Various and sundry
Jan. 28th, 2008 12:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amethyst73So it's been a bit of a while since I posted a life update. Let's see...
Oh yes. And it rained, pretty much all week long. It's nice to see blue sky and sunshine for a change!
Sorry for the combo of length and lack of excitment! Such is life sometimes.
Weekend of 1/19-1/20: We went up to San Francisco to see a really good production of The Secret Garden, and met some of the huz's online buddies for dinner at Maya, a pretty tasty Mexican restaurant. I wore the ankle brace all day. Found that it was useful for walking around, but not so great for just sitting. Got through the day reasonably well. Sunday we spent a lot of the afternoon walking around doing various errands. I probably should have paid attention when my ankle started complaining and sat while the huz did grocery shopping, cuz it *hurt* for the rest of the day, and most of the next as well. (I'd noticed before that if I overworked it one day, I paid for it not just the rest of that day but all of the following.)
Monday I ended up drivingnezumiko to the doctor in San Jose. (She thought it was much closer than that, but the main office line neglected to mention that the office near us was closed for renovations. This made life awfully exciting when we arrived at the nearby office and found it... well, closed for renovations!) Was very tired and kind of stuffy much of the day. Went and had voice lesson and chorus rehearsal anyway.
Spent rest of week trying to stay off my dratted foot. Also tooknezumiko's advice and started taking Aleve at night as well as in morning. Definitely seems to help. Was pretty anal about putting on the ankle brace whenever I had to get up and walk around for more than a couple of minutes.
Saturday most recent, stayed home from skating (of course), but did lots of tidying and such in preparation for dinner guests. Wore the brace pretty much the whole time, and was pretty good about paying attention and sitting for a while whenever the ankle complained. As a result, I managed to get a fair amount done over the course of the day, and my ankle wasn't even all that unhappy with me at the end of it. Overall now, it's not-hurting for a much larger portion of time than it is-hurting, so I think it must be getting better.
Monday I ended up driving
nezumiko to the doctor in San Jose. (She thought it was much closer than that, but the main office line neglected to mention that the office near us was closed for renovations. This made life awfully exciting when we arrived at the nearby office and found it... well, closed for renovations!) Was very tired and kind of stuffy much of the day. Went and had voice lesson and chorus rehearsal anyway.Spent rest of week trying to stay off my dratted foot. Also took
nezumiko's advice and started taking Aleve at night as well as in morning. Definitely seems to help. Was pretty anal about putting on the ankle brace whenever I had to get up and walk around for more than a couple of minutes. Saturday most recent, stayed home from skating (of course), but did lots of tidying and such in preparation for dinner guests. Wore the brace pretty much the whole time, and was pretty good about paying attention and sitting for a while whenever the ankle complained. As a result, I managed to get a fair amount done over the course of the day, and my ankle wasn't even all that unhappy with me at the end of it. Overall now, it's not-hurting for a much larger portion of time than it is-hurting, so I think it must be getting better.
Oh yes. And it rained, pretty much all week long. It's nice to see blue sky and sunshine for a change!
I've been playing a fair amount of Super Paper Mario. It's fun, but not as engaging as Zelda TP was. Part of that is, I suspect, because I'm not really very good at button-pressing, so it takes me more tries to successfully perform a series of jumps than a more coordinated gamer, so it feels more frustrating than Zelda did at most points. Or maybe it's just the trouble that meepodeekin's hubby has, of inappropriately mapping actions to buttons - I jump when I mean to flip a not-insignificant portion of the time. The extremely stylized graphics and (really) 2-D world also make me feel much less like I'm the one running around and doing stuff. Mario is very definitely a little guy that I'm making jump around; he is not the extension of myself that Link was. It's not actually bad or anything like that. Just different.
Meanwhile, the huz is a pretty good amount farther along in Chocobo Tales than I am. He's in the Air Temple, while I have yet to finish the Water Temple, but that's okay. I'm largely working on it in little bits - half an hour Monday evenings before dinner, 15-20 minutes Wednesday evening between dinner and choir rehearsal. But overall I find that works pretty well; I realized this weekend while beating the Flaming Frenzy book that while Chocobo Tales is fun, it isn't necessarily relaxing - too many of the mini/microgames depend on speed, precision, and other things that tend to increase one's adrenalin level to be really relaxing after a while. But that's okay. :)
meepodeekin's hubby has, of inappropriately mapping actions to buttons - I jump when I mean to flip a not-insignificant portion of the time. The extremely stylized graphics and (really) 2-D world also make me feel much less like I'm the one running around and doing stuff. Mario is very definitely a little guy that I'm making jump around; he is not the extension of myself that Link was. It's not actually bad or anything like that. Just different.Meanwhile, the huz is a pretty good amount farther along in Chocobo Tales than I am. He's in the Air Temple, while I have yet to finish the Water Temple, but that's okay. I'm largely working on it in little bits - half an hour Monday evenings before dinner, 15-20 minutes Wednesday evening between dinner and choir rehearsal. But overall I find that works pretty well; I realized this weekend while beating the Flaming Frenzy book that while Chocobo Tales is fun, it isn't necessarily relaxing - too many of the mini/microgames depend on speed, precision, and other things that tend to increase one's adrenalin level to be really relaxing after a while. But that's okay. :)
We've been working together on both Zack and Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure, and Myst 5.
Myst 5 really seems like a throwback to Myst 1 and 2 in that the gameplay largely consists of 'wander around and see what you can figure out about how the world works' rather than having a pretty obvious Set Of Puzzles. There is something of a plot, though much less than in Myst 4, and the voice acting is really very good - in a way, I'm not sorry that they decided to replace the human actors with CG (due primarily to Achenar's atrocious acting in Myst 4). It's a lot less obvious what exactly the puzzles are in Myst 5 than in either of the last two installments. It took us three play sessions in Ice World to figure out how to cross the puddle, and we have yet to figure out exactly how to do the next thing. We believe we know how, but our sightline (which is, we believe, extremely important here) is a bit impeded. We have much of Astronomy World figured out (we think) though there's definitely still places to try to get to. All interesting, all pretty. A little frustrating at times because the remarks from characters which are presumably meant to indicate what you're supposed to do next are less than clear, and because we've grown somewhat used to the 'I am a PUZZLE!' presentation used in Myst 3 and 4.
Zack and Wiki is an almost direct descendant of the Monkey Island and Space/King's Quest inventory-based adventure games, and as such it's a refreshing change from everything else we've been playing. In pretty much every 'stage', Zack attempts to get hold of a chest containing a piece of Barbaros' treasure/skeleton while avoiding the astonishing variety of deaths that he might encounter. (We've played 4 or 5 stages so far, and only in the very first one - which is a pretty handheld introduction - did we succeed without dying.) Essentially, the player uses the Wiimote as a variety of objects (e.g. a fishing pole, an extendable grabber tool or hand, a wrench, a flute) to help Zack unlock doors, drop bombs, or play melodies to overcome the various obstacles between him and his goal. It's at least as imaginative in its uses of the Wiimote as Rayman 1 was, if not more so. The puzzles so far are good but not insanely hard (but we're only in the first handful of areas - there's something like 19 pieces of Barbaros to collect), the graphics are pretty, the writing that describes each object that the Wiimote becomes is generally at least mildly amusing, and the deaths that we've seen (falling down onto a spiked floor, being captured and carried away by the natives, getting smashed by a ball falling down a Rube Goldberg device) are also pretty funny. It shares the all-too-typical flaw of not being able to save your progress until you've completely solved a stage and gotten your chest of treasure, but that hasn't been a big deal just yet. It does feel like the sort of game that, fairly soon, we're going to actively need both our brains to solve the puzzles. Which is fine too.
Myst 5 really seems like a throwback to Myst 1 and 2 in that the gameplay largely consists of 'wander around and see what you can figure out about how the world works' rather than having a pretty obvious Set Of Puzzles. There is something of a plot, though much less than in Myst 4, and the voice acting is really very good - in a way, I'm not sorry that they decided to replace the human actors with CG (due primarily to Achenar's atrocious acting in Myst 4). It's a lot less obvious what exactly the puzzles are in Myst 5 than in either of the last two installments. It took us three play sessions in Ice World to figure out how to cross the puddle, and we have yet to figure out exactly how to do the next thing. We believe we know how, but our sightline (which is, we believe, extremely important here) is a bit impeded. We have much of Astronomy World figured out (we think) though there's definitely still places to try to get to. All interesting, all pretty. A little frustrating at times because the remarks from characters which are presumably meant to indicate what you're supposed to do next are less than clear, and because we've grown somewhat used to the 'I am a PUZZLE!' presentation used in Myst 3 and 4.
Zack and Wiki is an almost direct descendant of the Monkey Island and Space/King's Quest inventory-based adventure games, and as such it's a refreshing change from everything else we've been playing. In pretty much every 'stage', Zack attempts to get hold of a chest containing a piece of Barbaros' treasure/skeleton while avoiding the astonishing variety of deaths that he might encounter. (We've played 4 or 5 stages so far, and only in the very first one - which is a pretty handheld introduction - did we succeed without dying.) Essentially, the player uses the Wiimote as a variety of objects (e.g. a fishing pole, an extendable grabber tool or hand, a wrench, a flute) to help Zack unlock doors, drop bombs, or play melodies to overcome the various obstacles between him and his goal. It's at least as imaginative in its uses of the Wiimote as Rayman 1 was, if not more so. The puzzles so far are good but not insanely hard (but we're only in the first handful of areas - there's something like 19 pieces of Barbaros to collect), the graphics are pretty, the writing that describes each object that the Wiimote becomes is generally at least mildly amusing, and the deaths that we've seen (falling down onto a spiked floor, being captured and carried away by the natives, getting smashed by a ball falling down a Rube Goldberg device) are also pretty funny. It shares the all-too-typical flaw of not being able to save your progress until you've completely solved a stage and gotten your chest of treasure, but that hasn't been a big deal just yet. It does feel like the sort of game that, fairly soon, we're going to actively need both our brains to solve the puzzles. Which is fine too.
Sorry for the combo of length and lack of excitment! Such is life sometimes.
