Merg

Short post today, cos my brain isn’t at it’s best.

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Bweh. I go kill things. Cheer other things later.

/flop

::hackcoughsneeze::

And of course, the first day of May, just in time for my recovery from the sinus infection that I’d had through most of April, I get a cold. /sigh At least it’s a small cold, nothing too outrageous, but it’s still a pain in the rump. It managed to put a serious dent in my enjoyment today.

See back when Jared and I got married last summer, the place we stayed at, The Inn at Ole Miss, had a Sunday brunch buffet that was AWESOME. No, really, I cannot tell you how awesome it was. We walked in with my family, and everyone’s jaws hit the floor. Tables and tables of food as far as the eye could see. All these breakfast goodies lined up for the taking, and at the back of the ballroom was the carving station with some awesome looking meat ready to be munched on. Oh and tons of desserts, all the way from chocolates to cakes and pies, to chocolate eclairs. /swoon

My first comment other than “Oh my god!” was “I’m starting at one end of this and eating my way to the other.” I had several people agreeing with my decision.

Cut to this morning. This is the last Sunday morning Jared will be available due to his job switching schedules around. He’s going to be getting home at a better time, but he’ll be working weekends and have two days off during the week now. It stinks that we’re going to miss out on the Sunday brunch at the Inn. Well, we will if we want to take him with us. So I was determined that we’d go today. Even though I was showing all signs of being sick (or getting there), I figured I’d make it through the morning reasonably upbeat.

The trip to the Inn should have been a hint. I ended up having to turn on the air in Mom’s car cos I was starting to feel sick to my stomach. Once we got there and I was walking around, I was fine. Perky even. Got a warm-up plate of grits, bacon, and ordered up a waffle from the guy at the back. I saw the eclairs and grabbed one, sat down, and started in on the bacon. A few minutes later, the guy brought my waffle and some syrup over.

Everything was delicious, just like last time. Last time, I’d raved about the eclairs to just about everyone that came to the wedding or asked how the wedding went. Seriously, these eclairs were that good. And much to my happiness, they were just as good the second time. The only difference between last summer and this morning was I didn’t have 3 eclairs with everything else I ate. Nope, I had my bacon, grits, most of the waffle and the eclair and stopped eating.

Trust me, I didn’t want to. I wanted to go back for more. I wanted another eclair (or three), some fried catfish, some of the delicious looking roast they had at the carving station, more of everything. But when your stomach comes alive and says “Put one more thing in me and you’ll regret it,” that’s when you bow to your body and say “okay, I’m listening.”

So at some point in the next couple of months, Mom and I will have to make another trip to the Inn’s Sunday brunch buffet, even if Jared can’t make it. Cos I really hate going someplace like that and not being able to do it justice.

And cos I want another one of their damned eclairs. /drool

A month of video games – Postscript

So that’s it for me and my “month of video games” posts. I know there’s games that I forgot or left off that deserve to have mentioned somewhere to show the love for them, but hell if I remember who. Hell, I could probably fill another 30 days of posts of games that I’ve loved and loathed over the years, but I think that’s for another day. For now, it’s back to regular, which is knitting, books, random life babbles and… oh… yeah. Video games. ^^;

I’ll just be over here in the corner now. ^^;

A month of video games – Day 30

Day 30 – Your favorite game of all time.

Oh dear, just one? I’m going to have to pick 2. Why? Cos one fills me with giggly silly fun glee. The other fills me with cackly ebil glee. Take your pick as to which is which.

A month of video games – Day 29

Day 29 – A game you thought you wouldn’t like, but ended up loving.

Let me go off and say right now I don’t do First Person Shooter games. I don’t even really do Third Person Shooters. If it’s got rifles, grenades, handguns and a selection of the latest in hand weapons that go boom, I don’t play it. Why? Simple, really. I stink at them. Flat out suck. No, really, it’s laughable. I’m not quite as bad as “throw a grenade and it lands back at my feet to blow me up” (that would be my friend Robin) (love ya, sweetie),  but I’m still god-awful. Jared knows this and is usually amused by it.

So imagine his surprise when I demand to go to GameStop to pick up Mass Effect 2 for the Playstation 3. “Um, there’s shooting in this. Are you sure?” “Yep.” “Why?” “…I just need it. Now gimmie! /races to bedroom to start playing”

This is NOT a normal game for me. Everyone and their brother was praising ME2 as being an awfully good shooter with this RPG game wrapped around it. Me? I set the bloody thing to casual and proceeded to kill anything that moved. For 3 weeks, the first thing I’d say to my husband and mother after we got done eating supper was “Lovely meal. I’m off to go save the universe, one head shot at a time.” I’d promptly vanish back into the bedroom where I’d been most of the day and cackle my brains out. Jared was bemused, but enjoyed watching me have a good time.

Honestly, when we got the game, I was starting to have second thoughts. I was thinking more and more about this whole “shooter” aspect, and knowing that I have trouble with shooters, was wondering if I was just blowing money that we could spend on other things, like Dragon Age 2. But I mentally shrugged and bought it, thinking that even if I sucked at it, Jared could prolly play through it fine and I’d just watch him play, since the story was supposed to be awesome. That’s me: sucker for a good story.

I was not expecting to dive into this game with gleeful abandon. An hour in, Jared was halfway poking me to see about maybe starting his character and I was snarling and hissing at him, clutching the controller to me. I went from “Hm, not real sure about this but ::gulp:: let’s see what happens” to “OMGLOVEMINEMINEMINE!”

I can’t tell you what clicked in my head with this game, but I can tell you it seems to have left. We downloaded the latest DLC for ME2, The Arrival, and Jared played through it. I was (and to some degree still am) having a “meh” moment, flitting from game to game, project to project. So when I finally got around to it the other week, I started up and immediately started struggling with the controls. Same control scheme as when I was playing it a few months ago, but the ME2 mojo has definitely gone on vacation for me. I finally pleaded with Jared to finish the content for my account. When we got to the spot where I’d been stuck, barely any time into the content, he just looked at me and asked “Really? Here’s where you got stuck? This isn’t even the hard part!”

/sigh

I still want to get ME3 when it comes out at the end of the year. But right now I’m hoping that either I get my mojo back between now and then, or they reduce the “shooter” bits a little back to more “RPG with guns and don’t have to worry about that pesky aiming thing.” ^^;

A month of video games – Day 28

Day 28 – Favorite game developer.

Aw crap. I have to pick just one? /whine I refuse to do it! I’m picking three! HA! I’m not scared of you! RAWR!

::cough:: Anyway, back to the dev love. In no particular order: Square Enix, Blizzard, and Bioware. Why these guys? They all tend to develop games that are “must buy” for me. Their games tend to have decent plots, decent gameplay, and decent art. They tend to have a higher baseline set for quality in everything they produce. I expect more from them, and rarely am I disappointed by them. Their “meh” products are other studios’ blockbusters. Sure, sometimes they do some things that leave me scratching my head, but overall, these guys help set the standard by which other games are measured.

That’s overall, though. Specifics to each company? Well, SE showed me that not all RPGs were “dude in loincloth and axe picking up loot” and could tackle things like life and death is a somewhat adult fashion. Blizzard showed me that not all developers were concerned with pushing a game out as fast as they could AND were happy to develop their games on the Mac to be released at the same time as their PC versions (still almost unheard of to this day). And Bioware showed that it is possible to wander into someone else’s universe (Forgotten Realms, Star Wars) and create something amazing, while still being able to create their own worlds and keep that same level of depth. (I’m scared to think of what their internal lore books for Dragon Age must look like. Gotta be huge monsters.)

So thanks guys, for pushing the various envelopes in your own ways and giving us such wonderful games.

P.S. – Special bonus mention of thatgamecompany, the creator of flOw, Flower, and the upcoming Journey. You guys are awesome and I can’t wait til Journey comes out.

A month of video games – Day 27

Day 27 – Most epic scene ever.

I’m giving this one up to World of Warcraft, even though I haven’t played it in over a year. I can think of quite a few scenes in games that have left my jaw on the ground, me bawling my eyes out, or me cheering loud enough to scare the neighbors down the block. But for an overarching storyline, this scene (and it’s wrapping up of plot lines for the expansion) is total win. I may not have been able to see it in-game, but it’s still epic all the way.

A month of video games – Day 26

Day 26 – Best voice acting.

Voice acting is really kind of a “newish” thing, but it’s not really surprising how fast VA can make or break a game these days. Not whether it has it or not, but whether it’s any good. Given the choice between meh to bad voice acting and no VA, I’d rather have none.

There’s actually a few games that I like the VA: Dragon Age, Final Fantasy (X, XII and XIII), Mass Effect, KOTOR. I’m sure I could think of others, but those are the ones that come to mind immediately. Right now, I couldn’t pick one over the others to save my life. There’s something that I like in all of them. Of course, it helps that they all have decent to excellent writing for the actors to read through. That always helps.

A month of video games – Day 25

Day 25 – A game you plan on playing.

Aw yeahhhh. /drool

A month of video games – Day 24

Day 24 – Favorite classic game.

Oh man, classic games? How “classic” are we talking? Ah nevermind, I figured out probably the “classic” game that I loved the most.

Centipede. This game used to make Mom and I fight over the controller at home. In the arcades, I used to hunt this one down. There was something about the trackball that I just connected with. Add in the Space Invaders-like “tromp-tromp” and I was a very happy camper.

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Well, up until Mom started to regularly kick my butt at it. /sigh At least I could still beat her at Frogger. She liked running Frogger into the traffic to make him go splat too much to ever last long at that game. (Hey, you guys know I’m warped. I do get my warped-ness honestly.)