August 2009 Archives

I needed something to occupy my time for my upcoming trip to France. Since I canceled my World of Warcrack account, I can't rely on that for hours of entertainment. So I bought a copy of Bookworm Adventures 2. Talk about a game made just for me -- you wander around spelling words! It's sort of like Scrabble except with a storyline. How awesome is that? I'll tell you how awesome it is: I managed to spell "quaaludes" last night.

As usual, the Twins pitching proved to be in fine form, not even making it 5 innings into the game. Thank goodness we have good batters to recover from terrible pitchers -- we actually won the game! I sure hope that new stadium comes with a new pitching staff next year. Oh, and my fantasy team took a major hit this week: Morneau and Kubel are both injured, and I can't swap em until Monday. Blech.

We have a visitor here now -- our friend Jennifer is visiting for a few weeks. It's awesome to see her again, she was in our wedding as one of the bridesmaids. Unfortunately, her hubby Aaron couldn't come with her on this trip. Hopefully next time!

Cache is still doing great! We're trying to teach him a new trick, but this one has proved pretty difficult to confer. We're trying to teach him to play dead when we say "Bang", but since "lay down" is still pretty new, and "roll over" has yet to be understood, I suspect this one may take a while. Anyone have tips?

For whatever reason, my weekends have ceased to recharge me recently. I don't know what it is -- it's not like I did a ton of chasing this weekend. But I certainly woke up today going "wait, it's Monday already?"

I was, however, delighted to see my new office chair sitting in the office. Adam was nice enough to loan me a very nice spare he had sitting around in his basement. It's one of those black mesh, super expensive, totally awesome ones. Yay for friends!

I'm patiently waiting for October to come around so I can get Fallout 3 for the 360, but am also bored out of my skull in the gaming dept. I've reverted back to old arcade games from XBox Live, like Uno and Hexic. It's not that I don't enjoy them during my down time, but they're also not very captivating either.

Interesting REALbasic question for the day: now that IE can be entirely uninstalled from the OS with Windows 7, how does the HTMLViewer control react? Sure, it's nice to use the native rendering engine for each platform, but this makes two platforms out of three where the native rendering engine which RS has picked may not actually be present. Oops.

I head out to France this weekend for a week-long work trip. I wish Elissa could come along on this one, but it just wasn't in the stars this time around. Instead, we're getting a totally awesome visitor: Jennifer (one of Elissa's best friends) is coming to town! She gets in tomorrow, which is awesome. But I'm bummed that I will be out of town for the majority of her visit. :-( I get back late on the 29th from France, and I think Jennifer will be gone by then.

However, the following weekend (the 5th of Sept), we're having a party here at the house. It's a house-warming party, of sorts. Mostly just an excuse to play yard games, drink beer and have fun with friends. If you're interested in stopping by, either drop me a line or surprise me -- either way is fine with me. :-) The theme of the party is: California Sucks, Minnesota Rocks. I still have no idea how we will express this theme, but I'm sure we'll come up with something. :-P

So I finished Mass Effect this weekend, and I have to admit that I'm torn. It was a really fun game, but had a lot of lame to it.

Good

* The game had a captivating storyline while still remaining somewhat open to exploration. A lot of games either drag you kicking and screaming through the storyline, or they are so open to exploration that you forget there even is a story at all. I thought Mass Effect had a nice mixture of the two.

* Reasonably compelling characters that were actually fun to play. Even though I exclusively used Wrex and Talia through the entire game, I didn't find any characters I simply couldn't stand.

* Beautiful graphics.

Bad

* So I can travel at faster-than-light speeds... but the elevator in my ship can only travel at 1m/min? The game was full of infuriatingly slow elevators for no good reason. They didn't serve as loading screens -- no no, you'd get off the elevator and THEN you'd get to load.

* Abrupt termination of the storyline at the end really sucked. Here's this awesome story about how evil all these critters are. You kill ONE and then..well... oops, we're done. It looks like the producers ran out of money part of the way through the project and just gave up.

* I can travel all around the universe... and yet there's only about 20 places for me to go in it? And all of them are mild variations of one another? Lame. The graphics are so compelling, but the level design -- especially for indoor scenes, was laughably poor.

All told, I liked the game. It was well worth the "free" I paid for it. But it was still disappointingly short in terms of play time. My wish list for ways this game could have been different is actually pretty short:

1) Random level design for the worlds and bunkers.

and/or

2) Continue the storyline to an actual completion instead of copping out.

Had they done either one of these things, then I wouldn't feel the game was too short. #1 would allow me to keep exploring and completing random side quests. Oblivion did a great job of this. Mass Effect, not so much. Had they done #2, I think it would have added another few dozen hours to the play time.

Would anyone else like to share their thoughts on the game?

You can thank my friend Dana for such an entertaining question.

I traded in a few of my old N64 games and picked up a copy of Mass Effect for the 360. It sure is a pretty game, and it's been a lot of fun so far. It has the right amount of methodical tedium that I look for in an RPG. It also has auto-aim functionality, which I require in an FPS. I dig it!

I was hoping to get a copy of Fallout 3, but they wanted 55$ for a used copy (you can get it new for about 5$ more). If anyone has a copy they want to loan me, I'll pay for shipping. :-D

Cache has been a ton of fun to have around the house. He spends most of the work day hanging out with me in the office, sleeping. He's sleeping, not me. ;-) I really enjoy having a dog around the house again. After Charm died, I wasn't certain if I'd get another dog. But I'm glad I have. The cats are starting to handle life with Cache better. Miikka is still scared of him, but Pixel got over the changes pretty quickly. He's very gentle with the cats -- mostly curious, but never aggressive. So far, so good!

It sounds like I'll be heading back to France later this month for work. I'm hoping to take Lis with me on this trip so she can stop being so jealous of me. :-P Oh yeah, and it would be fun to have my wife along too!