The game tries to adopt a Heart of Darkness esque vibe to the story. A mercenary (who you choose from a pool in the beginning – the ones you don’t choose are encountered later in the game), you are brought to this unnamed African country to assassinate The Jackal, a mysterious arms dealer who is arming both sides of the seemingly eternal conflict between the two factions in the game. Of course, it’s never that simple, and you quickly contract malaria, and while sick and helpless in your hotel bed, are confronted by The Jackal, who says in simpler terms, you’re screwed, better try and get some work so you can survive in this hellhole. Of course, your goal is still to kill him, but he’s so confident in his ability to avoid this fate that he lets you live. Getting missions is simple enough, although one thing that strikes me about all the NPCs is that everyone speaks incredibly fast. I don’t know if it’s intentional, but it comes off like they only had the money for a couple hours of recording studio use.

This is how the game begins, and really, how the game is played by the most part. You’re constantly in danger – even when taking on a job for one of the sides, they are sure to tell you that the mission is secret, so even their men will shoot at you. Whether this is an intentional decision or just the developers not wanting to program friendly AI, it ends up being frustrating more than anything else. Considering that your mission target is usually way off on the other side of the map, and you usually have to go through several checkpoints – all populated by hostile mercenaries who don’t hesitate to shoot you and give chase – it both helps and hinders the experience of the game. If you’re well-equipped for battle these encounters are often fun – but if you’ve already fought five or so encampments and are just trying to get to your target location, it can get tiring.

As I played through, I found myself getting a bit cannier with the inevitable encounters. I’d constantly be checking my map as I drove, and when I came up to an encampment, I would scout it out first. I’d try to count the enemies that I saw and plan my attack. Sometimes the attack would go fantastically – I’d manage to kill the first guard, draw the other two out, and blow up a conveniently-placed barrel as they ran to my position, killing them and finishing with not a scratch on my person. Other times it wouldn’t unfold nearly as well, I would get shot to hell, my gun would jam and have to be saved by my buddy, which is actually a fairly unique and interesting system included in the game.

The various ‘buddies’ you find in the game are in fact the mercenaries you didn’t choose in the beginning. There is no particular advantage or disadvantage to choosing one character over another – they all play the same. You have both a ‘best buddy’, who calls you up to subvert various faction missions (often making it easier for you to complete them), and a ‘second buddy’, who rescues you if you die in combat. He only rescues you once, though – to get this ability again you have to rest in one of the safe houses and wake up to find him staring at your sleeping body, which really comes off as vaguely creepy and makes me wonder if his interest in you is more than that of a brother in arms looking out for his friend.

Your buddies can die as well, and they will be replaced by other characters – although I have to wonder if there’s a finite amount of buddies and eventually you will just run out of health. If they get downed in combat, you can revive them with a syrette if you have one, or if you have nothing, you can even opt to execute them and save them from a slow death. The latter choice shocked me a bit when it happened in the game, marred only by the achievement notification popping up after I did the dirty deed.

The combat itself in the game is actually quite intense – you have to aim down the sights, there is no crosshair provided in the game, which adds a neat bit of realism. Additionally, I must say that I love the health system of the game – eschewing modern day FPS tropes of having regenerating health, it has an interesting hybrid of old and new. You have six bars of health, and if you get hurt but not enough to deplete an entire bar, it heals up to that bar. If you want to heal anything more than that, you have to use a syrette, which heals you up to maximum. You can only carry five syrettes at first, however, and if you’re fighting more than one person at a time, chances are you are going to need to heal quite a bit. If you get down to the final bar of health, you start bleeding out, and you have to press a button to stop the bleeding – which is always accompanied by a particularly brutal animation, like snapping your dislocated arm back into place or pulling a bullet out of your thigh with a knife.

In addition to worrying about your health, it’s also good to think about your weapon condition. Weapons do degrade in this game – often faster than I imagine they would in real life, but at the same time I have no real experience with weapons, so this could be a realistic model. Degredation is physically modeled on the weapons, so the pristine assault rifle you picked up will soon become caked with mud and dirt and prone to jamming before just shattering in your hands. It’s an interesting way of making you switch weapons, and although it is frustrating at times I found it quite entertaining. Particularly dangerous are rocket launchers, where a misfire can often mean a rocket spiraling off into a direction that you did not intend it to go.

All in all, Far Cry 2 is a very good game. I am looking forward to playing more of it. The sheer atmosphere of exploring a jungle and having the freedom to tackle missions how I want makes me look past the few strange design decisions and sometimes frustrating enemies.

Life is progressing swiftly. I’ve made the decision to go back to school next month, and in preparation for that (and numerous other things), I’m going to be leaving my current job soon. I’m not particularly broken up about leaving – my current job is a strange one, and I’ve never felt exactly ‘right’ doing it. I do the job perfectly fine, of course, but it’s certainly not something I want to focus upon for the rest of my days, or even for the rest of the year. Getting out of the newspaper business is something that I aspire to do, and it seems like the best way to do it would be to leave and go to school full-time. I’m still going to look for a part-time job (I’m personally hoping for a bookstore job), but I’ll be done with full-time work until I get a degree of some kind.

A few weeks ago I saw Inception. As the hype has indicated, it was quite a good film. There are lots of interesting theories about what’s really going on in the movie, and personally I love the ambiguity of it all. It’s nice to see a movie that leaves the ending open to interpretation. That said, I know there are lots of movies like that, but I probably haven’t seen them. The fact that I was dead tired and practically asleep while awake when I saw it probably enhanced the experience quite a bit as well, though I can’t recommend that most people experience it that way. I would like to see it a second time, perhaps in IMAX or even D-BOX.

Just Friday night I saw Scott Pilgrim Vs The World, which I liked a great deal. Michael Cera, who made me nervous as the choice for the title character, actually pulled it off very well, and I was especially impressed by Kieran Culkin’s turn as Wallace. The movie was exactly what it needed to be – a good emulation of the comics but also it’s own unique thing, particularly the ending, which I understand was vastly different from the comic’s.

The sun is rising, and I realize I have spent another night without sleeping. This is required by my current job, however it doesn’t mean I enjoy it, since I don’t get to sleep with my wife at night. Another reason why I’m glad to be leaving my job.

I was tempted by World of Warcraft because I enjoy exploring in games, often to the exception of most other things. Massively multiplayer games, of course, often have enormous worlds with many things to see, and I’ve always thought it a damn shame that I really do not care for the gameplay in any of the MMOs I’ve tried. But, since I do admire Azeroth’s side and have enjoyed the expansive vistas I’ve seen in that game (and I’m sure I’ve not seen anything yet, since I never even passed level 20 in the game), I was sorely tempted to resubscribe and slog through the gameplay to see some new, interesting things.

Fortunately, my friends came to my rescue. Knowing my penchant to waste money on things I never play, or play only briefly, they were quick to reccomend Minecraft. This game, they told me, was something amazing. The world is procedurally generated as you play, so there is basically limitless potential for exploring. Not only that, but the principal mode of the game, Survival, is geared entirely around building a fortress and, to say nothing more, surviving. There are numerous creatures of the night that will assault you, the most heinous of which is the hedge creeper, a green zombie-like thing that is completely silent aside from the telltale hissing sound it makes right before it explodes and ruins whatever it is you were working on. The game even includes an amazingly intuitive crafting system for making various mining tools and even decorative items. As my other obsession is survival-based games, this was amazing to me.

After perusing some of the creations people had made in the game, I visited the website. Five minutes of deliberation (and realization that Survival mode is only available to paying customers) culminated in me purchasing the game, which is currently in Alpha, for the simple reason of “It’s $15, if I end up not liking it at least I only spent $15.” This would prove to be a fantastic decision.

My first foray into the game was before consulting any of the extensive documentation that players had created for it. I spawned on a coastline, as I learned you often do in this game, and hopped around a little bit. My first world culminated in me punching a pig and a cow to death, and then quitting, deciding I needed to learn a bit more about how to play before I attempted any more.

My second world was one where I immediately learned how annoying it can be to die far away from your spawn point. You’re only given one spawn point in the game, and although editors can change where you spawn, often times you may find yourself carrying a load of precious ore back to your camp when you are attacked by a skeleton and murdered out in the wilderness with no way of knowing where you died, because you didn’t leave any sort of trail back to where you were. Perhaps that’s just me, though.

Regardless of this setback, however, I was dedicated to making some sort of a home for myself. Unfortunately, I still hadn’t read enough about the game to learn how to many any kind of wood or stone construction, so my first home was a dirt fort, leading underground to my underground lair. This world was also quickly abandoned.

The third world, however, would prove to be something else, and I learned that a great part of this game is the co-operative gameplay it inspires, despite the entirety of the gameplay being me and a friend switching off on the single world file on my computer. I had learned a great deal in the time between these two worlds, and soon quickly (and before night fell, I learned) built a wooden home for myself to hold off the encroaching monster hordes. This home was soon expanded to include an underground basement and, when I let my friend play, a maze of catacombs and underground water pool. For himself, he built a sky-house and, after dying several times to creepers and spiders in the dead of night and not being able to find his way back, a road leading straight to it.

Despite this, however, we were still dissatisfied. The world we inhabited was still a bit dull, unfortunately. There were no interesting mountains and formations to be found, just low hills and sandy beaches. While this would satisfy anyone who wished to live a life of quiet solitude, we were playing the game to explore, and, more importantly, build interesting structures, the layout of our land did not seem to afford us either.

The fourth (and current) world we are playing has proven to be the most interesting so far. After looking at five potential worlds, each more interesting than the last, we decided on a snowy world that had some interesting rock formations a short distance from the start point. Seeing what looked to be a massive stone outcropping very close to the spawn point, I decided that this would be where my house was.

Actually playing the world, I discovered that what I thought to be a simple outcropping was in fact an arch, with a small backyard-type area behind it. This made me even more eager to start building, and after some time, I had constructed a very nice looking three-story wooden house in the middle of the arch. I cannot say how many trees died in the making of this home, suffice to say that the numbers were many, and I was very appreciative of their sacrifice for my shelter.

Some time later I decided to go excavating, in the hopes of finding iron, or even better, gold. Sadly, the cave behind my house proved to be perilously dull, with only a small amount of charcoal in it. After salvaging what I could, I sealed off the entrance with a sign noting that this mine was dangerously boring. Satisfied with building a very nice home for myself, I called it a night.

The next day, I picked up my friend from his apartment after dropping my wife off at work and we proceeded back to play some Minecraft. We would switch off on different times to let the other play and make some progress on what they wanted to do. He had told me he wanted to build an ice fortress, and I had remebered to craft him as many ice blocks as I could stand to do so he wouldn’t have to spend too long gathering them for himself. His fortress was built on a flat area near mine, and we connected it with a small bridge.

Wood was plentiful, as the world we inhabited had trees growing everywhere. Unfortunately, resources like iron or charcoal were hard to find. We decided to set out exploring. We had a sand tower built as a landmark, one that could hopefully be seen from a good distance off. Our best bet, we decided, was to load ourselves down with weapons and mining tools, pick a direction and start walking. We soon learned this was a poor idea after dying several times with useful items in tow. Particularly difficult for my friend was when we died with several buckets in our inventory – he is well aware of how useful buckets can be during construction of various things.

Needing a better landmark (we had quickly learned in our journeys that the sand tower is nigh invisible at night), we took our single bucket of lava and poured it over the top, making a glowing, if somewhat phallic, monument to direct us back to our home. This would unfortunately not give us the edge we had hoped for in finding our way back home, as our expeditions took us so far out that even at night, our penis-esque tower was out of visible range. Still, we wouldn’t let that deter us. After finding an amazing natural lava waterfall, however, and dying while trying to mark its location.

We had been playing for many hours at this point, though, and were not about to let this get us down. Deciding to go out on another expedition (one that was in fact intended to recover our items lost on a previous expedition), we discovered an amazing network of caves. At first seeming to be a regular short cave, we somehow managed to find crevices that led us deeper and deeper into the bowels of the earth.

At this point in the day, it was time for me to pick up my wife from work. We quickly jumped in my car and drove to her workplace, having to wait about an hour until she was done. We talked excitedly about what might be in the cave, other than the small deposits of iron and charcoal that we had discovered. Learning from our previous mistakes, we had crafted a chest and a crafting table near the entrance of the mine, and made frequent trips to the surface to drop off our goods, secure in the knowledge that at least if we died, we might someday find a chest in the wilderness filled with our treasures. As soon as we returned home with my wife, we went back into the game, with me apologizing profusely for our horrible nerdiness.

For the next two hours my wife got to listen to my friend and me excitedly talking about our finds. She heard our eager hollers when we caught first sight of gold – we had found some in a previous cave, but it was sadly lost when we mined it with a stone pick, not knowing that you needed at least an iron pick to actually harvest raw gold. She heard our amazed gasps when we reached the near bottom of the earth, a place where lava flowed freely and we were forced to tensely make bridges across if we wished to harvest the myriad of resources – redstone, gold, and iron – that we saw embedded in the walls. She heard our squealings of delight when we saw diamond in the walls – and shortly afterward, a waterfall of lava and water that created obsidian. All of this she endured while I continually came back to her to apologize profusely. We soon realized that Minecraft almost devolves us to the level of cavemen – grunting and shouting excitedly when we find shiny things, running away from scary things, and eating raw meat of animals to sustain ourselves.

Eventually, I became concerned. We had such a weath of items, more than we had ever dreamed of finding, but were unfortunately still deep under the earth. My wife, after hearing our excited jabbering for the past few hours, had become interested in playing. I urged my friend to tunnel to the surface, drop off the resources, and let her play, so she might actually understand what got us so excited. The thought of losing all the items we had worked so hard – and so long – to attain was horrifying, nearly more horrifying than death in any other game I’ve played. As we tried to make our escape, not knowing exactly what path we had taken to get there, we passed by numerous other mineral deposits. I had to demand that my friend ignore them in favor of escape. We were running low on picks, our health was perilously low, and we didn’t know what time it would be outside when we finally surfaced. If it was daytime, we were in the clear, if it was nighttime we would have to hope for the best.

After a nearly deadly encounter with a creeper, leaving us with a single health point, my friend agreed that we needed to escape. We began digging up furiously, and eventually beheld the surface once more – unfortunately, it was nighttime. We noted with a bit of irony the fact that we emerged on top of the lava fall we had worked so hard to find again earlier. Thankfully, we were actually able to find our way back to our chest and quickly fled back to our home base. We were nearly dead, but we had survived, and we had the loot to prove it.

As I write this, my wife is currently playing Minecraft, leveling off the top of a mountain to make room for a fortress she plans to build. I have helped her with these plans – tunneling through an entire hillside so her fortress will be visible from my mountain arch home, and building stairs up to where her fortress will one day be – and can’t help but be satisfied that she at least seems to understand now why my friend and I were so eager about this game. As she plays, I am currently planning an expedition of my own in the game when it is my turn to play. I am going to leave with many stone steps, torches, and signs, and scout out as many caves and geographical oddities I can find.

I almost find it difficult to say in words why I enjoy this game so much. Part of it is the ownership I feel over the creations you make – there is creative mode, where you have unlimited resources and can build whatever you like, but that means that whatever you create is easy to recreate. In Survival, there was a real sense of accomplishment for me when I finished my house – I knew I had cut down those trees, turned them into planks, and used those planks to make my house. The path to where my wife’s keep will be is something I did myself – I worked to take down the entire hill and place the stones that made the path.

The mere idea that I am planning to scout out this entirely fictional world, and leave signs marking potential places for exploration, flabbergasts me. In any other game, I wouldn’t dare do that. Minecraft, however, makes me feel like an explorer, and since I’m sharing this world with friends, like an actual contributor to the world. I discover these places so we might continue to expand our land area, and hopefully keep building new structures and discovering new things. People like to go on about gameplay elements created by the player, something that I always was in slight doubt of, but this game allows me that without question.

The fact that it can be played with other people, collaborating on a single world and making your own settlements and houses is something appealing as well. With Multiplayer Survival mode just released today (although in a rather bare-bones form), the potential for dozens of people working on a single world is something that excites me immensely. Finally, since the game is still technically only in Alpha, the fact that there is much, much more to come to flesh out the game even more is exciting.

I can say without hesitance that based on my experiences, Minecraft is certainly worth the money. If you have $15 to spare and are looking for a new thing to pass the time, buy Minecraft.

I’ve always considered the Dragon Quest games to be the JRPGs -even ignoring the fact that chronologically the series is the first. Final Fantasy is more popular in the states to be sure, but everything about the Dragon Quest games is prototypically a JRPG to me. The stories are often basic – the evil guy is, surprise, often revealed to really be the evil guy. There are twists in the storyline, yes, but those twists often amount to more bumps in the road than drastic u-turns. I often struggle with exactly why I enjoy the Dragon Quest games, then, since they are so very linear, grind-heavy, and often predictable.

There is no real answer I’ve come up with to that question either. I just enjoy them, that’s all I can say. Perhaps it’s the storylines, they’re refreshingly simple. Maybe it’s the monster designs, which are nearly always adorable or at the very least bemusing. Even grinding, a common problem with JRPGs, isn’t something I mind much in these games, and Dragon Quest is generally considered to be the worst offender in terms of hours spent grinding. The newest entry in the series, Dragon Quest IX, is no exception.

The story of Dragon Quest is typical fare. You start out as a Guardian, a kind of angel living on a place called the Observatory, tasked to protect the human world and help out the mortals in order to gather Benevolessence (yes, it is actually called that), in order to offer it up to the World Tree. Once the World Tree has recieved enough, it will summon the Starflight Express and take all of the Guardians to the Realm of The Almighty, basically a kind of heaven. Of course, you manage to gather the last of it, but unfortunately when you offer it to the tree and the Starflight Express is summoned, there is a sudden attack on the Observatory and you plummet down to the mortal realm, losing your wings and halo in the process. From there, the game progresses on at a steady pace, with you trying to recover the various Fyggs (mystical heaven-fruit) that have fallen to the mortal realm and discover exactly who or what attacked the Observatory.

This installment of the game makes a few changes to the formula, most of which are welcome. Instead of assuming the role of an established character, you create your own character – face, hair, and all. Eventually you will create the other characters that you adventure with as well. I was tested to not make my character look exactly like Goku because of Akira Toriyama’s art design, and I’m proud to say I succeeded. If there is something to be said about his art, it is certainly easy to recognize, though I can’t say I’m a fan of his human characters, who typically all look similar and sport an abundance of turbans and headbands. Still, I do enjoy the monster designs and his environments. It’s just a shame that the actual human characters all look so similar.

At first I was a little worried about the fact that your party consists entirely of self-made characters. One of the biggest charms of the Dragon Quest games for me has been the various party members that join you through your epic adventure. Thankfully, the lack of party member personality is more than made up for by the NPCs that populate the game world. The game’s prolictivity for puns is in full effect, something that I’m glad still remains in the game given the many quests of the story would be terribly depressing and self-serious otherwise. The puns and awful, awful jokes at least allow for some kind of amusing relief when you find out that the undead knight who is after a young princess is only doing it because he believes he is still alive, though the kingdom he is a knight of has long ago fallen into ruin and the princess he seeks is long dead.

Another interesting change is the introduction of four-player co-op multiplayer. You can send your main character to someone else’s world (or they can come to yours), and join them on various quests. The only progress made is on the host’s game, of course, but it is useful for leveling and helping other players out. Though I’ve only done this for a brief few moments with my wife, it seems like it’d be a lot of fun with a full group of people. One of the problems with it, however, is that Dragon Quest is far more popular in Japan, and therefore it’s a bit easier to group with people there. In the US, it’s much less popular, and therefore unless you know someone who has the game, seems much less useful. The same problem occurs with the inn canvassing system, where you leave your DS closed and if it passes by another DS that is canvassing, a guest will appear at your inn, often with a useful item or treasure map. Again, in Japan this is probably easy to accomplish. In the US, much more difficult. The multiplayer is local-only too, so don’t expect to just be able to go online and adventure with friends.

Treasure maps bring me to another portion of the game that’s new – a treasure map will take you to a grotto, a randomly generated dungeon with a preselected set of monsters and an end boss who often has some great treasure. My one attempt at a treasure map dungeon ended in me getting annihilated thoroughly by the boss there, and that was only a level 1 treasure map. As it goes up to 99, and there are even some bosses that you can sacrifice your experience to to increase their level when you fight them again, I shudder to think the amount of grinding required to get up on even footing with those bosses.

Still, the game has massive amounts of replayability built onto it. Discounting the main storyline (which I am around 25 hours deep into and maybe halfway through), there are dozens upon dozens of sidequests, many of which do not even unlock until the main story is finished. In addition to the aformentioned treasure maps, there’s also an alchemy system, which is a requirement if you want to get any of the most powerful items. There are also accolades, basically achievements for the game that thankfully don’t have numbers tacked on, else I would find myself trying constantly to get more and more. The fact that there’s an accolade for playing the game for 1000 hours says something about just how much time you could put into it.

The game has it’s negatives to be sure. Grinding is still a major problem – though it is ludicrously easy in Dragon Quest, as most normal monsters can be defeated by simply tapping the A button and the occasional glance at the screen to make sure no one in your party is dead. If you’re not a fan of puns, the game will probably get on your nerves for the unrelenting torrent of terrible jokes it unleashes. The story is fairly basic, and if you’re craving something with depth and many twists and turns, you’re best off trying something else. The graphics, while fantastic for the DS, do make the game chug at times, especially if you have a full party with you. The multiplayer is not nearly as useful in the US, where Dragon Quest is much less of a brand than Final Fantasy, so you’d best have friends to play with if you want to enjoy the multiplayer, especially as there’s no online portion.

It goes without saying that if you’re looking for a game to take up a lot of your time, Dragon Quest IX is definitely a worthwhile purchase. I’m interested in seeing for myself just how many hours I play before I beat the main story – and how many hours I play afterward.

The ‘villain’ of Bioshock was Andrew Ryan, objectivist to the extreme, who refused to back down from his ideals no matter what tragedy befell his underwater utopia of Rapture. Bioshock was basically designed to skewer the entire idea of Objectivism because, guess what, when everyone’s out for themselves, people are going to suffer a lot. Not everyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and become a successful citizen, unless they live in a fantasy world where everyone is nice to each other and willing to help – but wait, that’s not Objectivisim anyway!

Bioshock 2, by contrast, has a Collectivist antagonist. Now, regardless of my feelings on either philosophy (to be specific, I think both are pretty unrealistic), it seems odd in the first place that they basically took the villain from the first game and turned him upside-down. I’m not opposed to that kind of conflict either, but the fact that they bill Sophia Lamb as this great rival to Andrew Ryan, and yet she is never mentioned once in the first game, seems strange. You find an audio log from Ryan asking another character to bury every mention of her, which I guess explains it, but it seems more sloppy than anything else.

The big draw of Bioshock 2 is, of course, that you play as a Big Daddy. That is, you play as the Big Daddy, the original one that was made. Because you’re the first, you’re slightly different – you can use plasmids and you can swap out your weapons. Slightly odd is that you get the drill, which seems (and is) awesome for the most part, but the drill needs fuel, which is a slightly annoying aspect to the game. I understand that the drill is powerful, but it’s more than a little frustrating to be facing down a group of splicers only to realize your gigantic drill-hand is out of gas so all you can do is clobber them over the head with it.

Even moreso than the first game, Bioshock 2 is far more combat-focused. And, as a Big Daddy, you’d kind of expect that – with a large part of the game focused around you taking Little Sisters from other Big Daddies and helping them harvest the mystical bioengineeering Adam before deciding to either free them or harvest them. Unfortunately the game doesn’t really let you feel powerful as a Big Daddy, or at the very least I didn’t.

Maybe I’m just bad at video games –  I am very prepared to admit that, as I really am not very good at the things despite spending the better part of my entire life playing them. I can understand from a game design perspective why the people that made this game wouldn’t want to make you as powerful as a normal Big Daddy – that’s the entire reason why you’re Alpha, the original – you were developed before the others so there are some weak spots in your design that were fixed later. It would have helped, though, if I was at least a little more resilient. Perhaps I’m just not using plasmids enough, or maybe I’m just not good at dodging bullets. But really, when this diving-suited monstrosity doesn’t manage to take down more than a couple attacking splicers before being taken down once more, it doesn’t feel exactly right.

That said, I still love exploring Rapture. The city is as gorgeous and decayed as ever – if not moreso, considering it takes place a decade after the first. Of particular enjoyment is Ryan Amusements, a theme park that Andrew Ryan appropriated for his own screed against the world governments, religion, and basically anything he disagreed with. There’s even an opportunity for an amusing achievement in there if you know what you’re doing (or have read about it beforehand).

The multiplayer seems interesting, at least from a narrative standpoint. Although I haven’t yet played a game of it (my attempts ended with me waiting in an endless lobby with one or two other prospective opponents for 10-15 minutes before I gave up), I appreciate that it’s set during the fall of Rapture in 1959, so at the very least there is some sort of justification for why you are murdering everyone else.  The ‘lobby’ where you customize your character and swap out plasmids and gene tonics is very clever too – basically your own apartment, and you are picked for ‘field testing’ of various plasmids. I can’t help but feel that the single-player might be slightly more enjoyable had they decided to cut out the multiplayer entirely, but hey, they gotta do what they gotta do to sell more copies, right?

I haven’t yet finished the game  so I can’t really pass judgement fully on it. I’m enjoying the game to be sure, but there’s just something very off about the storyline, and I find it a shame that the game seems so damn combat-heavy. For me, the draw of Bioshock was the setting and story. The combat worked fine, yes, but it was always ancillary to the amazing environment and story that occured in said environment. For right now, Bioshock 2 is a game that I enjoy a lot despite it’s flaws. I can’t profess any great love for it because of those flaws, but it’s still a solid game. Once I finish it, perhaps I’ll decide that I love it, but for right now I’m sitting on the ‘like’ side of the scale.

Rachel and I went out on a date last night. It was our first date in… Well, a while. Possibly our first ‘dinner and a movie’ date as well. Still, it was a lovely time and we hope to do more of it in the future.

The film was Toy Story 3, something we’ve been meaning to see for a while but never actually got around to until last night. I have to say I was very impressed, it was a sweet movie that didn’t feel at all like a cheap cash-in sequel. It had heart, as loath as I am to say something like that since it sounds so cliche.

There’s something about that movie that affected me – I never had a ton of toys as a kid, so that part of the movie didn’t really hit me. Just something about the willingness of the toys to make Andy happy and to be there for him, though – that’s something I can relate to.

The short film before the movie was also excellent. A bit different from Pixar’s usual shorts, but certainly not in a bad way. I always admire how their shorts (with the exception of ‘Bound’ and I guess the Incredibles one, although I’m not sure if that was a short before the film or just something included on the DVD) manage to convey a story so well with no dialogue, just their expressive characters and fantastic use of sound and music.

When we walked out of the theater, we both expressed aloud how amazing it is that Pixar keeps making such good films consistently. With the possible exception of Cars (and in my wife’s opinion, Wall-E), which wasn’t bad, I just didn’t think it was up to the other films, Pixar really pushes out amazing quality films every year. I must admit, I’m slightly fearful about the coming years, as they seem to be trying to make more sequels – a Monsters Inc one is apparently coming in 2011 – but with Pixar’s current track record it doesn’t seem like we have much to worry about. Hopefully.

After the movie, we waffled about on where to go for dinner. It was 9 PM, and we had originally planned to go to Chili’s (yes, we go for the fanciest restaurants in our relationship), but neither of us were particularly hungry. After a bit more debate we decided that yes, we’ll go to Chili’s.

I had a Caribbean Salad, which was both something I hadn’t had in a while and something I’d never tried. It was pretty decent, I have to say, although I’m not really a fan of sweet things in my salads. Still, I finished all my greens, so my parents should be proud of me for that fact. I sprang for shrimp as well, as I often do when I have the option, and I’m happy to report that the shrimp was also delicious. Rachel had Margarita Chicken, which came swimming in a sea of what looked like beans. Though I only had one small slice of her chicken, I have to admit it was pretty tasty and I’m considering having that myself if we go there again. Dessert was a molten chocolate cake, which basically looked like some kind of ice cream volcano, with melting vanilla ice cream in the center and fresh hot dark chocolate cake surrounding it, and a chocolate shell mounted on top. I’m unaccustomed to such rich flavors so I only had a few bites, but what I had was, of course, delicious.

As it was my birthday a few days ago, I decided to go to the bookstore before our date and pick up a couple books. It was either that or buy Starcraft 2, and I am crap enough at RTSes that I figured it’d be best to spend my birthday present on something I’m more likely to use.

Even though I recieved a wealth of books for my birthday I still craved more. So I wandered the shelves of Barnes and Noble for the better part of an hour, finally deciding on The Splendid Magic Of Penny Arcade and a book full of random creative writing prompts.

Penny Arcade has a special place in my heart, and not simply because it’s a comic I enjoy. As most people who are probably reading this know (and to not get into too much detail for fear of boring people even more), it’s the entire reason why I met Rachel and why I am married today. I read through the book last night and enjoyed it greatly, particularly the section where they pick their favorite comics and Tycho’s are long descriptions of why he likes them and Gabe’s max out at five or six words.

As for the books I recieved for my birthday, I’ve started reading Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin. I’m finding it fascinating, not only as a book but for what it accomplishes as a book – not only is it a story of a woman of this culture in the far future, but it also has descriptions of the culture and the culture’s practices, something I always enjoy reading about. It’s really hard to describe what I mean by this, so I’ll stop, but I find it amazingly interesting.

That’s enough for now, I think. I’ll make another post later about the games I’ve been playing, and likely one with one of those writing exercises.