Another Quiet Saturday

In which the Wife continued to ensure that she maintained the #1 spot on the leaderboards for all the Oasis songs.

And Done

All in all, a fine game. I will definitely be picking up the sequel, if only to get some closure after the amazingly surprising (and emotionally unfair) cliff-hanger ending they tacked on. I needs me some closure.

All skill points racked, extras unlocked, weapons powered up and ridiculous levels of destructive ability achieved. The hardcore gamer in me says “It was a tad too easy,” but that doesn’t stop the game from being an immense amount of fun. And just plain gorgeous to look at.

Oh Those Whacky Americans

The Wife has been messing around in Home and has come to the unfortunate conclusion that a virtual environment offered as a free service is probably not a good idea in America.  She’s witnessed racism, homophobia and a male/female ratio so hopelessly out of whack that whenever a female “avatar” shows up, she’s immediately hounded by all the males either begging to add her to their friend list, or just outright trying to “impress” the girl in question by dropping a rape joke and then telling them to come to their virtual private apartment for cybersex.

So far this is not making a real positive impression…

How Many Times Can One Person Sing Oasis Songs?

If that person is The Wife and has been waiting a good chunk of her life for this moment?

About eleventy billion times roughly in the span of a day.

Today was the day the Britpop bomb dropped on Rock Band and, as to be expected, the Wife was bouncing around the apartment like a kid at Christmas, with each minute becoming an excruciating hour as she waited for evening to arrive, when the Playstation Online store normally updates with new content. So eager to make time pass faster, she was willing to even indulge in a shopping trip wherein a new, decent winter jacket was purchased at an amazingly low sale price, various kitchen implements were bought (we now have new a new vegetable peeler and ice cream scoop) and even the purchase of season 2 of Robot Chicken was allowed, as long as these things took up more time while the painful wait for Oasis dragged on. Alas, my attempt to locate the Blade-Runner Blu-Ray 5 disc set was utterly thwarted during the shopping spree, not because The Wife didn’t approve, but simply because the damn thing is still sold out. Oh well, there’s always Amazon…

Suffice to say that when the momentous update arrived, the downloadable content (or DLC in the parlance of gamers) was hastily bought, downloaded, installed, and for the next few hours, she sang her heart out and it was pretty much a given that no other kind of “rock band-ing” would be done for the day. She was in a such good mood that she didn’t even care when I snuck in an additional DLC game I’d been eying for a bit.

Nearly Done With The Ratchet

It sometimes occurs to me that being such a completist when it comes to games is probably not very healthy, but then I remember that I still need to get a few skill points or an Ultimate Weapon or pass a particularly difficult song and the moment of insanity passes.

Waiting On Fear

With any luck when Siren: Blood Curse becomes available on the PSN tomorrow it won’t suck. We really need a horror game that doesn’t fall apart at the end the way Condemned 2 did…

Coming Up For Air

My right arm does indeed now feel like it’s hanging on by a single, battered tendon, but it was worth it. Rock Band 2 pretty much lives up to the promise.  It’s a phenomenal game that is really only let down by one feature, or lack thereof; they took out the solo campaign.  There’s still a solo campaign of sorts, where you can earn money and such, but it no longer shows you the “stars” that indicate how well you’ve done on a particular song.  A star listing however, is still available in Quick Play, but that means that you can no longer earn money.  The heart of the game is Band World Tour which you can now play solo or go online with, and… it’s huge.  It’s gonna’ take a while to plow through that.  The game also seems to have taken the same progression in difficulty from Guitar Hero 1 to Guitar Hero 2, in that Rock Band 2 has a noticeable climb in difficulty of songs.  One thing I was extremely amazed with however, was the fact that Ace of Spades came up as one of the songs in Rock Band 2 and I remember, just a few years ago, this song utterly annihilated me on Expert in the original Guitar Hero and even though I didn’t 5 star it on this go through, it wasn’t a struggle to survive either.  It’s good to know that I’ve actually progressed some thanks to obsessively playing with a plastic toy guitar.

The Post Office

The only thing of note was that the kid’s comic was wrapped up, and we went down the post office to affix stamps to a seemingly endless line of envelopes destined for the offices of art directors, magazine editors and anyone else that might need an illustrator.

Those Quiet Sundays

Another quick trip to Bloor for some last minute art supplies. Aside from that, basically just playing games and writing another High-Def Digest article.

The Comic News

< ![CDATA[Oh well, this WAS, the news I'd tried posting last week before everything went crazy, to just to make sure it's not lost in the depths of the blog, here it is again.  First off, the funky graphic:

This is the ad that finally announces Liquid City, the anthology that the Wife and I have a story in.  Unfortunately, since neither of us are comic big shots, we are generically listed as “And others.”  If you’re interested in learning more about the comic, or even seeing samples of the story we contributed, you find it all the official website for the comic which is HERE.