Is it just me?

It's kind of been a weekend of bad news again. A sad face emoticon seems fitting.

On Friday, my friend's sick father died. He seems to be doing fine, however, as we saw him a few times this weekend and he was in a pretty positive mood.

Friday night we went out with a friend who's been going though a long, non-mutual break-up. I don't think he really thought that anything was wrong in the first place, so it was kind of a shock. Plus, there's factors involved that don't allow for a clean break. So he was down in the dumps and we spent a few hours at Sakura talking it over.

He came over afterwards and we played Gears of War 2's Horde mode for several hours. It is pretty spectacular. Horde Mode pits you and up to four other friends against wave after wave of increasingly difficult bad dudes on any of the multiplayer maps. Once things get really though, it results in some on-the-fly desperate strategy and lots of panic. It's a blast, I love it.

Saturday we met a friend at Longfellow Grill, which is awesome food, but very, very busy on Saturday nights. Go figure. After dinner went home and traded off playing rounds in Socom for a while, then we played a butt-ton of Horde mode in Gears 2.

I was about 15 minutes from the ending of Gears 2, as well, so we just went ahead and beat it.

All in all, Gears of War 2 was totally awesome. But I'm not done yet. I'm going to be going back to the Horde and straight up Multiplayer modes for a long time, I'm sure. Plus I'd like to give the story mode another shot on a harder difficulty mode, and with a friend.

Being in the mood to beat some games, we popped in Little Big Planet and finished the story mode on that, as well.

Again, I was a mere 20 minutes or so front the end. I have been for weeks. But I don't like playing without friends, so I didn't bother trying to finish it alone. But now I have. And it was cool. Not mind-blowingly so, but very cool and fun and creative.

Of course, with LBP, the story mode almost a secondary feature, and the creating and sharing of community levels is what it's all about, so I'm sure I'll get a lot of use out of the game in the months and years to come. The levels already are sometimes totally amazing. Too bad Sony is deleting a bunch of them for copyright infringement.

Funny. I could see that coming from a mile away.