46 posts tagged “games”
For many in the US, they're just coming off of a long weekend due to president's day. I'm one of those people. I also didn't really feel like posting running updates, so you're going to get the whole thing right now.
Saturday
This weekend was another one of those weekends where I headed over to my friends house for a lot of general hanging out and doing stuff. I had placed an order for a Gamecube controller for in store pickup at Circuit City because I needed one to play Tales of Symphonia on my Wii (very nice RPG so far). It would also be useful there because we had planned on Smash Brothers Melee and they only had one Gamecube controller. I figured that going the in store pickup route would be faster and I'd just pick it up on my way to my friends.
Well, I was wrong. The guy in front of me in line at Circuit City was trying to return some car speakers. And they wanted to exchange them for a different model, but he wasn't having any of that. This argument took at least 10-15 minutes, so had I not already paid for the controller, I would have taken one off the shelf myself and tackled a salesman so they could ring me out and been out of there faster than if I did the in store pickup. Bah.
I arrived at my friends about a half hour later than I had planned because of the Circuit City incident. Most of the afternoon was spent just watching Slayers (An anime series. A very good anime series) and general hanging-out. After dinner (pizza) we were going to go bowling, but unfortunetly, all of the lanes were booked until 8pm which was a little late for us, so we headed back to their place for some margaritas (with an awful lot of tequila) and Super Smash Brothers Melee. Followed by the now traditional late night game of Trivial Persuit which lasted about..3 hours. But it was a fun 3 hours. After that, Robot Chicken and then I dropped off at about 1am. I really suck at staying up late these days. Must be getting old.
Sunday
The next morning I went off to the gym with Wassy because Jay sleeps in late and doesn't usually get up in time to hit the gym in the morning. I really wish I had a decent gym within a close driving distance to me because it was pretty nice having all that equipment right there. But unfortunetly the only close gym is nearly 20 minutes of driving time away and I'd never go regualrly so it wouldn't be worth it for the membership.
I hung out around their place for a while longer and watched some more Slayers, then headed home. Not too much to talk about Sunday really. Just a lot of relaxing and doing not much of anything.
Monday
Monday was the day where I was supposed to get stuff done. The plan was, do laundry, get the low tire pressure light on my car to go away finally and get some homework done. The first two worked out pretty well. As it turned out, my tires were just slightly low (all 4, so it wasn't a leak or anything) and adding a pound or two fixed the problem.
The homework didn't go so well though, since the site hosted by my school where I had stashed all the work was totally dead, so I didn't really have anything to work on. So that pretty much killed my productivity for the rest of the day. Hopefully I can make it up tonight (if I have the energy to do so that is)
This weekend was spent doing a lot of lounging around and relaxing. I spent a good majority of the time playing Tales of the Abyss, which is a really good RPG for the Playstation 2. I've had it for over a year now and only played about 12 hours of it to start with before something took me away and I'm regretting not finishing it sooner. Very good game. But it wasn't all fun and games this weekend.
I had some fish trouble, nothing major though. I noticed Saturday afternoon that my tank's temperature was inching downwards towards room temp, which is bad if you've got tropical fish and your room temperature isn't 79-80F. Needless to say, I was a little concerned. As it turns out, my heater was broke, so I grabbed my backup heater and threw it in there until I could go out the next day and pick a new one up. Luckily that seemed to work pretty well until Sunday. I also took the opportunity to redo my aeration setup, with new tubes and a valve to control flow so I don't need to use my potato chip bag clip to stop some air from going through. Probably should have gotten a smaller air pump, but...oh well. Everything seems to be working fine now, so I'm hopefully done playing in the water for a while.
Other than that, nothing else of particular note really happened this weekend (that I can remember right now anyway). Just your standard relaxation totally lazy weekend. I was going to do stuff with Wassy and Jay, but she got sick over the weekend and had to cancel. Bah to illness (and not just because I wanted to do stuff either.)
Last night was the first night of hopefully my last semester of college classes. Nothing like a 3 hour statistics course after work to pass the time. Or something. At least the professor is an interesting guy. He's got a quirky sense of humor and knows how to make things interesting.
The first thing he said to the class was that he was annoyed at the school because they don't know how to do anything right and nobody will actually pick up the phone if you're trying to get a problem fixed. He basically went on a 5 minute mini-rant about how annoying working with the school was. It was at this point that I realized that this is my kind of teacher. He also seemed to know how to teach people too, which is kinda a rarity. Although he does also teach at Herkimer County Community College which might explain it. I've found that most of the teachers at community colleges actually know how to teach.
And as far as the big project goes, I'm beginning to wonder if my faculty advisor guy knows what he's doing at all. I'm trying to get some guidance about how the project is generally run and the guy isn't telling me anything. I have a feeling I'm just going to have to stumble through this blindly and hope for the best at the end. Fun.
Let's see here...in other non school related news, I discovered that something ate my Guitar Hero 3 saved game on my memory card, so now I need to replay the game from scratch to unlock everything again. Not that I really mind doing it, exactly, but it's just a pain to have to. I have no idea how my saved game got corrupted either as I don't recall turning the game off while it was saving or something along those lines.
The first day back from vacation is always horrible. No exceptions. Which is why yesterday I had such a hard time concentrating at work. It was extremely hard for me to keep my mind on one task at a time which wasn't good yesterday because of the fact that I was working on something that was a little complex and I kept losing my place and having to start over from the beginning again. Sigh. I hope today is going to be better.
After work though, things went a bit better. I did my exercising while starting to watch Cowboy Bebop which has potential right now, but it's hard to tell so early into it. Then I sat down and played Xenogears, which I've come to realize again, is probably my favorite game ever. Such a cool story, and you can always pull something different out of it each time you play it. I'm about 1/3 of the way though the game (20 hours in or so) and things are just starting to get really really good.
On the school front, I was still unable to contact who I needed to contact. On my Rogues airbags front, I haven't heard anything about the parts being in. I'm probably going to call up this morning since my work phone was acting wonky for a couple days and may not have recorded the message if they left one. I'd like to have airbags at some point here.
Yesterday I went over to my parents house in the morning and hung out there pretty much all day, playing various Wii games. We started with NBA Live 08 for the Wii (without looking at the instructions, so we were lobbing shots at the basket from the other side of the court) which was...fun. Like the reviews said, it wasn't a really great game but it was entertaining enough that it was interesting. Probably not in the ways the game designer intended though.
I managed to get my dad to play a game of Mario Party 8 which I thought was fairly good but he didn't enjoy it as much. My mom ended up winning the game. After that my parents played some tennis and I ended up falling asleep for a little while on their couch. After I woke up, we played some Wario Ware Smooth Moves which my mom really enjoyed and my dad, predictably didn't.
My grandparents (mothers side) came over for dinner and to play some Wii sports after, which was cool, and they looked like they enjoyed themselves.
But, as a result of all this activity, I'm totally Christmas-ed out. I need to take today to clean up my living room a bit, call school to get my registration for my capstone project fixed up and generally relax.
Yesterday was the majority of the planned Christmas celebrations for my family with our gift exchange happening in the afternoon and then going over to my grandparents (mothers side) in the evening.
I got to my parents house around 11 because I had to shred some stuff and I'm too cheap to buy a shredder myself. I had cleaned my bedroom out the previous days and I had a stack of old pay stubs and stuff that I had to dispose of. That took an awful long time to shred. After that I hung out and watched the ER Christmas episode marathon on TNT until my sister and her husband arrived shortly before 1am at which time we commenced with the gift opening.
Probably the best part of the whole thing was two presents my mom gave to my dad and my sister. My sister has a habit of, lets say..using a lot of tape when wrapping gifts. Using A LOT of tape. Usually taping up every single opening in the paper that could be used to gain a foothold for the opening. She does it to one package a year, usually to my mom. So this year, my mom got revenge. She gave both my sister and my dad (for laughing at her when she's trying to open it year after year) presents that contained boxes wrapped inside of boxes inside of boxes, all taped up, with just a little note inside (although my dad got a gift certificate to the restaurant they like to eat at in his)
It was a penguin Christmas for me. My mom made me up a really nice penguin themed shower curtain and a couple of penguin themed pillows. There was also some penguin related kitchen stuff, including a really cool set of plates with penguins ice skating and on each plate, the penguins keep falling down and off the plates. I kept thinking my friends who already thing this obsession is becoming a problem are going to think I went off the deep end.
In the non penguin department and yet still decorational department, my parents have this really cool crystal thing that rotates while shining lights up through the crystal to illuminate a 3d design inside of it that I liked when I was over there. This year they found a fish related one, which I tried to take a picture of over to the right, but it's extremely hard to do since you can't use the flash and it needs to be a little dark to get the effect.
Moving into the non decorations was a set of screwdrivers which I really needed, as well as a tool box destined to slowly empty of screwdrivers as I scatter them around my apartment never to be found again.
And then finally I got my own little in-car GPS unit because I keep borrowing my parents GPS to go places. It's a Garmin Nuvi 650 which appears to be in full working condition. I just need someplace to go with it now.
My dad got a Wii which was the result of a scheme my Mom and Myself tried to pull to keep it secret. We tried using my credit card to make the purchase, but it triggered my fraud protection after wal-mart had denied the purchase after which we used my moms credit card and it worked. Chase still called me and wanted to authorize the charges on my card though, so...it had potential to be a minor mess. It turned out all right though.
We set the Wii up and played a little bit of Wii sports before having dinner (mmm, lasagna) and heading over to my grandparents house for the traditional Christmas Eve party. As usual, the highlight for me was the traditional game of Pitch which was almost usurped by something called apples to apples, which I am assured is a fun game, but it's not Pitch. The girls team won the first two games while the boys team won the next two. After that I left the game, so I don't really know what happened in the tiebreaker match. I went back to my parents and we played a little more Wii type stuff, and then I took off to go to sleep.
Today I'm going back to my parents for some more Wii action, and the christmas cinnamon rolls of course. I should have some more pictures of the penguin stuff up later. I only took a picture of the crystal now because it was hard for me to describe properly.
I just got back from the christmas party thrown by my dad's side of the family. As I've said before, sometimes this party can be a little...less than entertaining. Mostly due to the people there I don't really know and/or get along with. This year though, it was pretty fun. Everybody was cool, lots of good conversation and food and stuff. We walked in to the spectacle of one of the dogs (there's usually a TON of dogs at this party) wearing a reindeer costume and looking very pathetic. All the other dogs were picking on him and it kept flopping in front of his face so he couldn't really see all that well. Pretty entertaining for a bit, but they took it off him quickly.
The highlight of the event though, was Rock Band. One of my cousins (her husband actually) has Rock Band and he brought it over so we could play it at the party. We played for a couple hours, with various people rotating in and out. I managed to play all of the instruments and sing some as well. I started out at guitar and played that. I was going to play drums after that, but my sister accidently bumped the difficulty on her bass part to Expert so I swapped with her quickly.
Then I got talked into singing. I picked War Pigs as the song and apparently I knocked it out of the park because people were commenting about it for the rest of the night. It's probably because I'm known as the quiet guy who doesn't talk much. Of course, I can also sing pretty decently (if the song is in my range) so I probably ended up surprising some people. I also ended up doing vocals on Tom Sawyer and Enter Sandman.
Just a mini Rock Band review. Pretty fun game for parties. I like the way Guitar Hero handles the guitar parts more than how Rock Band does it, and I also like the feel of the Guitar Hero controller. The drums were pretty fun, but hard to get used to because of all of the stuff you had to do at once when playing them. Overall, two thumbs up, but I probably wouldn't want to pay the full price for the set unless I was going in on it with other people.
All in all, a good way to kick off the Christmas party season. It finally feels like Christmas time to me.
The northeast is currently in the midst of a the first real winter storm of the season. Lots of wind at the moment, blowing stuff around. Kinda normal for the area. But you would have thought the world was coming to an end yesterday.
I had to go grocery shopping and it was a madhouse. The had every cash register open and the lines to check out were still crazy long. Haven't these people ever been through a winter storm before? I was surprised that the laundry place wasn't that busy. I would have figured people would want to try to get that out of the way as well. I guess they were all grocery shopping.
I spent my last remaining day on earth (because we're all going to die in this snow storm of course) over at my friends house where we watched some Anime (more Fushigi Yugi) hung out and also played Trauma Center: New Blood on the Wii. Trauma center is really cool now since it has an actual co-op mode that works really well. There's some nerve wracking surgeries in this game now and it puts the two player option to good use. The difficulty may have been a little exaggerated due to the fact we were also drinking... The skin graft operation, in particular was very, very difficult.
In any case it was a good way to unwind after my stressful week. We'll probably keep playing the game Wednesday or this weekend (between my holiday festivities)
Friday and Saturday I was gone over to my friends place for another "gaming sleepover" thingy. This time around it was more like half games half movies as far as activities go. There was some MST3k (Eegah from which the title of this post was derived), Interview With The Vampire and The Crow, along with heaping helpings of Guitar Hero 3, some Super Mario Galaxy and replacing Resident Evil as the creepy game of the event, Silent Hill.
Silent Gill was...freaky. I usually don't play these types of games because I'm a wuss, but I'm usually unaffected watching them. Silent Hill was something else though. There's some kind of science to scaring the crap out of people and the developers of this game have that down perfectly. I can't wait to see what the heck is going on. The guy you control isn't the brightest guy in the world. He's standing in an elementary school turned into HELL, the floor becoming a metal grate, a giant bottomless pit in the middle of the room with bloody cages hanging above it, and the only thing the guy notices is strange is "Huh, why is there a wheel chair in an elementary school?"
Another fun moment in Silent Hill was a piano puzzle which ended up being a logic puzzle. There was a poem with all of the clues in it and a small section of the piano to work with. We had the clues written out, the keyboard diagrammed and spent like 15 minutes working up solutions which didn't work. Eventually, we went to a walk through which made us realize that we missed the biggest freaking clue in the whole puzzle which was in the title of the poem. Arrrgh! We made a good effort though.
We ordered out for pizza and wings for dinner and then went to IHOP in the morning for breakfast. I didn't last quite as long as I did the last time so we ended things around 12:30am. I must be getting old. Or I was just tired. I was falling asleep at the end of Interview With The Vampire though. I don't really remember the last 15-20 minutes of it, so I'll need to watch it again.
It was fun though, which is going to contrast with the contents of this next 2-3 weeks where I'm going to be doing a ton of homework because it's the end of the semester. Sigh. I can't wait until I'm done with this college crap.
Well, another fun thanksgiving this year. As always, we like to keep things fairly small and just have a nice dinner with the immediate family.
Before the activities officially started, I was watching the Today show on NBC and it quickly became apparent they had run out of stories to cover. They were doing a story about a kid (couldn't have been more than 7-8 years old) who choked on a cheez-it at school and his best friend saved him by performing the Heimlich maneuver. The bad part about this story was the fact they had both the kid and his friend on to interview them. It was...painful. Both kids were camera shy and had a hard time saying anything. I had to turn the channel for a bit since I couldn't watch the trainwreck any longer.
The day officially started out around 9-10am when the traditional assembling/decorating of the Christmas tree while watching the Macy's Thanksgiving day parade took place. As always, my dad supplied the "It's too early!" comments as we were putting up the tree and my mom continued to want to put the lights on as we went which is totally against the tradition. Dunno how much longer that tree is going to last though. Getting kinda ragged and the base is a bit tippy this year. We also watched a little of the National Dog Show (long enough to see the dog that looked a lot like a mop) before switching over to football for the rest of the afternoon.
I ended up falling asleep during the Green Bay/Detroit game because it was kinda boring. Apparently, I slept through the interesting part of the game where Detroit tried to mount a comeback. I woke up a few minutes into the Dallas/Jets game to find that my sister and her husband had arrived. We hung out around my parents house for a bit and then we headed over to my place (minus my dad who was watching the jets get creamed) for some Wii bowling.
We headed out to Buffalo Head, the traditional Thanksgiving dinner location when we eat out (which we did this year, as opposed to my mom cooking last year). The roads were a little icy as my dad found out several times We thankfully arrived in one piece, but it was scary there in a few spots. True to past thanksgivings, nobody had the turkey special. I ended up with some stuffed shells that were pretty good. Somebody else in the restaurant had ordered a slice of lemon meringue pie for desert which got me wanting some pie. Apparently my mom wanted some too since she said she'd make one when we got home.
I hung out at my place for an hour or so before heading back to my parents for pie and to watch Grey's Anatomy. The pie was a little more eventful than expected. A couple bites into his, my dad doubled over and made something of a surprised noise. I can't remember exactly what he said, but when he straightened up again it had looked like his pie exploded all over his shirt. We're not entirely sure what happened, but it was very entertaining. Well, for us anyway. It's not like he shoved the pie towards him when he was taking a bite. Straight down fork movement. The best theory we could come up with is some kind of sabotage.
