Couple of smaller gems.

I've been kind of busy, in a good way, lately. The kitchen show keeps us running around (we start filming in 2 weeks, yikes), I've been staying a bit later at work and I've been doing a few art projects at home. Every morning I kick myself for not going to bed earlier, but every night I find myself awake at 2 am wishing the day was longer.

I picked up a couple indie titles that are really cool. I haven't had much of a chance to play them, but they both have made pretty great first impressions, so I'm excited to dig a little deeper.

The first was originally a PC game that just recently came to the Xbox Indie channel, called Flotilla. It's basically a simultaneous turn-based, tactical, three dimensional space-combat simulator with an abstracted art style and a soothing atmosphere...

It's hard to explain, so here's the developers giving a little demo, which pretty much explains everything.



So far it's been a real treat to play. I love the concept, it's a bit complex to start but I quickly got the hang of it. The pace is as slow as you want it to be, so I never feel overwhelmed although I've only played a few missions. I'd heard about it as a PC game, but I've slowed down my PC buying habits. It was cool right off the bat, but I quickly realized I'm just a console gamer to the core, and I just don't play PC games that often. So when I saw it pop up on Xbox, I snatched it up.

The second game is the long awaited Cave Story remake on WiiWare. Yes, I know it's 3 or 4 years old. And I know it's free on PC. But like I said, I'd rather play on a console. And that goes ten-fold when it's a platformer.



I've only played the first 15-20 minutes, but so far I think it's great. Cool, cool stuff.

Too bad Bad Company 2 is so damn awesome it's hard to spread the love...

Wizard of Om.

So things started smoothly with this Kitchen thing... On Friday we met with the designer and went to Ikea. We mainly there for cheap cabinets, and we picked out all the sizes, attachments, etc that we needed. We also found a fridge, hood and dishwasher that we liked, to take advantage of their ongoing buy 3 appliances, get 20% off deal.

Great. We were done by 5 pm, no sweat. The first thing we saw when we got home was an email from the president of the production company that there was a new mandate: No Ikea. Crap. Not only did we do the work and planning, but Ikea is like 1/2 the price of anything else...

So first thing Saturday we went out to Home Depot with our designer. We worked through it and put together a new plan, but it does cost a bit more, and it's not as easy. But whatevs.

After we took care of that, we stopped at United Noodle for more... noodles. We also tried out their little restaurant/cafe. It was pretty good. I got a dish that I used to eat all the time when I visited Japan, but it's really, really hard to find anywhere in America. It's a very workman-like dish, maybe the equivalent to a Grilled Cheese here. Something that people eat all the time, but you don't got to a fancy restaurant and see it on the menu.

I went with Lindsay to a client's (and former co-worker's) house. We were just dropping some stuff off, but it turned into an hour long visit.

After that we pretty much went straight out to the Orpheum downtown to see The Wizard of Oz. Since I was out of town last weekend, this was sort of Lindsay's birthday night. It was a good play, with some very cool production values (and a real dog playing Toto!). But it didn't blow my mind, like some play's we've seen recently. It was just good.

We walked down 1st Ave to Om, a new Indian restaurant in the clubby part of time. It's about 6 or 7 blocks, and I can't remember the last time I've been so annoyed. I'm just going to say it; people who go out to the clubs (at least these clubs) are dumb, obnoxious and worthless people. Just listening to them around us as we walked was enough to make me glad I never have to interact with anything so fucking stupid on a regular basis.

But Om's food was quite good, even if the atmosphere was pretty douche-y. Not even the atmosphere. Take out the people and it would have been great.

Oh wait. Take out the music, too.

It's official. I guess?

On Monday we had a meeting with people from the kitchen remodeling show. There were 2 producers, a designer and a contractor. We started discussing the schedule, what was expected of us, how we were going to work together and what the plan was going to be with the kitchen. It went well, maybe even exceptionally well.

Everyone seemed to have varying degrees of excitement about working with us. The contractor could care less, the producers were excited and the designer was very excited. So much so that he even took some photos of us that he will be submitting to the producers a different show for a different network. Or something. Everything was happening fast and a lot of people were talking at once.

So I guess it's official. Things are always open to change, of course, but we are set to begin filming April 20th, it sounds like. Yikes.

After they left, Lindsay and I went down to our accountants office and did our taxes. It was relatively painless. Each year we work with him, things get faster and easier. Now we have a history and records built up so when he asks "How much do you think you drove to and from clients for the year?" we can sheepishly ask "What did we put last year? Yeah, that's about right..."

After that I went home, and Lindsay went to class.

I jumped into some Battlefield with the crew, and we killed it. We won match after match, always ranking as the #1 squad. So, so awesome. When only a couple of us play, we are dangerous. But when all four of us are playing, we are a force to be reckoned with. I've maxed out Assault, so I've switched over to Medic as my go-to class. Mighty fine.

Day in Madison.

I went to Madison this weekend. I'm always meaning to go back but never do, and it was my brother's 30th birthday, so I decided to make the trip while there was something to do.


lookit that baby.

I drove down Friday night and arrived pretty late. I stayed up with my mom until 2:30, then played World of Warcraft with Lindsay (who was still in Minneapolis) until 4.


unimpressed.

The next day I went to brunch with everyone, went shopping with my mom, sister and niece. I went to the dog park with my brother and watched Zombieland at my bro's house. We went out to celebrate his birthday at a vegetarian place called the Green Owl, then went to a bar next door to hang, or do whatever it is people do at bars...


meeting of the minds.

From what I observed, not a lot. Drink, eat and talk I guess. But I don't drink, I just ate, and my voice doesn't carry in loud environments, so I just had a lot of people saying "what?!?" whenever I opened my mouth.

There was some music, a live dub/reggae band or something. I don't particularly care for that type of music, but hey, I work with what I'm given. I started to dance a bit, then tried to get some people to go out and dance in the main area. No one was interested. But after a while I noticed a couple girls from our group (whom I had never met) on the dance floor. So I went down and busted a slight move. I was having fun for a while, but the music was just too repetitive, and eventually I just took off. I was so freakin' tired it hurt.


picking up new babies at the store.

I stopped by my dad's place on the way out of town. I had wanted to be on the road by 11, but didn't leave his place until noon. On the way home I was really tired, and I somehow ened up getting off track, and it took me 6 1/2 hours instead of the usual 4. I was very, very angry. But it felt good to be home.


probably the most flattering picture of all time. for everyone involved.

An Underdog.

The other day I got God of War III in the mail. I was working late to get some files sent off, so only played about 15 minutes. It seems cool. I liked God of War 1 and 2 a great deal. Both are amazing and I like them a great deal, but I guess I would never consider the God of War franchise one of my favorites.

I'm usually very put off by the hack-n-slash genre, but God of War does it so well that it transcends the genre. I look forward to getting around to it, but I'm not in a huge hurry, I guess.

I still have a quite a bit left in Bioshock 2, I think. I guess I'm in no hurry to play that, either. I've just been lacking motivation to play it. As I've said before, it's quite good. I think it has more to do with the size of the levels. I feel like I need to sit down and play through one entire level per session, but the levels are huge. So I just never end up playing it at all.

I will soon, though. Maybe after my trip this weekend.

Despite having these 2 triple A games sitting on my shelf, not to mention trying to tear-up in the super-sweet Bad Company 2 multiplayer whenever I can, I picked up a couple new games today.

The first I've been meaning to pick up for a long, long time. Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes got a lot of buzz for being unexpectedly outstanding when it was released (in November?)and I've been meaning to pick it up since.



I guess I haven't played my DS in a long time. Since we went to Mexico last year? I don't know. But there hasn't been a lot of interesting stuff, besides this, and it's taken me a while to actually find.

Either no one is carrying it, or it's name is just so freakin' generic that whenever I look for it, I end up looking for some weird variation, like Heroes and Magic: Clash of Might or Clash of Might: Heroes of Magic. Confusing and needlessly bland, especially considering how cool it is.

Anyway, I finally found it.

I actually went to the store to pick up Metro 2033. It's a Ukrainian game based on a famous(I guess?) Russian book of the same name.



I really appreciate and am on the look-out for quality games that do something quite different. This appealed to me in the same way Demon's Sous or Far Cry 2 did. It seemed foreign, different and maybe slightly obtuse.

I was unsure if it would even be worth my time, but reviews seemed to indicate it was pretty good. I was already very interested, so it didn't have to be phenomenal for me to buy it. It just couldn't be fundamentally broken.

Many reviews seemed to bring up a list of similar complaints; Ammo is scarce! You have to scrounge for supplies! You have to recharge your flashlight often, and manually! You have to use your in-game watch to time how much oxygen you have! The good ammo is also your money!

Those aren't complaints! Those are things that make me want to try this game. Something different, exciting! Unique! Not Call of Duty! Oh no!

So I decided to get it. Right away. If for no other reason than to show my support of games like these. I want strange, European games! I want games that won't appeal to everyone. I want a unique voice and ideas. And I will put my money where my mouth is.

The cost of love.

Happy St Patrick's Day. Truth be told, I'm not really a fan. I'm not Irish, I'm not a huge fan of green, and I don't drink. I hate drunk people in public, and drunk drivers are pretty much my #1 pet peeve/nightmare in a major way. If you drive drunk, ever, than fuck you. Seriously.

But I do like the song in that cartoon.

I'm not feelin' so hot today. Which is sad because I felt great on Monday and Tuesday. Unusually great, almost. I think the nice weather gave me a lot of extra energy.

But today... not so much. I fought off the urge to vomit for a couple hours at work. That was the most miserable part of the day, and I feel better. But even now I feel just well enough to not feel like vomiting. Hmmm.

I'm still trying to decide it I should go to the gym. I've been looking forward to it since yesterday. But I think it might not take much to push me over into 'I want to die' territory. So I probably won't.

Last night I didn't get to go. It was the last night of house/cat sitting for some out of town friends. So I went straight there after leaving work kind of late. Then I went out to Pizza Luce with Lindsay before heading straight home to get some work done...

I had to send off the final artwork for a t-shirt design. I might wait for the final product to hit before posting anything about it on my blog, though. Unfortunately I spent a long time picking Pantone colors and getting everything final-final, so by the time I finished it was after 11:00. Too late to meet up with Team QT in Battlefield Bad Company 2.

Well, maybe it wasn't really too late, I didn't even check to see if they were online. Lindsay wanted to play some World of Warcraft, so I did that instead. We played a bit on Sunday, but before that we haven't played in months. The time off has really made it fresh and fun again. Not that it was UNfun, but it was certainly getting a little more stale when we last played.

I play it huge spurts. On for a couple weeks, off for months. But getting back into it is always nice. We've played it on and off long enough that it kind of feels like home. You can always go back and check in to see how the gang is doing.

Last night was especially momentous because after just 20 minutes of playing, we both hit level 60. This is Lindsay's first level 60 character too, so that's cool. And I guess to be fair, the only character I've ever got above 60 before was my Deathknight (who starts at level 55).

The first thing we did after hitting 60 was run over to the Flying Mount Vendor. It costs roughly 260 gold to be able to use a Flying Mount. 210 to train, 50 for the mount itself. Lindsay only had 150 gold to her name and it would take a LONG time for her to make that kind of cash, since she didn't keep up much with her professions. So I gave her the gold she was missing, and she picked out a Black Griffin. I think it's a Griffin.

But that left me 15 gold short for my own. Oh well. I guess that's true love.

Business and Food.

I seemed to have resolved my credit card issues, but I'm still going to have to go through and change all my automated services. And I have a lot. What a drag.

This weekend I found out on of my favorite restaurants, Pop! (although maybe they're slightly less awesome now that I've seen their website...), has opened a new location in downtown St Paul. The North Minneapolis location is kind of out of the way for us, and had very strange hours. We'd always seem to show up just after they closed. Plus they have very limited seating, so even if they were open we weren't guaranteed a seat. The St Paul location, although not exactly close, is slightly more convenient, and it is huge with tons of tables. Maybe it was too big, actually. A lot of the charm was lost, but the food was just as good as ever. Sweet.

We happened upon this new Pop! location because we were already downtown at the James J. Hill Business Library, combing a database of manufactures around the metro area who might need our services. It's a funny place. It's connected to the St. Paul Library, and it's a big, impressive and stately place. But the people there were mostly quite... strange.

We also stopped by United Noodles, a very impressive Asian Grocery that has pretty much anything you'd need if you were doing some Asian cooking. Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai... pretty much anything in that general area. Lindsay went nuts and bought tons of stuff. She just got a Japanese cook book and is pretty excited to try everything out.

We hung out with Ryan at Little T's very late that night. Late enough that the Daylight Savings switch was confusing the restaurant's employees. Were they closed? Were they open? Who knows? All I know is I wanted some damn nachos. And I got them. And they were awesome.

I've started playing through Bioshock 2. I'm a bit torn about it, though. It's good. It's fun, it's pretty, it's interesting. Rapture is a cool place to explore, and there's a lot of new, cool stuff to see and do. When I play, I'm having a good time. But when I'm not playing, I don't feel the urge to go back. I'm kind of like "oh yeah. I should play more Bioshock 2."

Maybe the problem is that no matter how great Bioshock 2 might be, it's not Battlefield Bad Company 2. Which I'm ALWAYS down for. Ryan, Chris C and I have been a crew to be reckoned with, which has been a blast. But the icing on the cake was that Jesse picked it up, as well. Now we can roll 4 deep, as a squad ought to.

Bad Luck and Bad Company.

The other day I found out that my credit card info had been comprimised. Someone has been making regular purchases online for the past 2 weeks, and by the time I caught on, I was out 2,000 dollars. Gah.

So I've been running around dealing with that. I just got that freakin' card and switched all my bills over to it... So now I've got to do that again. It was my check card, so all that money came straight out of my bank account...

Stupid. Bull. Shit.

This weekend I wrapped up Darksiders. I was about 1 hour from the end when I put it down, thanks to Battlefield Bad Company 2, I think... I really like Darksiders quite a bit. I can't even think of an action adventure game I really liked more. Maybe God of War 2? Hmmm? It's been a long, long time, that's for sure (I thought maybe Uncharted 1 and 2, but then decided that those are 3rd person shooters). It's a real old school, Zelda like adventure game, except I liked it quite a bit more than I've ever liked any Zelda game. Sue me.

I've been playing a ton of Battlefield Bad Company 2. So, so, so awesome. Probably my favorite multiplayer shooter. I like Call of Duty and Halo a ton, and MAG, Rainbow Six, Gears of War and Flashpoint are all great too, but I think I'm a Battlfield guy, when it comes right down to it. I love the size and scope, the destruction and the classes. Chris C has been right there with me, tearing up fools.

Every day we would both send Ryan a message or talk to him, telling him he needs to get on that shit. He resisted, mainly because he was trying to plow through Mass Effect 2, but the other night we were working at the Tea Garden and I FINALLY wore him down. I took him over to the local game store and we went back to his house. He played while I sent off some files.

The whole way back to his house he was like "This better be good. I don't know why I bought this. You suckered me." He partied up with Chris C, jumped into the fray, and within 15 minutes he was shouting, planning, and laughing, having a blast. I knew it. What a freakin' baby.

But now we roll three deep as clan QT. But Chris C suggested we crush some peens, so we might switch out tag to PC. Peen Crushers.

I also found this little gem on Xbox Indies. It's like an adventure game with some Tower Defense elements. I don't like Tower Defense, but this is pretty far from it. It's basically just a long lost great NES game.



I've only played it for about 15 minutes, but it was doing a lot of smart, smart think and I really liked it. It's rare that it happens, but it's exactly the kind of thing that keeps me checking the Indies section of XBL on a daily basis.

I noticed thier drinks.

There was a big meeting Friday. Some new information came down from our corporate overloads; there's going to be some major changes and it's up to my boss to come up with a new plan of action. Until then, the directive was "no new artwork." Which translates to "don't come in, we don't need you until we get our shit straight" to me.

So I basically get a week off. I don't mind taking time off, I've been using the time to get some work done for my brother and finish up a couple projects. Like Chillman.

I left work a little early on Friday (right after they told me to stop working) and I met Lindsay at this new place called Cafe Kem. We walked around Uptown, mainly stopping at places for Lindsay to shop for clothes. We ended up at Mt Fuji for Sushi.

On Saturday we met up with Adam and went to Red Stag. It was Karaoke night, but they didn't have Poison's 'Every Rose Has It's Thorn' so I didn't sing anything... None of us did, despite looking through the entire list of songs. But on the way home we sang songs to each other in the car, including Mistah Fab's Ghost Ride It, which inspired us to jump out and dance around the car on Washington Ave.



On Sunday we went to the Humane Society to visit some animals. Amazingly, there weren't a million cats, which is a good sign for spring. They also had a bunny that acted more like a dog or cat than any rabbit I've ever seen. They had a lot of dogs and I was sad...

We went downtown and walked around for a while. I bought some pants. They are very nice. We stopped at Buca before heading home. The staff was kind of distracted then they seated us. A group of about 50 high school kids came in 2 minutes later. You could tell the people working were kind of annoyed. I think every girl ordered pink lemonade.

The end.

The cat meowed.

Yesterday we finally had the producer from the TV show who might be interested in fixing our kitchen come by. The interview was postponed a week, so we re-cleaned our house and psyched ourselves up.

It was convenient, however, because things had been put on hold for a day at work while details of the upcoming collections were sorted out by corporate. So I just didn't go in. Instead I got up and went to the gym, did a playthrough of Tatsunoko VS Capcom (and didn't lose a single round), want just waiting for the producer to show up.

Battlefield Bad Company 2 showed up in the mail, so I was pretty excited. I popped it in right as Lindsay came home from running to see a client. She wanted me to play Heavy Rain, so I quit after my first match online.

Were in the middle of a tense scene when the producer showed up. They weren't here for long, though. The basically videotaped up walking through our kitchen, pointing out the problems (of which there are many) and talking about how we might like to change it.

Then we sat down and did a more personal interview, asking how we met, what we do... stuff like that. The interview went fine, but not great. Lindsay was pretty nervous and REALLY wanted to get them to fix our kitchen, so she kind of dominated the conversation and was talking really fast.

I tried to speak up, to not come off as too quiet, but it was kind of hard to get a word it edgewise without just being awkward. But it was fine. The really bad part was the pets. Most were locked upstairs, but Oliver was in the bedroom alone. He was quiet all day, but hearing the stranger in the house must have really intrigued him because he started meowing. Loudly. And constantly, about every 10 seconds, the ENTIRE time we were being filmed.

I was trying to be personable, energetic and fun-loving, but I wanted to scream. Everyone ignored it, there's nothing you can do to keep a stupid cat from being stupid, but it was really distracting. I'm hoping she didn't leave and just go "well, we can't film a tv show with meowing in the background the entire time" and forget us...

All in all, it didn't take more than 30 minutes. We have no idea if we'll be selected. 1/2 of me says "yeah, maybe" and the other 1/2 says "OLIVER!!!"

After that was over, we finished up Heavy Rain. Overall, I liked it. I'm glad I played it. I'm glad it exists. I hope it's not he future of games. Because it's barely a game, really.

I thought about going back and trying to see different outcomes and scenarios from the game... but I don't think I will. Kind of like Mass Effect 2, I experienced my story, and I'm pretty happy to leave it at that (but I still want that DLC, ME2!).

The game started slow, built up to be tense, engaging and exciting, and then ran out of steam, a little bit. There's a lot of things it does well. And at it's best moments, I just couldn't wait to see what happened next. But there's also a lot of things it does poorly. The most offensive, to me, was a late game twist that might have worked just fine in a movie. But despite it's best efforts, this is no movie. And as a game, I think it's pretty offensive to try to pull crap like that. It basically cheated in it's storytelling.

But then I listened to the Gamers With Jobs podcast where they did the Spoiler Section discussing the game, and I realized just how many different ways the story could play out. Even though I didn't experience them first hand, it game me a much deeper appreciation of the game.

So now I'm impressed again.