Belated Happy New Year, all. I hope you all came through the holiday's more or less unscathed. I had a nice time. Spent most of the break just bumming around, catching up with my out-of-town friends. I worked some and even enjoyed that. Overall, two thumbs up.
I finally managed to find a macaroni and cheese recipe that I like (read: is more or less like mom makes). This is the one I used. I added half of a small yellow onion (chopped) and one slice of ham (uh cubed?) and baked it for about 35 minutes (25 covered, 10 un). Good consistency and good flavor, if somewhat unlikely to ever be called gourmet.
I've been playing a lot of videogames which is nice. Quick capsule reviews follow:
Final Fantasy X - PS2 - Despite a very slow start I enjoyed this game quite a bit. The characters are generally interesting and likeable, the plot is quite good (at least as far as crpgs go), and there are lots of opportunities for me to be obsessive compulsive. I bet you could probably play through in 30 hours. I have to give this one a 10/10.
I wish I could go in to more detail about the game without spoiling too much but I really can't. One word of warning: the ending is not a storybook happy ending.
Final Fantasy X-2 - PS2 - This is Square's first direct Final Fantasy sequel. And it's truly bizarre. I like it that they had the guts to take a very popular game world and go nuts with it. I'm only about two thirds of the way through but I have mixed feelings. First of all let me say that the game is a lot of fun. They did some neat things with the combat system (welcome back, ATB) and character advancement. One or two really painful (to me) j-pop scenes, aside, the increased "coolness" of the game doesn't bother me. They make it work. I think my one complaint is that the heroines sometimes seem really over-the-top girly. I might not be a good judge. I like very much that the plot flows fairly smoothly from the original.
.hack:infection - PS2 - A friend (thanks, weasel) lent me this game. First, some background: apparently this is a game that goes with an anime. I didn't ever get around to watching the anime so I may have missed some things. The idea is a little headtwisting. You play a person playing an mmorpg (think, EverQuest). I'm not kidding. Your first interface to the game is a "desktop" that lets you run little apps like a mail client, browser, and, most importantly "The World" (you really have to intone that and make your listener feel the quotes because that's how they say it over and over ingame). "The World" (duhDuhDUHH) is the mmorpg which you metaplay. You have to keep popping in and out to do things like check your email. They really tried hard with this game. The areas and their corresponding dungeons are randomly generated and very simple. It's like little tykes diablo (the voice acting is actually MORE annoying than diablo). Anyway, "The World" is under attack by either hackers, a virus, or both. I wasn't really sure. This evil force is messing up the game something fierce and you have to use your newfound newb haxX0r skillz and clues both in and out of the world to stop it.
A few criticisms at this point. 1. The control sucks! Arghh. The developers need to read up on modern camera placement. 2. the battle system would be pretty cool if it weren't for the fact that little numbers and messages from your virtual party obscure about 3/4 of the battle scene 90% of the time. 3. the inventory/character management interface is amazingly cumbersome... as is the character statistics system.
All in all .hack:infection might be worth a rent if for no other reason than laughs. I personally wouldn't buy it.
SSX3 - PS2 - Beanie gave me this for christmas. It's your classic snowboarding game. The graphics are fantastic. They did some really subtle things with light that are truly wonderful. The music is also quite good (depending on your tastes). The gameplay is the only area in which the game falls down, in my opinion. Rather than going with the fairly linear progression of the previous two games they opted for a very freeform system that can make finding your goals quite confusing... not to mention actually completing them. One mixed blessing is improved opponent AI... it's nice to have a challenge but often quite frustrating. One thing I was very happy to see was that they've scrapped the overly goofy courses from the second game in favor of semi-realistic yet fun slopes similar to the original ssx... shake what yer mama gave ya. It's fun to play in small doses, and very soothing to look at and listen to. The only caveat is that it's awfully hard on the PS2 (it chugs and chops sometimes).
Tony Hawk's Underground - PS2 - Jaeger brought this over for us to sample. We beat it (with his help) on the easy setting in one (loooong) sitting. It's another tony hawk game. It's pretty amusing but fairly one dimensional. I think I just have to face the facts and admit that I don't have the coordination for these games. Oh well. Great if you think you might like a skateboarding game with a little bit of plot.
I suppose that's it for now. Now that I've dusted off the headspace skills I'm going to try and get back to my usually infrequent updates. *chuckles*