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Cindy Lue GrueIt is dark.
February 18 Lost (Art of Great RPG Design) OdysseyFinally! I've been waiting for this for so long, I started to think it was never going to happen again: the Japanese RPG market has spawned something really, really good! Hubby and I started playing Lost Odyssey a few days ago, and... wow. So many types of wow. This game is single-handedly (and quad-diskedly) restoring my faith in Japanese RPGs. Of course, the game is beautiful; these days, that's practically a given. But even then, Lost Odyssey stands out with rich environments, amazing cutscene cinematography, incredibly unique cityscapes, and the sort of costume design that makes me wish I was twenty years younger and good at metalwork. Honestly, though, the game doesn't even need to be as visually magnificent as it is. I was already happy with just two things: the landscapes aren't made up of various shades of brown, and the main characters don't look as though they use 50 collective gallons of hairspray before leaving the inn every morning. Besides, where this game really shines is in design and story; the gameplay evolution is right up there with the odd-numbered Final Fantasy games, and the plot is not merely passable but compelling. I'll rave and ramble more about the design and story when I have time to do the topic justice; for now, let's just say... um... wow. And for extra fangirlish glee, the game even includes the original Japanese language track, which is chock-full of superb voice acting. Not to jinx anything -- we're only ten hours into the game -- but so far, Lost Odyssey is doing absolutely everything right. Some day, we'll get around to finishing Wild Arms 4. And Digital Devil Saga II. And Tales of the Abyss. And five or six other JRPGs that we've started but didn't have the burning urge to complete. That's just the sort of players we are. But for now, we're going to thoroughly enjoy the breath of fresh air called Lost Odyssey, and hope like crazy that the game bucks one more appalling trend and actually provides a really satisfying ending. Hope hope hope! Diet update for week four Diet update for week five BONUS: piccies! Here's my lovely raven tattoo... ...and here's Bren's adorable chocobo tattoo! Once I've finished losing weight, I'm planning to have some background detail added to my raven, hopefully building it into a full backpiece with swirly clouds and gorgeous landscape and plants and flowers, oh my! I have an appointment this Wednesday with George from Laughing Buddha; we'll plan out what it's going to look like and how much I need to lose before we can get started! February 04 A little slice of hellWell, this sucks. I had an entire blog entry written, I hit the little button to add a photo, I got a pop-up thingie for installation, and WHAM, all my text went away. Half an hour's work, reduced once more to its component electrons. Now I get to sit here and try to remember everything I typed, including an entire recipe. Frankly, this is so high on the list of Monumentally Irritating Crap that many of today's other annoyances seem paltry by comparison. And no, that is not a good thing. >_<
Most of what I was griping about here was Wild Arms 4, and how it continues to disappoint. As I mentioned before, this otherwise RPG-style game has a jarring, obnoxious tendancy to descend into platformer action. And the more we play, the more obvious it becomes that the platformer sections are poorly designed. The game's camera is fixed, which frequently makes it impossible to judge distances: a bit annoying in RPG exploration, but a massive frustration factor in a platformer, particularly since the distances in question involve ledges, pipes, and spinny laser beams of doom. There's nothing like playing the same hallway ten times because you can't tell whether any given dark spot is a shadow on the floor or a yawning pit of certain death. Thank you, game. Thank you for giving me an excuse to indulge in some primal scream therapy. Thank you for breaking up all the chatty, predictable cutscenes with cathartic moments of overwhelming fury. Thank you for removing all emotional attachment I might have otherwise developed for these characters by making me want to slam their heads repeatedly into the ceiling or throw them to their deaths. You rock.
In other news, hubby and I have a habit of missing out on any given trend in popular media until the rest of the world is long since tired of it -- hence, our "discovery" of Buffy the Vampire Slayer two years after it was off the air -- and we are now cheerfully feeding this habit with a subscription to Netflix. Movies we missed, anime we didn't bother to download, TV series that sounded vaguely good at the time but we never got around to watching: Netflix is paradise for the second-run theater crowd. Our first happy Netflix find was the Film Crew movies. Seeing the MST3K boys back in action, together again, was practically a dream come true. I say "practically", of course, because my own dreams rarely involve grindingly bad B-movies. But we're so very happy to indulge in more good bad cinema with our favorite commentators!
We've also started watching Eureka, as if you needed any more proof that we're a couple of geeks. We saw the pilot for this show when it first aired, and thought it looked like fun, but we're monumentally bad at catching anything when it airs on TV. Now that we can sit down to an episode whenever we like, we're both really enjoying the show. Okay, yes, the characters are mostly one-dimensional or stereotyped. But the dialogue is witty, and you just can't beat pseudoscience for amusing plot fodder. We look forward to seeing more!
Diet update for week three
Because it's easier to stick to a weight loss plan if you humiliate yourself online by posting stats.
Miles walked: 4 (getting better)
Pounds lost: 1
Total pounds lost so far: 6
Pounds to go: 102
Nastiest thing consumed last week in the name of "healthy eating": baked spaetzle. I had this crazy thought that I could oven-bake spaetzle until crunchy, instead of frying it in a whole stick of butter like I usually do, and it would still be tasty with chicken and gravy. FAIL.
BONUS! Diet-y recipe:
Magnificent 350-Calorie Meatball Sammiches
The cornerstone of my theory on successful dieting is that you should never eat anything you don't like. Most actual "diet food" is so nasty that eating it for an extended period of time constitutes a form of self-inflicted psychological torture: after a month or two, only the hardiest of souls (or those without taste buds) can avoid a breakdown and resultant diet-ditching. Hence my experimentation into lower-calorie and portion-controlled versions of meals that I really, really like. And this week's resounding success is the meatball sammich.
3 pounds uber-lean ground beef (4% fat, such as Laura's Leanest)
4 eggs
2 slices white bread
1 big-ass sweet onion (or 2 smaller ones)
1.5 TBSP basil
1.5 TBSP oregano
1.5 TBSP parsley
1.25 TSP garlic powder
2 TSP salt
dash pepper
hot dog buns
ketchup
Early in the day, toast two slices of white bread and set them aside; they should be nice and stale for the evening's meatball-making frenzy.
When you're ready to start cooking, crack the eggs into a large mixing bowl and beat until well-blended. Finely dice the onion and add it to the bowl. Place the stale toast slices into a plastic bag and crush them into crumbs with a rolling pin, then add the crumbs to the mixing bowl. Add the spices and stir everything well. Now add the ground beef, roll up your sleeves, and start mixing!
Once the beef and other ingredients are thoroughly inseperable, divide the mixture into three lumps. Then divide each of those three into three smaller lumps. Each of the nine resultant meaty blobs can be further divided into eight meatballs. Roll the meatballs between your palms to get the right shape, then place them into two large rectangular glass baking dishes (36 meatballs per dish).
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees, then place both dishes on the lower center rack and bake for 20 minutes. Once the meatballs cool, you can portion them out: place six meatballs each into 12 plastic baggies and freeze them for the future. Then, whenever you have a jones for beef, you can thaw out a set, reheat them in the microwave, drop 'em onto a 100-calorie hot dog bun, slather 'em in Heinz ketchup (another 50 calories), and voila! A 350-calorie meatball sammich from heaven.
If your diet permits a bit more excess, you can substitute leanest ground beef (7% fat) in the meatballs, and your sammich will still be a mere 400 calories. Yum! January 28 What to do, what to do?Now that I have this whole weight-loss thing truly underway, I wanted to set a few bribes for myself at various points along the process. My original thought was that every twenty pounds, I'd have a bit more background detail added to my back tattoo (I'd love some pale blue, swirly cloud shading, for instance). But after talking with George Long, the tattoo guru at Laughing Buddha, I discovered that the image would likely warp too much as I continued to lose weight. He suggested waiting until I was quite close to my goal before I have any more tattoo work done. Obviously, I'll take his advice; a tattoo is forever, so there's no sense in risking the outcome by being hasty!
But that does leave me with the question of what to do to reward myself for weeks of hunger and grumpiness. Buying fancy new clothes is out, since I'm just going to continue losing weight until I hit my goal. Obviously, going out for a gourmet dinner and decadent dessert would be foolishly counterproductive. Considering how many unplayed games and unread books we have stacked up, shopping for new ones is more an exercise in guilt than a treat.
Frankly, I'm stumped. Anyone else have some suggestions?
Diet update for week two
Because it's easier to stick to a weight loss plan if you humiliate yourself online by posting stats.
Miles walked: 2 (yep, still lame)
Pounds lost: 2
Total pounds lost so far: 5
Pounds to go: 103
Nastiest thing consumed last week in the name of "healthy eating": nonfat blue cheese dressing, which is a semi-congealed liquid reminiscent of runny egg whites, with even less salad appeal than Bacon Salt January 26 The price of carelessnessWell, that was stupid.
The postman just stopped by to bring me a package with beautiful, beautiful videogame sketches in it (thank you so much, Dawn; they're amazing and you're wonderful!). Looking back on this rather pivotal moment -- safe and ordinary as it seemed at the time -- I realize that I should have locked the cats in the bedroom instead of closing the front door nearly all the way to prevent them from escaping. And I realize that I probably should have been wearing shoes. And I realize that I need to carry my cell phone even when I'm just slacking around the house.
Hindsight really is 20/20, isn't it? But Foresight is legally blind, and Fate is a slapstick comedian. So of course, the instant I stepped out onto the porch in my pyjamas, the door latched firmly shut behind me.
It was like stepping into a cosmic punchline. There I am, barefoot, wearing flimsy sweatpants and the world's ugliest yellow shirt, standing on my porch in near-freezing rain and looking for all the world like the biggest idiot who ever lived. Yay me. A quick enumeration of my options yielded little of value: all of our windows are locked (of course, I checked a few anyway... that's human nature), there's no spare house key hidden under an unrealistic plastic rock in the garden, the nearest pay phone is four blocks away, and we barely know any of our neighbors. The notion of showing up on somebody's doorstep with my unkempt bed-hair and garish PJs and begging to use their phone to call Bren did cross my mind, but was reluctantly quashed. I'm telling myself I ruled it out because walking across the cold, wet street in bare feet would be courting pneumonia. In all honesty, there was probably also a certain amount of self-image involved. But mostly... mostly, I was just bloody cold.
Anyway, while my yard may be lacking the ubiquitous key-in-a-fake-rock, it has no shortage of real rocks. Since our front door is made of fifteen little glass windows, I employed a chunk of decorative sandstone on the panel nearest the doorknob and let myself in. (Have I mentioned that our house was built in the 1920's? Most of the glass is still original, and they didn't have safety glass back then. One solid whack with the rock sent dagger-like shards flying everywhere.) I rather figured it would take forever to get someone out to replace the pane, so I covered the hole in cardboard, vacuumed the floor, then set about calling glass repair shops.
It is now an hour later, and thanks to the folks from Glass Doctor, the only remaining evidence of this morning's misadventure is a bill for $177.38.
If I had it to do over, I would have immediately gone to a neighbor's house instead of spending five minutes trying to open windows that I knew damn well were locked. But then, if I had it to do over, I wouldn't have locked myself out in the first place. One thing's for sure: I'm going to buy pyjama pants with pockets, so that I can carry my cell phone around the house. Lesson learned.
And now we know the exact price of carelessness. $177.38, plus my pride. January 22 RPWOPSG = Role-Playing With Obnoxious Platformer Sections GameWell, I'm still not done with Beautiful Katamari (one item and two presents left!), but there's really only so much rolling a person can do before permanently injuring their thumbs. So when my hubby finished replaying Neverwinter Nights, I leapt at his suggestion of playing a console RPG together. If I was handed a giant cosmic whiteboard and asked by some divine power to stack-rank my favorite things in the universe from one to ten, "a comfy evening playing console RPGs with Bren" would be way up there. And since our careers at Microsoft Games provide us with more money than free time in which to do anything with it, we always have a stack of purchased-but-unplayed games sitting around looking forlorn. So with some vague notion that the games on the bottom of the stack weren't getting any younger, prettier, or more cutting-edge, we dug straight to the deepest geological strata and pulled out Wild Arms 4.
Two evenings and about five playing hours later, I can safely say that this will not be standing out as our favorite installment in the series. As always, the story and world are intriguing, the characters passable, and the combat enjoyable enough. True, the soundtrack wanders from genre to genre and style to style like a grab-bag of musical leftovers from other games. No, the game does not include its original Japanese language track, and yes, the English dubbing seems to have been voiced by a handful of game testers and the producer's brother-in-law, recorded in a closet, and edited by drunken marmosets. But these are sins we've reluctantly forgiven in other, better games. Wild Arms 4, on the other hand, suffers from a major gameplay problem, and thus it annoys us enough that the other flaws seem all the more apparent.
Now let me preface this complaint by saying that some RPGs have very successfully managed to hybridize themselves with a second genre. The Suikoden series, for example, features traditional RPG-style play interspersed with tricky tactical battles. Mass Effect -- gorgeous bastard of a game that it is -- successfully marries RPG exploration and dialogue with shooter-genre combat. Quite a few RPGs mix in puzzle, casino, card, or action elements: the Final Fantasy series is practically notorious for including mini-games from a dizzying array of genres. But Wild Arms 4 eschewed each and every one of these potential secondary genres and chose instead to punctuate their RPG gameplay with... jumping puzzles.
Riddle me this: a mage, a badass swordswoman, an artificially evolved lifeform and a kid with a nanotech super-gun are trapped on a flying fortress and need to get to an escape craft. Do they: A) blow a gaping, jagged hole in every wall between themselves and their goal, B) take the nearest soldier hostage and use his keys, or C) crawl like idiots over the surface of the ship, leaping from ledge to ledge and pipe to pipe, activating a ludicrous series of timed platforms, and frequently falling to their deaths? If you think C sounds like fun, then Wild Arms 4 is the game for you.
Sadly, being the bad-guy junkie that I am, we'll probably finish this game anyway. The villians are as colorful a bag of assorted freaks as you'll ever see. But I reserve the right to grumble all the way through.
Diet update for week one
Because it's easier to stick to a weight loss plan if you humiliate yourself online by posting stats.
Miles walked: 1.5 (yah, yah, I know, lame)
Pounds lost: 3
Total pounds lost so far: 3
Pounds to go: 105
Nastiest thing consumed last week in the name of "healthy eating": Bacon Salt
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What's eating my life this week?
My very first obsession, and still a fave.
What we watch while eating dinner
My favorite places on the Net
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