Up late talking games & writing? You're...

So I've been using a T-Mobile Sidekick 3 for a while... I use it a lot for comunication on the go, and for work purposes. I started using Sidekicks with the Sk2, a very durable and well-designed unit that served me faithfully for about three years before it was time for a new model.

...Nothing happened today.

Just a quick shout-out tonight to a local restaurant that the wife and I think is pretty groovy. It’s a small Puerto Rican place called La Isla, tucked away back on the west side of Market Street.

There aren’t a lot of tables and a chilly breeze blows in whenever someone opens the door, but it smells great and the food hasn’t disappointed us yet.

Tonight we tried the garlic shrimp that came accompanied by rice and beans, a slice of avocado, and some crazy tasty garlic dipping sauce. On the side of the plate were a few slices of fried plantain. They look like bananas but taste like potatoes, crispy on the outside and very starchy and firm underneath the crust. Good stuff.

We also ordered some small empanadas, one stuffed with pork and the other stuffed with chicken. They could have used a little more seasoning, but the meat was very lean and the shells were just right.

The waitress didn’t blink when I ordered a virgin Mojito, and the kitchen graciously splits orders onto two separate plates and garnishes both equally, instead of simply giving you an extra plate and letting you dish it out yourself. It may be a small touch, but one that I really appreciate.

This little place seems to always be doing good business whenever we go there, and with good reason.

Check it out if you’re in the neighborhood.

So after a little waffling, we decided to be bold and go out to catch a movie after the sun went down. Cloverfield was playing out on 45th, so we took in the last show along with a small crowd of completely obnoxious twentysomethings who probably should have either been studying, or in lockup.

The movie was good, but I went into it without knowing much about it except that it was a Godzilla sort of thing told from the perspective of regular people. I had heard that they aped the Blair Witch Project shaky camera style, but I didn’t realize that the entire film was shot that way. It did indeed give the movie immediacy and intimacy, there were a couple of times when I wished they would just hold the damn camera still.

I don’t wanna give away too much to people who haven’t seen it yet, so I’ll just say that it does a very effective job of re-creating what it might be like for a group of big-city people under siege from the unknown. It wasn’t perfect but it was fresh, and that counts for a lot in my book.

Recommended.

I took a few days off from posting, but I’m back with a few random tidbits… I’ll throw them up here in no particular order while I try to decide whether or not the wife and I should go out and see Cloverfield’s late showing.

Nothing makes you feel old quite like being ready for bed at 8 p.m….

SIFT 2
I think I may have a title, and I’m proud to say that I have thrown myself back into the slow, torturous process of writing again and I’ve got two (extremely rough, admittedly) chapters in the can.

Books
Started and finished Dearly Devoted Dexter the day before yesterday… it’s a quick, fast-moving read. I think the concept of having a sociopathic serial killer for a main character is fantastic, and obviously quite a few people out there agree with me. Personally, I think Dexter comes off as little too warm and likable at times, but it’s probably a necessary evil if the book wants to maintain an audience. CBS is going to air repeats of the Dexter series (based on book 1) that were originally created for Showtime, and anyone who’s interested at all in the material should check it out. A few of the actors seem to be miscast, but the series expands greatly on what the first book covered and actually provides greater depth and more exploration than the source material, in my opinion.

In any event, Dearly Devoted Dexter felt a little rushed but was another solid installment. I’ll be coming back for number three.

Just this morning, I started The Nymphos of Rocky Flats, by Acevedo. It’s about a soldier in the Gulf War who becomes a vampire, and then starts a job as a private investigator when he gets back to the states. I’m not very far, but the first three or four chapters have been pretty solid although I’m kind of thinking that vampires in general have been overdone in every sense. I’m not sure that enough genius exists to bring a fresh, new angle to these bloodsucking creatures who walk the night, honestly… maybe if all vampire novels went away for five or 10 years, they wouldn’t seem so similar and played out. Still, Nymphos seems promising.

Games
Wrapped up Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles with the wife this morning. We got stuck for a long time on one particular level that prevented us from moving forward until we had gotten an “A” rank. Oddly, it was the only level in the entire game where meeting that particular requirement was in effect… every other level simply asked that you reach the end. We busted our humps for a while with no success, but eventually pulled it off by taking turns going solo. Evidently, the points requirement for a good ranking skyrockets when you have a second player aboard, and the challenge seemed stiffly disproportionate to the rest of the game. That particular frustration aside, the game was surprisingly much better than I expected, quite possibly the best on-rails shooter I’ve ever played, honestly. It needed some tweaking and graphics and with the responsiveness of the Wiimote, but the concept and execution in general were a thick cut above what you’d usually expect from a game of this sort. Definitely recommended, although the story sort of falls apart unless you’re already a RE fan.

Moving on to Half-Life 2: Episode One next.

Had a lot of plans and things to do yesterday and today, but I got kicked in the ass by a few emergency assignments. 

Before I launch headlong into Rantsville, my latest piece just went up on GameCritics... it's running about ten weeks later than I intended it to go up, but some things are out of our hands.

Anyway, check out Portable Project 12.

And on to the main event...


Tonight I spent about 74 minutes on the phone with Microsoft customer support, and of those 74 minutes, probably about four of that was me not being pissed. Why was I calling?

Three issues.

1> Like many of my fellow 360 owners, I make a habit of logging in to Live on Wednesdays to see what new content is available to download. I eagerly await new Arcade titles, but I’m always up for a good trailer or a few demos that tell me I don’t need to waste my time with some title I’ve had my eye on. (Elements of Might and Magic? That’s now a pass.)

Anyway, I log in like I usually do and when I get to the demo for The Club, I see that it has a little message stating that this demo is “only for Gold members”. I recall reading that Microsoft had recently spit in the eye of Silver (i.e. - non-paying) members by making them wait a week before being able to download any of the good demos and trailers. I thought it was pretty lame, but I’ve been a Gold member since Ive owned my 360 and I do believe that eight dollars a month is a very reasonable price for the service they offer, so it didn’t bother me that much.

I couldn’t figure out what happened, so I went to my status and saw that I had been downgraded to Silver. It made no sense. Microsoft has had my credit card on file since the day I bought my 360, and they’ve been charging me every month like clockwork. I know for a fact there is money in the account, and I haven’t made any changes to my membership. WTF?

2> Microsoft completely screwed up their DRM (Digital Rights Management) for Live Arcade games when they were doing repairs on consoles with the Red Ring of Death. For some reason, apparently Microsoft matches downloadable game purchases with GamerTags AND specific 360 machines. Prior to catching the RROD, any Arcade game I downloaded under my Tag was fully accessible to my wife under her own Tag. After my 360 died, got repaired, and then was sent back, every single Arcade game I bought prior to this repair was now only accessible to me, completely locking my wife out and prompting her to pay full price if she wanted the privilege of enjoying the games she had full access to prior to RROD.

3> This past holiday season, apparently tons of people had issues getting onto Live and getting it to function properly. Personally, I only had about two hours of problematic service total, but I guess the problem was more widespread in other parts of the country.

To remedy the situation (and probably to head off any more talk of class-action lawsuit) Microsoft was kind enough to announce that they’d be giving away a free Arcade game as a way of saying sorry. Unfortunately, that game was Undertow. It’s a great game, but I and many right-thinking people like myself bought the game long ago. For us, we were instructed to call in to customer service and be compensated in another way.

After dialing 800-4-MYXBOX (so clever, that) I was connected to quasi-English speaker “Aren” who offered to listen to my issues in between telling me to “please hold, I need to check my resources” approximately every 15 seconds.

What were the resolutions?

Item 1, the mysterious downgrade: “Aren” was absolutely convinced that I had not been paying for my Live account with my credit card, despite the fact that my numbers were entered into their data banks, I have bank statements going back a year proving otherwise, and I had the card in my hand. After further investigation, she explained that my pre-paid membership card had expired.

What membership card, you may ask?

When I received my 360 back from the service Center, they included a note of apology and a prepaid card for a one month’s worth of Live service. I redeemed the card thinking that I would skip the eight dollar fee for a month and everything would be back to business as usual, but that was not the case. By redeeming the card that MS had sent, it had actually cancelled the credit card I had on file and my account did not revert to its original billing status once that free month had run out.

“Sorry for the inconvenience, use this card and we’ll inconvenience you some more.”

Item 2, the games lock-out: after explaining this issue to “Aren” several times and not having her grasp it, she insisted that all I needed to do was re-download the games and that would solve everything. I did it while I was on the phone with her at least three or four times, insisting each time that the issue was still there.

I literally must have went over the problem for over half the time I was on the phone and we kept going around and around in the same non-comprehensible circle. She eventually just gave up and tried to pull the wool over my eyes by giving me a reference number and telling me to re-download every single game that I had an issue with (about twenty, in all) and to call back if it didn’t work. Since I had confirmed with her in real-time that it damn well did not work, she wasn’t going to go any further with this.

Customer satisfaction: zero.

Item 3, I already have Undertow: This is the only one that Microsoft got right. Although “Aren” was well and truly sick of talking to me by this point, she credited me 800 Live points on the spot after I had to read her my 360 ID and Serial numbers and repeated them more times than should be necessary. I don’t quite understand why she had to have me hold three separate times to do this transaction, but I did verify that the points were added and I was just about ready to get off the phone whether I got my points or not.

All told, only one issue out of three was solved to my satisfaction and Item 2 is still enough of a pain in the ass that I’m going to need to call back again and probably waste another hour or two trying to explain it to another rep who won't understand before passing me off to a supervisor who probably won’t care.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my 360 and of the current consoles, it’s my favorite by far… However, that’s not to say that I’m all right with getting dicked around when I’m paying cash money for a Live membership and downloadable content. Microsoft dodged a bullet the size of an oil tanker when they started the repairs for every console that had Red Ringed and found that amazingly, people weren’t really that pissed.

Do they really want to push their luck and see if their audience will be just as passive when they start getting nickel and dimed on Arcade games and have to call in for wonky membership problems? If anything, I would have guessed that the online aspects of the 360’s management would be Microsoft’s strength, but tonight’s wasted hour suggests otherwise.

First up, a quick link that I got from Bill Harris' Dubious Quality blog (the link is to your left.)

A Day in the Life of a Turret

This clip will be more meaningful if you've already played Portal, but it's funny as hell either way. Kudos to the guys who put that one together.

Games
Started up Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles with the wife today, and she's a pretty good shot. The game is much more difficult than I had anticipated, but it's still quite do-able with two and it's a hoot to go back and revisit some of the classic RE bits... Basically Capcom repurposed a lot of old cutscenes and reworked older game content to create an on-rails shooter similar to a House of the Dead and the like. Not sure I'd buy it full price, but we're enjoying it as a rental. My thumb gets pretty tired hammering on the Wiimote's 'A' button, though.

Writing
I've basically got the outline for Untitled Book Two in my series sketched out, and I'll be starting the actual writing pretty soon. My hope is that the process will go faster since I've already established a lot of things and I'm not starting completely from scratch, but we'll see.

Tabletop
My recent obsession, HeroScape, just announced that it's been sold to Wizards of the Coast, a local (as in, Washington-based) gaming company that's taken the not-videogame-games world by storm over the last fifteen years or so. They started with Magic: the Gathering and exploded due to its incredible popularity. They eventually bought Dungeons & Dragons (if that gives you any idea of how big they are in the games world) among other properties, and now they're bringing HeroScape into their all-encompassing arms.

A rep from WoTC has been taking comments from players over at the HeroScapers Forum which I think is an excellent idea, and hopefully they'll be able to grow the game into something a little more accessible and successful. For some strange reason, Hasbro had been aiming the game at the 8-12 year-old bracket (which is WAY too low) and shipping it to toy stores when they should have been shooting for the older disposable-income gamer and stocking a wider variety of outlets.

Picking up some of the older pieces on eBay has been a minor nightmare and future releases had been thrown into question, but the WoTC reps are hearing the feedback from players and with their unsurpassed games know-how, I'm sure it's nowhere but up from here.

...It's good to have one once in a while.

As promised, here's the short story I whipped up last week - "In the Trees".

The contest that I wrote it for had a few rules:

1> The story had to involve a ghost as the main character.

2> The ghost's focus couldn't simply be on being dead.

3> Extra points would be awarded if there was sexual content.

4> The total length had to be 700 words or less.


As I mentioned in previous posts, the contest was suddenly canceled for unknown reasons, but I still had the story... I may work on it a little more and expand it, or maybe I'll look for another contest to enter it in, but for now, here's what I had...


In the Trees


It was about 9:15.

I knew because I could see the face of the clock in the town square from my vantage point on top of the hill.

It was also Thursday.

Ordinarily I can’t tell one day from the next, but I had seen Lester Jenkins driving his huge supply truck as he made all his regular stops earlier in the day, restocking the cold beer cases down in town in preparation for the inevitable Friday night festivities.

It wouldn’t be long now.

---

A pair of shining headlights made their way up from the dark burg below, the small clusters of houses and strip malls invisible except for the twinkling of porch lights and a few weakly-lit bits of neon.

The approaching vehicle ignited the tiniest spark of warmth at my core, the most I could muster on my own after being stuck here for decades. I could only recall vague glimpses of the night I lost my life on this hill, but enough time had passed since my last breath to allow hemlines to rise and morals to shift.

Some things never change, though. That’s why Laura Spinney was on her way up to my little secluded corner of the hilltop with whatever willing stranger she had hooked this time.

---

Laura and I had met just a few months ago.

At the time, it had been several years since anyone had spent more than a moment or two on the ground where I was bound, the last living people I could recall being a pair of roughnecks hunting deer as they passed through. I hadn’t even had had time to collect the bits of my essence that were floating amidst the treetops or lying dormant underground before they had moved on.

It was just as well. They probably would have killed themselves after I was done with them, and they didn’t seem the sort that would be good company for the rest of eternity.

That particular day, a quiet girl who had spent most of her time amidst the sorry stack of books that passed for the town library found her way up the hill and through the trees to me. I don’t quite know what was on her mind—reading thoughts wasn’t one of the gifts that came with my curse—but I like to tell myself that she had found a telling scrap of newspaper somewhere, or some dusty mention of the foul play that occurred in this very spot.

I like to think she knew I was here. After spending so long on this lonely ridge, it was comforting to imagine that someone cared enough to come looking for me.

As she drew closer, her energy brought me to life.

As she stepped over the gnarled roots and shifted the piles of dead leaves strewn about, the simple fact that she was breathing and present gave me the strength to manifest in a way that I hadn't ever done; feeling the pull and the warmth and given off by her innocent soul, I leapt inside her body and reveled in the feeling of flesh.

Laura could feel my loneliness, and the harsh, bitter cold of being trapped alone as my bones rotted where no one could see. Wrapped again in blood and skin, I filled her body with my own. My hands became her hands as her eyes gave me sight. I had forgotten the taste and smell of rich forest earth until I had sucked in breath through her lips.

Overwhelmed by the sensation of being alive again, I couldn’t control myself. Although we shared one body, I made love to her with the fierce desperation borne from being given the chance, and the thought that it might not come again.

But it did.

---

I was feeling much stronger these days, and not nearly so alone.

As her car’s headlights died, I glided through the forest in anticipation of what was to come. I could sense them drawing near, snapping twigs and tripping on the underbrush along the way.

As she laid down a thick woolen blanket, her head turned discreetly from side to side. She couldn’t break herself of the habit, though there was really nothing to see.

The man she had brought with her didn’t need much coaxing, though he might have reconsidered that she had told him what was about to happen. Or maybe not.

As his urges grew stronger and he tried in his awkward, crude male way to draw her close, I leapt inside of him and made his body my own. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get used to the feeling of borrowing a stranger’s alien, hard stiffness when I had only ever had soft, gentle folds in life, but I made love to Laura again that night.

…And many nights after.

If you read my blog regularly, careful observation of the last few posts will reveal that this week wasn’t exactly peaches and cream for me. That said, I had a little turnaround late this evening and things are looking up. On that happy note, I’ll stop my e-moping and get back to what you come here for.

(..And what is that, again?)

Games:
(Okay, I know this is cheating but here’s a quasi-repost from something I put up on the GameCritics forums)

So, I haven't spent much time with the ol' PS3 since I dropped an uncomfortably large stack of cash on it, but I 'm a big fan of most of Naughty Dog's work, and I figured there was no way Uncharted: Drake's Fortune would let me down.

So wrong.

Truthfully, I’m completely shocked at how weak this game is. The graphics are pretty cool, don't get me wrong, but underneath all the shiny stuff is a simple formula cribbing off of Tomb Raider and a whole lot of generic shooty action games. Shockingly, I discovered within the first few minutes that this game isn’t even an adventure game; it’s a piece of crap third-person shooter disguised as an adventure game.

Honestly, I’m offended at how much shooting is in this game. There’s so much, I can only describe it as childish. Hordes of African bushmen/pimp mercenaries come pouring out of every damn crevice in the caves and ruins I’ve been through so far. It’s ridiculous. To top it off, the main bad guy is pretty Aryan-looking, his second-in-command is Hispanic, but every generic dude I’ve mowed down has been black or African. I’m not sure exactly what this message is supposed to be, but it feels pretty racist somehow.

I’ve died a ton from excessive gunfights too, and this is only through chapter 5. I can't even say that the AI has been taking me down fairly, either. The sheer number of enemies you encounter is unreal, and their main purpose in the game seems to be to flank the player at any cost. Dudes spawn in back of you, they come climbing over cliffs, they pop out from places you’ve already cleared, and from everywhere... it's just stupid.

As for the rest of the game, it's highly MEH. Level design is pretty anonymous-tomb-like and grindingly linear, with some non-puzzles every now and then. (Light this torch? puzzle solved.) There’s some ledge-grabbing and shimmying, and some wonky-looking jumping that doesn't feel dialed-in at all, but none of this stuff can hold a candle to the recent reinventions of Tomb Raider or Prince of Persia by any means. It seems to halfheartedly try, but I'm having a hard time that the dev team was really trying to go there.

I was considering having Drake's be my next review but I’m seriously questioning whether I’ll even finish it at this point. It’s just too much of a slog to get through insipid ambush gunfights just to see more sub-par rock-jumping areas. Checking it out on Metacritic, I see many of my same complaints echoed almost word for word, yet not a single critic seemed capable of giving it less than an 8. 8 isn’t average, people-- it's pretty good. This game is not an 8. Based on what I’ve seen so far (and granted, I’m not all that far) I’m thinking somewhere in the neighborhood of 6 seems more appropriate.

In multiplayer news, the wife and I are steadily going through Trauma Center: New Blood on the Wii. It’s exactly like the first game which is basically good since I liked it, but the developers have gone completely off their rocker because the game seems completely designed for two players at all times. The difficulty of even the beginning surgeries are orders of magnitude tougher than what the first game attempted, and the first game was known for its player-crushing difficulty, on the DS at least. We’re having fun at the moment, but this is one game I would’ve chucked out the window if I had attempted to do it alone.

Finally, I just have to throw out another recommendation for Omega Five on Xbox Live Arcade. It looks great, it plays exactly like one of my old favorites (Forgotten Worlds), it has multiplayer, and it’s really well put-together. Practice really pays off in this game, and it’s gratifying to be able to see my skill improving every time I play it. Not all shooters are so welcoming in this sense, so although it’ll chew you up the first few times you play it, patterns begin to emerge and the game isn’t nearly as heartless as it first appears. Even better, after logging an hour of gameplay, the game gives you an extra few credits to continue, which is always appreciated. Without a doubt, this is one of the better Arcade games to come down the pipe in a while, and it’s one of my favorites overall.

Writing:
Nothing new to report on SIFT at the moment, but I’m going to do another big push and send out some more submissions this weekend. However, I had taken the time to whip up an original short story this week that I had planned to enter in a small contest. Oddly enough, the contest seemed to have fallen apart before I actually got a chance to enter. Not sure exactly what was up with that, but the end result was that I have this little story sitting here and no real venue for it, so odds are that I’ll post it here this weekend. Keep your eyes peeled.

So, look.

Certain things about my line of work are great. Other aspects aren't. I'm sure that you could say the same thing about most jobs, but as a biased person with a limited field of vision stuck deep inside my day job, it seems to me like my particular gig depends on lying and falsehood more than most.

In my line of work, getting paid depends entirely on how many freelance jobs you can line up for yourself. There are always situations where someone's needed in a hurry and those last-minute things are easy enough to grab, but they're not consistent. To get regular, steady work... the kind of work that provides a comfortable living, you have to play the game.

It's all about who you know, who they know, how much people like you, who owes who a favor, and about a hundred other factors that have nothing at all to do with the sort of work you're capable of producing. Consequently, as a person who spends a lot of time calling bullshit on things (or at least, I'd like to think so) I spend an equal amount of time biting my tongue and censoring my own comments. It's not just to be PC... There's a very real likelihood that one wrong statement or one aside taken the wrong way can lead to a freelancer like myself being completely locked out of a job because someone's miffed.

There's no union to go to, nobody to petition, no higher power to beg for mercy. Play the game, and go along with everything while wearing a smile. If not, you're taking your next paycheck in your own hands.

It's just that simple.

To make things worse, there are a lot of... shall we say, eccentric personalities to deal with on a daily basis. Usually it's not a problem to get through the day, but sometimes... just sometimes it gets to be too much.

Today was one of those days.

I was tired. I was annoyed. I couldn't play the game, couldn't hold it in. I had all I could stands, and I couldn't stands no more.

I made some partially straightforward comments.

Did I burn a bridge? Maybe.

Am I tired of constantly self-censoring and worrying for hours afterwards if I burned a bridge? Definitely.

Days like today probably explain why I have about three or four friends in the whole world. Playing the game is hard enough between the hours of 9 and 5... I'd sooner jump off a bridge than have to do it in my off-hours, too.

It's been a busy couple of days recently, so I'm going to skip coherence and just throw out a bunch of stuff.

So my son's winter visit is over, and the wife and I flew him back home to be dropped off with his mom.

When we arrived at the hotel, the three of us were tired from the long flight and eager for some downtime. We stood at the counter with bags under our arms and bags under our eyes as I presented our printed reservations, but it was obvious that the clerk on the computer was having some problems. He checked and double-checked our info, and struggled with what he was seeing. He didn't specifically say so, but it was clear that the hotel had somehow not confirmed our reservation.

However, this fellow was a quick thinker and a generous soul. I never got his name, but whoever you are, a thousand blessings upon you, sir.What he did was give us a free upgrade since the standard room we had booked was not available and the rest of the joint was full up.

An upgrade to what, you may ask?

...the $800/night penthouse suite.

Without a doubt, this was the finest hotel room I've ever been in. The space was enormous, more like a complete two-bedroom condo than a hotel room. It took up the entire top floor of the hotel, and although I didn't measure the square footage, I'd say it was comparable (if not larger) than my actual house.

There was a deck that ran the entire perimeter of the room around the roof's edge, giving a panoramic view of the city, not to mention the hot tub and shower that were installed outside. Inside, we had two full bedrooms and bathrooms, a washer and dryer, a full kitchen and dining room, a sauna, multiple flatscreen HD TVs with cable, internet access, and a huge living room with couches and chairs to stretch out on.

The kicker? This place was so swank, the toilets were completely silent when they flushed. If that's not fancy living, then I don't know what is.

Now, I'm not saying all this to brag because it's worlds away from what we usually get and not at all within our travel budget. It was just a completely unexpected and lucky circumstance that felt like winning the damn lottery to the three of us after being on a plane all day and getting wiped out on an exhausting trip. I couldn't have imagined anything sweeter waiting for us when we landed, and it was the bright ray of absolute joy that we needed.

It got me thinking, though... it must be really nice to have the kind of money to be able to stay in places like that every time you take a trip. If it hadn't been for this stroke of luck, I don't think I would have seen firsthand how the other half... No, more like how the other 10% lives.

It's pretty damned nice.

As usual, I'm a few days late for the latest bit of news or culture. I do get around to it, though... this week, I outdid myself and got to see a film the wife and I have been eager to check out before it hit DVD. Yay for us!

Got my copy of EGM yesterday, but didn't have time to crack it until I had started seeing reports about Dan Hsu's editorial in the latest issue today.

Super-quick mini-update:

Just finished all SIFT revisions in one gonzo session, and sending out a full manuscript tomorrow. I get to write the words "Requested Material" on the envelope, and I'm peeing my pants.

In a good way.

Thanks for the hookup, MM.


Omega Five on Live: Cool.

Tron on Live: Nostalgicool for five minutes.

Bedtime: Imminent.

Just a quick one today, I'm neck-deep in revisions and tweaking the text on SIFT and I've got to seize the quiet time while I can.

Games: My review for the PS3's Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction went up a few days ago, you can check it out here.

I've also been putting in some time with Contra 4 on the DS. It's classic Contra if I've ever seen it, but Easy mode was tough and Normal is enough to make me quit. Not sure why they bothered to add in a Hard mode. Even though it hates me, it's still recommended.

Omega Five and Tron just came out on Live Arcade last night, so I plan to get to those today.

Books: I'm in the home stretch with The Amulet of Samarkand... gee, reading sure takes me a lot longer now that I'm a grown-up. Wonder why that is...

Anyway, it's a good book. Specifics to come. Looking forward to the second Dexter book up next.

Food: The wife made up an awesome salad yesterday: a few thin strips of italian sopressata salami, some frisee lettuce and field greens (also in strips), white balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and a little s&p... damn, that was delish. Do it up yourself and let me know what you think.

So after stirring up a shitestorm on the boards over at Gamecritics, I've been continuing to digest the contents of the first item on Orange Box's menu, Half-Life 2. It's influential and creative, but it's also flawed and troubling at times.  The worst thing about it so far? 

Just a quickie before bedtime...

Not to sound like I'm endlessly in love with Mass Effect and I'm sure this is old news to some, but I stumbled across Dean Takahashi's recent review fiasco regarding my favorite game of 2007, and had to say something.

Christmas and New Year's are behind us, and I've gotta say I'm glad.