Indie and Sick.

On Thursday I got really sick. It came on suddenly in the middle of the day, but I became instantly miserable. I felt like I was going to hurl.

I was preparing some trend and research stuff for my boss to take to our corporate overlords in Chicago, so I tried my hardest to stay. But eventually I called it quits and went home. I took the files so I could finish putting everything together that night.

On Friday I still wasn't feeling great, but I just went in to go to a hand-off meeting. I ended up sticking around most of the day to do some changes I'd been meaning to make to some product. Even though I wasn't feeling so hot, I hit the gym on the way home.

That night we went to the Minneapolis Underground Film Festival. Victoria was in a film her friend had made, and Friday was it's first showing. It was pretty okay, if you can deal with the sloooow pace and cliche indie trappings.

Afterward we went out to il Gatto, which used to be Figlio's (strangely, the URL is still Figlio.com). It's owned by the same people who own Chino Latino, and now you can really tell. They reworked everything to be much cooler and more of a destination, and it worked. The place was packed. The food's still good, so that's cool. I kind of liked how Figlio's was never crowded, though. But that's just me.

I've been jumping around playing a bunch of different things lately. Maybe because I haven't had the time to play anything for anything more than a few minutes. I got the God of War collection for PS3, which is basically just GoW and GoWII, but now it runs at a constant 60 fps and the graphics output at HD, so it looks really crisp. As far as I know, no knew assets have been made, it's just the old games that take advantage of a little more horsepower.

I popped them in to just give it a look, and both those games (but GoWII especially) hold up REALLY well. They look great and play great. Buying the collection also allowed me to download the God of War III demo, which is striking in just how similar it plays to a 5 year old game. But I'm not complaining.

I also got some 'triggers' for my PS3. They basically make the stupid, squishy, uncomfortable L2 and R2 buttons on the Dualshock 3 slightly less stupid and uncomfortable. Still squishy, though. I like them a lot, and I popped in Killzone 2 just to test it out on a shooter. They actually make a big difference. And Killzone 2 is still kind of a cool game.

I got an invite to the MAG beta for PS3, too. It's a 256 person first person shooter made by Zipper, who made the first set of Socom games... I was really interested to try it out. And the beta took FOREVER to download (so did the GoW III demo, too. And anything else on the PSN, for that matter. Man that thing is slow), and when I finally got it running, Ryan called wanting to play Modern Warfare 2. I told him I was busy with MAG.

So I booted it up, made a character, jumped into matchmaking and waited. And waited, and waited. Probably 10-15 minutes later I was in a game. And in less time than that, I was done. MAG was just not good. Sure I only played 15 minutes, but the graphics were rough (which I can forgive, and have many times before), the shooting didn't feel satisfying, just weak (which I can't forgive) and the game was just one giant stalemate of a bore.

Maybe it was just that game (though I doubt it). I would have given it another shot, but the Beta ended the next day. That was my one and only chance to try it out, and it was way less than impressive. Too bad. I was hoping for something fun and different.