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

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Family: Today was the first day of my oldest son’s summer visit. We've been on one visitation schedule or another since he was two, and now that he's getting older I feel like the whole thing is almost down to a science. He knows what to expect from us, we know what to expect from him, everybody loves each other, and it's all good. Seriously, I couldn't ask for a more fantastic kid.
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That said, it's still a bit of a transition to go from zero kids to a six-year-old (which was the case up until about a month ago) or to go from an infant to an infant plus a seven-year-old. Suddenly having another person around who’s been used to another schedule and a different lifestyle means instant acclimations for everybody… it's probably about as smooth as it could possibly be given the circumstances, but even still, the first two or three days after his arrival are pretty much devoid of any kind of productivity.
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Games: In case you missed them on Twitter or at GameCritics itself, here are some links to….
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Our most recent (and longest) podcast covering our E3 impressions
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And my official Prototype (360) review
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Incidentally, I'm not quite sure what the deal is, but my recent inFamous review racked up a lot of comments, only a few of them sensibly coherent.
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I haven't had this kind of weird reaction in quite some time, so I guess it's to Sucker Punch’s credit that they had enough people buy their game in order to have the half-baked and immature insult commenters come out of the woodwork in their defense.
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Kudos to you, Odofakyodo... You've got a hell of a lot more patience than I do.
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Started Red Faction: Guerrilla on 360 yesterday, and my quick impressions are mostly positive. I've never been a fan of the franchise but the demo for Guerrilla caught my attention and those same qualities that piqued my interest are quite present in the full version.
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Specifically, the level of destructibility in garages, bases, and other buildings is pretty impressive. The targets seem to react near-realistically to structural damage, and as far as I can tell, it achieves this particular effect better than anything else that's come before. Looking at the rest of the game, it's visually attractive, controls well, and seems fine enough for the most part.
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More like a streamlined GTA on Mars than anything else, really.
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I haven't spent very much time with it so far, but the only downsides I can see are that sometimes it seems nearly impossible to tell where enemies are firing from, and it may be my imagination, but I’d almost swear that enemies appear out of nowhere at times. Besides that, it seems a little tedious to be required to destroy certain amount of buildings before you can tackle all of the critical story missions in a given area. That feeling may or may not change as I progress further, but so far I've got a sneaking suspicion that it's going to get annoying before the game is over.
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We’ll see.
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Writing: The new book has been stalled for a few weeks, primarily because my son Whittaker was born, but also because my co-author and I had to put some light pressure on the brakes to make sure we were heading in the right direction. After several e-mails back and forth it seems as though we've got all of the kinks worked out and progress is about to resume. Of course, now I've got a newborn in the house and my other son here for the summer, so I'm not exactly flush with hours and hours of free time… still, all it takes is putting one word after another. We'll get there.
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