so what have i been doing lately? i haven't been cooking, that's for true. i've been lazy all week, and i just can't get out of this slump. and, the fact that i read yesterday that there's only 11 days until christmas (well, now 10) is really starting to stress me out.
i tried so hard to get shopping done and completed ahead of time, but it somehow never works out that way. i always seem to forget about someone, or i can't come up with the perfect present, or i just get totally stressed and can't seem to function properly because my head is spinning with all the things i have to do for the holidays (not to mention all the work deadlines i have in the next two weeks).
so yeah, i've been stressed. i've been lazy. i've not been cooking. i've been eating dominoes pizza for the past 3 days now. so food is not exactly the first order of business. so what has been...?
over the past two weeks cavin and i have been heavily (eh, more or less) immersed in computer gaming. i don't really know much about it to be honest. i never grew up with a computer in the house (i was a typewriter fanatic). it wasn't until i got to ye ol' college when i started realizing that you could do more with a computer than just typing up a term paper. (email was such a big deal when i first started college. if you got any email you were sooo cool - "look at me! i know people that have email! i've got messages in my eudora inbox!!!" and the computer lab geek techs would always be yelling at us for changing the settings on the public computers so that email would be checked every 2 minutes, instead of the desired 15 minutes, which i'm not sure why we did that - no one ever emailed us, so it wasn't like we were getting new messages every few minutes.)
so, you can see that i never really got into the whole computer thing as a way of having fun - it was always associated with checking email, or procrastinating a 12-page sociology term paper, or smashing the computer into bits because i couldn't get my sas code to run properly.
when i started grad school though, i thought that if i bought a computer game, it would help fill the time in an unknown town where i didn't know anyone. so i shopped around and i saw some egyption puzzle game, but i passed and picked up syberia, instead. i was drawn to it because it was an "adventure puzzle" game. i like puzzles! and i also liked the fact that it wasn't scary, nor did you have to walk around exploring, while also killing people/monsters.
of course, i never finished the game. (starting something and not finishing it is a habit i have, and i should probably address that in the future.) it wasn't because i got stuck (i never looked at an online walkthrough), but because i started living the grad school life of getting work done, and then going out and partying the rest of my free time. so there was really no time to finish.
in the past few months, cavin and i played an older claymation adventure puzzle game, the neverhood. imo, i thought it was a pretty good game - i had remembered seeing it and playing it on my uncle's computer, and i mentioned it to cavin so he found out what game it was and he obtained it. you don't have to kill people, which i really liked about it. plus, the characters were wacky and some of the puzzles were difficult (i think we had to consult a walkthrough), and yet, we were able to finish. (i'd give it 3.5 stars out of 5).
so more recently, cavin re-loaded syberia onto the computer and we started playing again, and last week we finished. in the game, you are kate walker, a lawyer looking for the rightful heir to this old toy factory, so that he can sign away the rights to the factory and your client (a corporate chain toy co.) can properly purchase it.
the puzzles in the game aren't really difficult - the thing that matters the most is that you find certain items and do things in a certain order so that you can continue. it's definitely adventurous - you are traveling with an automaton (self-operating robot) by train that runs on gears that need to be wound up.
the story is interesting, and the ending sets up the sequel, but syberia was not challenging enough for us. we did have to go online and look up how to get the monorail running, but the solution was that we had to use our cell phone to call our(kate walker's) mom to inquire about the opera singer we were trying to track down - eh. i'd probably only give it 2 out of 5 stars (yeah, so no need to go down there.)
upon finishing syberia, cavin remembered another game that he played in his youth that had better puzzles. he acquired it and loaded it onto the computer, but when i sat down next to him to start playing, i realized that i had played that game before (again, at my uncle's house) and had always wanted to play again, but completely forgot about it until now!
so now we're keeping busy playing 7th guest. we're actually stuck on this othello-like puzzle, and it's rather irritating, so we haven't looked at it in a couple of days. i'm sure tonight while we're waiting for our laundry we'll take another stab at it. i'd like to beat the game before the weekend begins, but i don't know how far along into the game we are (i'd bet we were more than halfway, for sure). but so far, 7th guest is better than syberia. Labels: games