for a way to access the site because to be honest it’s been so long I can’t even remember how. This site and the forums luckily are on my own hosting, but there’s still so much I have to move over.

IMO, the Planet site community has gone downhill when it comes to hosting. Gamespy was originally a grass roots game design fan based setup that seemed to care about games and building a community. Then they started getting corporate and merged with IGN which from what I’ve seen is a total mess and not at all advantageous for fansites. I get that they want to make money. I do. I guess they way they’ve changed over the years has left a bad taste in my mouth. They could barely centralize information for fansites or get their add code right when it was just Gamespy. Add IGN to the mix and kaboom.

Anyhow, I hope I can get all of the files from the old site because I’ve got quite a lot there that I’d rather not lose. I’ve contacted tech support at Gamespy. We’ll see.

In the meantime, please let me know if you have any issues with the forums, not that they get used much anymore. I can’t blame anyone for not showing up. At the same time, keep in mind, there are all nice new shiney goodies for you to enjoy now :)

This time however, I think I’ll be making a break from Gamespy. I’ve been with them for years now, but the IGN thing is kinda annoying and they’ve just gotten so far away from what they originally were. When I was first involved with them back in the late 90′s it was really kewl, but now it’s all corporate-like and it just doesn’t feel the same. There’s no reason not to completely use tramdesign.net.

Anyhow, I think the design of the site is mostly done. I’m going to use WordPress backend to make things easier on myself, but of course it will result in a much simpler website with less functionality. I’m sure it’ll be fine though.

If you want to know what I’ve been up to, head on over to Paul Ille [dot] com and read a few posts. Most notably this post which sums up the great things going on with my life, but of course, all great things require time.

/raises glass

Cheers! Let’s see how it goes!

P.S. – The Planetwolfenstein site still exists. You can get there using the following link – http://tramdesign.planetwolfenstein.gamespy.com/