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

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Baby: The wife woke up this morning and wasn't feeling too hot. Since we got referred to our local labor and delivery center for monitoring a few days ago, we figured we'd play it safe and take her into the OB for a quick blood pressure check, fingers crossed that preeclampsia wouldn't rear its head.
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We've been going to this OB for pretty much the entire pregnancy-- routine checkups, tests of all kinds, ultrasound, etc. The doc has been pretty good and she's certainly been taking my money for what basically amounts to nine months of “looks great, see you next week.” When we called them this morning, I figured it wouldn't be a big deal for us to pop in and have a nurse do the blood pressure. As anyone who's been to a doctor knows, it takes less than a minute. The response was not exactly what I expected.
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“The doctor’s not here right now, but you can come in this afternoon.”
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“My wife is not feeling well right now. If you can just check her blood pressure and let us know what the number is, we can take it from there.”
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“I'm sorry, but the doctor’s not here, so if something's wrong, then we can’t help you.”
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At this point in time I'm thinking to myself that there are at least five separate doctors who work in that office and share duties, so I know damn well that at least one of them is in. I'm also thinking that if my wife or my unborn child are in distress, it's better to find that out immediately rather than sitting around all day waiting for the doctor to come in. After all, even if the doctor was there, all she’d tell us to do is go to the labor and delivery center, which is what we planned to do anyway if the wife’s BP was elevated.
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“So you're saying that you're not going to do this blood pressure check for us, even though we're reporting that something may be wrong and it would take you less than a minute?”
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They didn't.
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We ended up going to our general practitioner to have it checked, which they gladly did at no cost. Start to finish, I think we were in and out of the office in less than three minutes. Luckily, the wife was fine so no further action needed to be taken in that regard, but I'm going to have a very frank discussion with the OB about the quality of care I expect, and the kind of office she's running.
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It might get harsh.
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Games: Playing Naughty Dog’s Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune on PS3 right now.
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I played it for a bit when it first came out, but it rubbed me the wrong way and I tossed it aside. I was quite surprised to have that reaction, really. I was a big Crash Bandicoot fan when ND was still producing it, and had a very good time with the Jak & Daxter series. I expected great things from Uncharted, and at the time I felt like it really didn't deliver. Didn't even bother finishing it.
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While skimming through Metacritic the other day I came across the Uncharted breakdown and was a bit surprised to see it that rocked an 88. Now, although I will be the first to admit that my taste doesn't always run parallel to the majority, that number seemed a little high to me, and being the Naughty Dog fan that I am, I felt like I should give it another shot. Maybe I just wasn't in the right frame of mind, or perhaps Saturn was out of alignment, or something. Who knows?
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Still don't like it.
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I'm toying around with the idea of doing a review for it, but I'm still sort of stunned that it's just not nearly as enjoyable and well put-together as it should be. The characters are pretty generic, the puzzles and platforming are lightweight, there’s at least twice as much gunplay as is warranted (the pop-out-endless-wave-of-enemies kind), and in general, there's not really a lot of heart. I kind of get the sense that the developers were trying to bowl everybody over with the visuals, hoping no one would notice how insincere and hook-free it is. Looking at that Metacritic score, I guess their strategy worked.
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I'll definitely finish it this time just to say that I did, but I certainly wouldn't ever hold this up as an example of a great game-- although considering how weak the PS3’s exclusives library is, I can see how some people would position it as one.
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