Yup

MGS 4 is still hard…

One Of These Days

We’re gonna’ finally get the hang of this “Canadian Portions” thing when eating out. After getting used to the fact that I could actually finish an entire meal in Singapore, coming back to Canada and ordering at restaurants still leaves my mouth hanging open at how much food we’re expected to actually eat. I still can’t believe people can actually finish one of these entres and still be hungry afterwards when I’m usually ready to burst half-way through it, if I’m lucky and the rest has to be packed away to attempt to finish off later.

Which is pretty much what happened today when we ran errands on Bloor and ate at a Korean restaurant. Their stir-fried rice with beef plate could easily feed three of me.

Just Another Sunday

Just Another Thursday

Another quiet day in the Annex. We walked down to the nearby gallery to check out the Wife’s contribution, had some food at one of our favorite neighborhood restaurants, and played some videogames.

Slow Wednesday

Only two things to do, play more Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots and start on another IGN article.

Nothing But The Gear

Aside from errands in the neighborhood, it was back to collecting “emblems”, the MGS 4 equivalent of achievements, that involves doing bizarre stuff like stabbing 50 people with a syringe, doing 50 hold ups and body searches for goodies, and hiding in a box for an hour…

Monday Of No Real Note

Did laundry, played games. Condemned 2: Bloodshot was finished, and it was a bit disappointing. A perfectly fine game was ruined by a bizarre tangent in the plot that suddenly had you doing incredibly dumb things that bore no consistency with the earlier part of the game. Or the first game for that matter. If you work that hard to try and have a dark, gritty, 7-ish or Silence of the Lambs-y style serial killer investigation game with some supernatural elements, then why suddenly take a left turn into comics-ville and turn your hero into Black Canary?

It’s too bad, the game itself is fine, and quite a bit of fun, but that story… man, it really dragged things down.

Saturday On The Streets

What started out just being a run for a carton of milk ended up being a pleasant afternoon on Bloor, a chance to finally try out a Fish n’ Chips place we’d been trying to eat at for over a year, a visit to the art store for the Wife’s supplies, a talk with one of her gallery curator friends, and a trip to the Evil Bookstore where I once again found stuff I couldn’t resist like a copy of Eternals by Neil-O, and Spiderman 3 on Blu-Ray for less than $20.

All in all, a pleasant day.

Yup

Desperation Games

The Wife has been getting the twitches somethin’ awful ever since playing the hell out of the Civilization: Revolution demo and checking the calendar every half hour to see if it’s July 8th yet. In order to try and kill some of that time and make the days go by faster, she was more than willing to indulge my list of “games I’ve been meaning to pick up one of these days but aren’t real high on the priority list,” and a trip down to Eaton Center meant I came home with these goodies.

Since the heavy hitters in the horror genre of gaming aren’t out on the PS3 yet (by that I mean Silent Hill, Resident Evil or Siren) this is just about the only thing I can pick up that spits out graphics in High-Def. I’d played the first on the Xbox 360, and while it lacked the same super-creep out factor of a Japanese horror game, it still provided some jumps and thrills. The second is more of the same, crawling around with a pipe in hand while hobos and other homeless types try to kill you.

One of the things I like about this game is the CSI style element that’s been built in. It’s obviously not the chief component (and now that I think about it, that’s a darn shame, because the interactivity of games is perfect for a detective-work style game) but it allows you to do cool stuff like visit crime scenes, run a UV light on the ground for blood samples, take murder victim photos, and try to deduce methods of death, where you’ll get rated on your accuracy. It’s a nice little break from all the super-natural, psychotically enraged, hobo attacks you have to fend off with a bat, pipe or any other handy melee implement you can find.

This, on the other hand, is by Atlus, meaning we were pretty much guaranteed to get it at some point since the Wife has turned into a total Atlus fangirl.

It’s not the kind of game that would go over very well these days because it’s in 2D instead of the “traditional” polygons that have been a mainstay of graphical presentation since the mid-90′s, but it’s got some amazingly detailed artwork, and actually plays pretty well for those of us that still remember a time before games came in 5.1 surround sound and juggled a million, buzillion particles in real time on the screen.