Pushed to the Edge.

Tonight I beat Mirror's Edge. I don't know why I did. I started it because I've been wanting to check it out since it's release. I buy and play a lot of games that I think might 'push the medium' forward. Indie games, games with fresh new ideas or interesting narrative and art choices... Mirror's Edge is a game that always appealed to me. It was a new IP, has a bold, minimalist art style and an entirely different take on a genre. Perfect, right?

Not really. I didn't find it enjoyable. At all, really.

The other night I wrote a big scathing post about it. But I sat on it, and had second thoughts. As an artist, I really hate to ever put myself in a position of poo-pooing other people's work. Whether it's one person's doodle or a multi-million dollar product. A lot of super talented people poured a lot of hard work into this game and got some phenomenal results in certain places.

But I think it's safe to say time, money, design decisions and the concept might have led to less that stellar results.

I'll just say this: Mirror's Edge frustrated me. A whole lot. I felt like to play the game right, you had to have played it to completion once already. Now I've played it once and I never want to see it again.

I beat it despite my better judgment. I finished it, said 'thank god, that was painful' and immediately put it up on Goozex. Enough said.

I am dumb.

Give thanks. Yes you.

This past week I went down to Madison for Thanksgiving. The long monotonous drive down was made 100 times more tolerable thanks to a new car and an ipod full of jams and extra nerdy podcasts...

It was kind of a whirlwind trip. I left directly after work on Tuesday and got into town at around midnight. Wednesday I went for a run in the morning before I met up with my brother and our friend and ate some food, talked some talk and played some games.


and met this lizard!

I met up with the rest of my family and we headed off to Thanksgiving meal #1 at my cousin's house. It's a cool house, and there was somewhere between 15-20 people there. Lots of little children whose names I'm expected to remember, but don't. Their house was out in the middle of nowhere and it was snowing/raining. I nearly hit a tree, and we got pretty darn lost. Like always. That place is like the Bermuda Triangle... we got back safe and alive, but very late.


some photographs were 'snapped' there, yes.

The next day I helped my mom with lots of computer stuff, then went to Thanksgiving #2 at my dad's place.


Katie's new baby is the main reason I went down to Madison.

Then I drove back to Minneapolis as fast as I could. I got back at 10 or 11 that night, excited to see Lindsay. She wasn't home, so instead I played a bunch of MW2. And maybe some Dragon Age: Origins.

We the better part of Friday, Saturday and Sunday doing some major moving and rearranging around the house and vacating the studio. Lots of work. We spent the rest of the time shopping for Christmas stuff, cooking and playing MW2, DA:O and Mirror's Edge. Yeah, Mirror's Edge. I just wanted something that wasn't epic or multiplayer a couple of those nights...

Speaking of brief gaming, I usually stay up later than everyone else when I'm home for the holidays and I was craving some Dragon Age: Origins. I brought my computer, and I remembered Dragon Age Journeys, a free flash game that unlocks items in DA:O.

I decided to give it a shot, hoping to get at least a sweet belt of awesome or something for my game, and it's actually a pretty fun little game in it's own right. It's similar to DA:O in it's leveling, classes, skills, items and inventory. But it's a turn-based, hex-based RPG instead.

I ended up playing it to completion, which was only a couple of hours, but that's damn good for a free flash game. And I unlocked EVERY item it had to offer. Sweet.

Oh yeah. While I'm at it, I should mention the new cat. Originally we took it in to rescue it from ending up the humane society, but Lindsay and I have both really taken a shine to it. And at this point, I think it's staying forever. I keep asking Lindsay if she found an owner yet, but she just kind of shrugs it off. So world... meet Oliver! Or maybe Charlie, or Cuddles, or Chuck. Or something else. We keep changing it.


don't ask...

Wedding Videos.

My friend Steve was awesome enough to bring along a little camera and shoot some video at our wedding. Then he was even awesome-r and did a little a little EQ work and editing, then he upped the awesome quotient once again and posted them up on that newfangled website all the kids are talking about, YouTube.

But something got out of sync, so I didn't want to share them until we corrected them. So he donned the awesome hat once more to fixed the issue!

Then I forgot to share them...

So without further ado: The Wedding Videos!


the ceremony.


Victoria and Justin speak!


the Bride and Groom speak!


the First Dance, followed by random Par-tay action!

Weee! Yahooo! Check out those moves!

Leaving Dragon Age.

I'm heading back to Madison after work tomorrow. I'm doing the Thanksgiving thing down there, but I'll be driving back Thursday night.

Right now I wish I could bring my 360. I've been super into Dragon Age: Origins and I just want to keep diving further into the game. I probably wouldn't actually have any time to play it, but I'd like the option.

I've pretty much fallen head over heels for that game. I'm actually surprised, because it was only half-heartedly on my radar before it came out and I bought it on a whim, so I didn't have a lot invested in the game to start.

And for the first couple hours, I didn't really know if I liked it. It seemed rough, confusing and maybe undercooked. The story was pretty standard, the graphics somewhat sub-par, and the combat just seemed... foreign and detached. It's got an MMO-esque style of fighting, and at first it just seemed too simple. I felt like I was missing something.

But as you go the story picks up considerably. It's still pretty standard fantasy tropes, but there's some interesting people and quests here and there. And I don't know if more time was spent on the later environments, and people just look cooler in bigger, better armor, but I swear the game looks nicer. I just might be more used to it now, though.

And once you start building your party and unlocking more skills and talents, the combat becomes the best part. It's deep, strategic and brutally difficult at times. I'm having a blast approaching the same situations with different strategies, buffs, weapons and characters and always being able to find a combination that results in a win. Sometimes I can find an approach where I dominate, but often I barely eek by, and both ways is super satisfying...

So yeah. I wish I could bring that along for the ride.

Greased Lightning and Shoop.

On Friday I went out with a friend who's been having a hard time lately. He's always unloading everything on Lindsay, but he wanted to talk to me one-on-one. And I listened and I responded truthfully. Although I think some of what I said was not what he wanted to hear, it was cool.

I went home and played some MW2 with a couple friends, then burned through some Dragon Age.

Saturday Lindsay and I started out with cleaning up the house a bit and taking a huge pile of junk Savers. My new car is awesome for hauling tons of crap, so that's perfect. Then we went shopping and ran a bunch of errands. By the time we got home, it was already getting kind of late. I went to the gym, but I wasn't feeling so hot and didn't do much worthwhile. Then I went home and chilled out until Lindsay came back from Yoga.

When Lindsay came in the door, she ran to her computer and showed me that Grease was at the Orpheum theater downtown. Someone had given us tickets to the show of our choice, so what better play to see than Grease? So we ran out the door, since it started in less than an hour. And the play was great. Phenomenal, actually.

Afterwords we stopped at Hell's Kitchen for some food. I haven't been to their "new" location (I think they've been there for a long time now) but it super nice. There was a CD release party for a band there, so they were playing on stage.

It was actually really good, especially when a woman got on stage (they didn't have a full-time vocalist, it seemed like they had a rotating collection of women) and stopped in the middle of a song and spit "Here I go, here I go, here I go again. Girls, what's my weakness?" and before I knew what was happening, out of pure instinct, I shouted "MEN!"

She kicked all of Salt N Pepa's Shoop before going back to the song she had been singing before, and it was amazing. It made my night. The food was really good, too.

Today Lindsay and I went to the Tea Garden to hang out and work on some art stuff. It's been a while, I don't think I've been there in months. We finished up some Thank You's for the wedding that had fallen through the cracks. I went to Wet Paint and got stocked. I was running dry on just about all my art supplies, so it felt good to just pile it up...

Most of the time I jammed out and worked on some art. I posted a couple of drawings to A Day in the Life, and finished up a piece I've been poking at for months. Not that it's that crazy or complicated or awesome. I just never had the chance to just sit down and work on it for a good chunk of time until today.

Fits like a glove.

I got my new car yesterday. A red, automatic, 2010 Honda Fit. To be honest, I wanted a Blackberry Pearl, Manual 2010 Honda Fit, but there's quite a waiting list, so I couldn't be too picky, since my old car was on the way out. Fast.

I did really want a Manual, I've always driven one and that's what I like. It seems like most people who can drive a manual prefer it. But I figured I should get car that Lindsay can drive. I tried to teach her how to drive a stick a couple times over the years, and she was able to get the hang of it. But she had no interest to ever do it in the cities and never practiced. So I went with Automatic.

It's real sweet. But that meant I spent a lot of time at the dealership last night. Buying a car takes a long time and you sign a lot of papers. I also had to run home right at the last minute to find the Title to my old car, which I traded in. I was worried. I am not the most organized person, and I had no clue where to even start looking. But I found it, and got rid of that car for a tidy sum, which is a huge relief. I did not want to try and sell it myself.

So that's that. But then I found out Lindsay was in trouble with the company she's renting her studio from. Possibly big trouble. So what should have been a fun "Yeah! New car! Let's cruise and party and have fun!" turned into "Oh crap. Better spend all night on the phone trying to straighten things out" kind of night.

Oh well.

Drama-mama.

Some shit hit the fan these week. Some close friends are no longer friends (of each other. they're still my friends), so there's been a lot of drama and stuff. I do my best to avoid things like that, but Lindsay seems to do a good job of ending up in the center. In a good way, kind of like a mother hen or something...

Still, it kind of sucks. But when can you do. I'm no ones mother so I'm not going to tell them how to behave. And to be honest no one is exactly the clear good guy in the whole situation. Le sigh.

Between giving pep-talks and listening to everyone's problems, Lindsay finally got Darklands up and running on our new laptop. Darklands is an ancient PC game that has been forgotten by time.

I know a lot of the classic western PC RPGs, if only by name, and Darklands is totally unfamiliar. A google search shows that there's not much of a community or record of this game. It's actually shocking how little info there is. But Lindsay loved it growing up, and was determined to get it to work. We've been trying every now and then for years, but finally we did it. She was pretty happy.

I've been spending a lot of time playing Modern Warfare 2. There's almost always someone online playing it, so it's hard to resist a game or two. And like Lays Potato Chips, it's impossible to just have one. One game leads to 2, which leads to 5. Which leads to many. It's damn good.

But I've also been getting super into Dragon Age. I can't devote the absurd time to it like some people can (like all the people who have beaten it already, which is crazy) so it took some time to really appreciate. But I think last night it finally 'clicked' for me and went from being good to being great.

I think my characters are finally getting diverse enough abilities to really make combat versatile and engaging. And I also realized that I don't have to focus on my main character. In fact, I never control my main character. He's a warrior and has pretty basic attacks. He's mainly a tank who absorbs and deals damage, so I let him hack it out while I finesse and micromanage my Mage and Rouge.

That simple shift in thinking has made me way more effective in battle, and made the combat vastly more interesting. I've won battles that upon first blush seemed impossible. But just managing my party and going in with some tactics in mind made all the difference.

Tomorrow I pick up my new car. I'm really excited. I should go join a Tokyo Drift gang or something.

Rough day. NOT!

Lindsay had the idea to get a massage on Sunday. In preparation for this, I went to the gym and worked out extra hard while Lindsay went to Yoga. We met up at the studio, but had a hard time finding any massage places that had 2 open spots at the same time so we settled with a being 45 minutes apart. Luckily, the place was just a couple blocks from the studio.

Lindsay went first, and I hung out at Adam's place and tried DJ Hero for the first time. It was fun, the music ranged from OK to really good, and it was pretty easy (on Medium). Easier than I expected. Maybe if I ever see it on some super clearance I'd pick it up, but considering I only ever play Rock Band with other people, a solo music game doesn't have that much appeal.

Finally, it was time for my massage. I walked over to the place, they got me in quickly and I told the dude giving me the massage that my previous massage had been performed by a tiny Asian woman. I could barely feel a thing afterward.

This time I wanted it to hurt. And it did. There were points where there was so much pressure that I was gritting my teeth, and about to cry 'Mercy'. But it was awesome. I can feel it today, but yesterday I was feeling pretty good. It was an hour long massage, but he skipped over some things he might normally focus on because once he started, he could tell my back needed some work.

I guess going to the gym daily and having a terrible habit of barely stretching causes some knots and such.

After the massage, I met up with Lindsay and Adam at Bubble Me. A silly named Bubble Tea place with an awesome Milk Tea. We walked back to the studio and went to Yum!, where I was tempted to get something greasy and delicious, but I think the toxins that had been released from my muscles had started to make me feel a little ill, so I got a salad and a ton of water.

We went home and cleaned for a bit. Lindsay's making some major progress cleaning up some of her areas she's neglected, and I just tired to keep things in order, taking out trash, sweeping and picking up the more communal spaces...

Ryan came by and told us all about his trip out West, and then we played The Beatles: Rock Band and House of the Dead: Overkill for a bit. Once he left Lindsay and I took the laptop into bed and played some Machinarium, which is very relaxing.

This cake pooped.

Friday was kind of a strange day... I spent a couple hours of my workday helping make a crazy cake. It was Friday the 13th and two people's birthday, so they enlisted me to help make an awesome cake.


meow! hiss! purr!


yes, that is poop in his litter box...

Everyone thought it was pretty funny, but the mood at work was definitely not as cheery as usual. Besides being a gloomy Friday the 13th, there was a funeral for a coworker in the morning that most people attended, and another coworker had a family near-catastrophe at the same time, so things were understandably somber.

But I think the cat cake helped lift the mood a bit.

After work I took a nap and beat Modern Warfare 2. I'll probably write a bit about that later. Then we went out to eat with Adam.

Saterday was slow and lazy. We woke up really late, cleaned a bit and putzed around. Finally we left the house to feed the studio cat, return some wedding gifts at Target and just goof around. Lindsay wanted to go to Patina and get some ice-cream next door, and we found a new Bubble Tea place that makes a mean Milk Tea.

On our way home we stopped at this little pizza place near our house. It's only a couple blocks away, but we've never really eaten there, so we gave it a shot. I'm not a huge fan of 'ordinary' pizza, if it's not Pizza Luce, Pizza Nea, or Punch than I'm usually not too interested, and this was no different. I'm sure if you liked Pizza a whole lot, you'd like this just fine. I just don't happen to like traditional pizza all that much...

I played a bunch of Modern Warfare 2 with Jesse and I think I am finally getting back into the swing of things. I started off getting 10 kills and 20 deaths, but by the end of the night, it was the reverse of that, and I was the #1 or #2 spot in the game. Both Jesse and I were dominating by the end. Good stuff.

I hear the call.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (heretofore known as MW2) was released and showed up at my doorstep yesterday. I played some single player last night, and immediately remembered that Call of Duty's single player doesn't do a whole lot for me...

It's big, it's flashy, it's pretty. It's a big, dumb roller coaster, but it's just not that fun.

Call of Duty has always been known for it's cinematic, action packed campaign. But that comes at a huge cost: it's rigorously scripted, catastrophically narrow and totally one dimensional.

It's like watching a bombastic play at the theater, but every once in a while the curtain falls down and reveals the fake, rigid machine that's controlling it all.

Sure, technically that's all games. But I much prefer the sandbox approach of the single player of Halo ODST or Farcry 2. Or Battlefield: Bad Company. Or Operation Flashpoint. Or even Borderlands.

I want options. I want to choose how I'm going to attack a situation. Don't stick me in a corridor, no matter how fancily dressed, give me the choice of a machine gun or a slightly different machine gun and say "shoot these pop-up targets until you win!"

The real ugliness is when I die (which I do somewhat often, just because I get confused by the shouting, explosions, debris and blood spattered on my screen) and I have to replay a section of a level. All I can see is how everything happens in the EXACT same way. Terrorist A will pop out of the window to the right, Terrorist B will spring up on the rooftop with a rocket launcher. Terrorist C, D and E are will come around the corner and unload. I'm not even sure there's AI involved, you can just run past them and they pretty much forget about you...

So I didn't play much before returning to Dragon Age. I'm being overly harsh, and I it's not terrible. But I can only take so much in one sitting.

Today, however, Jesse, Adam G, Ryan, Chris C and I all happened to come online at the same time, so we did a big multiplayer game together. We rolled deep enough to basically make up an entire team.

And then I remembered why Call of Duty is the shit. Then i remembered when I bought it Day One.

It was a blast. DESPITE how over powered I felt, since I haven't been playing much Call of Duty over the past year, like most people still have. DESPITE the fact that party chat is disabled in most multiplayer gametypes (I still call total bullshit on that. That is totally heinous. I'm not there to cheat, I'm there to have fun with my friends and avoid the jerks). Luckily I'm fast on the 'mute'.

I'm going to Route my fist to your stupid face.

I wanted so check out some games off Steam last night.

I hit up and gym on my way home. When I felt I was wobbly. Either I worked out very hard, or I'm extra weak. Possibly both...

When I got home I was looking at the internet, as I'm known to do. I noticed my internet was going abnormally slow. Then it stopped working entirely. And wouldn't start again.

I've been having trouble with my router for quite a while now. Possibly even a year or more. It stops functioning frequently. Sometimes I can just reset it and everything's dandy, but sometimes it takes an inexplicably long time to start working again. Oftentimes I give up and go to bed and it magically works in the morning.

The new laptop seems to mess with it in particular. If I'm on Xbox LIVE and someone opens the laptop, it disconnects me. Every time. Occasionally it just make the internet stop working all together. I don't know how or why. But it sucks.

In the past few months, it's gotten to the point where I've stopped putting any security on the router because I have to do a hard reset every week or two, and that means I have to enter a new password in two computers, the Wii, the PS3, the 360 if I protect the connection. Too much hassle.

But last night it was particularly irksome. The slow-ness of it made me suspect my neighbors were taking advantage of my already sketchy connection. Everything I might want to do (check out those Steam games, play on Xbox LIVE, stream some Netflix or update my blog) required the internet. So I jumped up, ran to Target and got a spiffy new (and faster!) router. Problem solved.

Not even. For some reason set up did not go smoothly. It should have, it's easy and impossible to mess it up. Which is what made me so frustrated. I finally got it working, but it took nearly an hour and a half. By that time it was 11:00, Lindsay was home and I was pissed.

Bah. But now it works, and it seems faster than ever. And the laptop doesn't cause any interference with my LIVE connection. It *should* be super solid now and I won't have to think about router issues for another 5-6 years (which is how old my malfunctioning router was).

And I didn't even have to call Jesse.

I went through and re-figured all the devices in the house to work with the new router, and then I was finally happy.

Especially because Modern Warfare 2 should be waiting at my door when I get home...

Brutal catch-up.

I'm going to run through some stuff really quick to catch up on the past week or so of lazy blogging. Some of it's pretty exciting, but the space bar came off my keyboard, which makes blog posts pretty hard to write. I can still 'space', but I have to be very precise in my thumb placement. It just slows me down.

Although the offending keyboard is just plugged into my laptop, so some might argue that I could have just opened my laptop to compose some beautiful prose. But whatevs. Hindsight is 20/20.



On Halloween Lindsay, Ryan, Chris C, Adam, Jessie, and Sara celebrated in some costumes. All of us (minus Sara and Jessie) went as Brutal Legend characters. Lindsay and I got the idea a week or so ahead of time, and it kind of spread from there...



The costumes turned out really well, if I do say so myself. We met up at Ryan and did the final touches before taking some quick photos and heading out to Keith's house party.



After we made an appearance, we went downtown to a new club called Elixir. I had high hopes, since it sounds like something you drink in an RPG. Alas, it was a downtown nightclub. Better than most, maybe, but still a little on the skank-ho side. Chris C got felt up, I think, and I saw some boobs. I didn't have my glasses on so they were blurry, though.

We rocked out in full on costumes, and finished up the night with some Nachos at Little T's.

It was a good time. If you don't know what Brutal Legend is, or want to see the source material comparisons, check out my blog post on Die Everyday. Good stuff.

On Tuesday I put a deposit on my new car, a Honda Fit. Unfortunately, they're a pretty hot item right now, and my deposit was for a car that wasn't even being built (in Japan) until late December... which meant I had a wait. But with some compromise I found one in the 5-state area that would work, so I should have it in two weeks or so. Score! I can't open the hood to my car anymore, so I've been worried about it not lasting too much longer.

I also posted a response to October's Super Awesome Art Challenge. Fun.

This Friday Lindsay and I went out to get some cat food, and ended up at Best Buy to pick up Dragon Age. Which is made by BioWare, who made Baldur's Gate 2, one of Lindsay's favorite games. That reminded her of old-ish PC games, and we ended up picking up a PC laptop just to play those old-ish games on. Ha. Bet you didn't see that one coming.

It's a Sony Vaio, and it's not top-o-the-line or anything, but it works for our needs. Of course, I've spent most time with it so far.

I downloaded Steam immediately and proceeded to buy Torchlight. Which is totally awesome. I also downloaded a bunch of demos. I've got my finger on the trigger to buy Company Of Heroes, but I'm going to give Dawn of War a try first. They're similar games made by the same company. Dawn of War is newer but word on the street is that Company of Heroes is the better game.

Plus the WWII setting does a little bit more for me than the Warhammer universe... But Dawn of War just finished downloading, and I'm going to hit that shit up. Right now.