Spend A Little Time With Friends

I'll be working a fair bit over the next two weeks thanks to the Australia Day public holiday (which falls on a Tuesday this year, so most people will also take Monday off as well dammit), so I've made the most of the time at hand and spent it wisely for a change. That is, I've done things that were more productive than just sleeping or sitting around at home.

Yesterday, I had the gaping hole in my back wisdom tooth filled, after having the wind whistle through it for the past four months. Fortunately it wasn't a very deep hole, but it must have been a fairly extensive repair because I'm still a little tender on that side...
Because I don't have any private health insurance, I paid the whole amount out of pocket, for the privilege of having my mouth numbed and my tooth drilled. $140~ is a fair bit to pay for dental peace of mind, but it's worth it.

Today, I went to visit my friends in Warragul. I hadn't seen them since they moved back from the US, and I figured I was overdue.
We stopped for lunch; my friend insisted on paying for the meal, since she felt she owed me for the tickets to Dali I bought for her a few months ago. Unfortunately, she didn't seem to agree that paying $30 for three six-inch subs, plus drinks and snacks, was a fair price... slightly awkward scene in a queue as she negotiated something cheaper...
We then went back to her place, where her and her husband's cats decorated me with hair - I was wearing head-to-toe black, what the hell was I thinking?! - and we watched The Black Balloon:

The movie is excellent, and very confronting - and there were several scenes in it that I could relate to, and no, no-one in my family is autistic. My friend's husband pondered how Toni Collette manages to be in just about every Australian cinema release, and I said "She probably just has a good agent." j.k. she's awesome

We spent most of the afternoon discussing things, like how our jobs were going (not great, but it could always be worse) and what we were planning on doing with our lives. You know, the usual. But the best thing about spending time with them was that it gave me a chance to stop worrying about my own problems, and listen to others' - and of course offer support.

Then my friends had to go into town to chase up some homewares and do their grocery shopping; while they were checking out electrical goods, I snuck across to the Home Entertainment shop across the road and picked up some more music. I'm such a junkie for tunes, now that I have a half-dozen different MP3 players. Music Is Always Good.

Tonight, I'm going to give this on-line shopping thing a try... There are a few books that I'm having trouble getting through the usual channels - most of the bookshops I've asked have looked at me and gone, "Duh...?" but I suspect that's mostly due to the books being out-of-print or hard-to-find.

And I really ought to curb my spending, even though I've been doing just fine over the past few (busy, work-filled) weeks. Christmas seems to start a strange spending momentum in me; of course, having the stores reduce all of their stock after Christmas does not help much. ;)

I'll be good, I promise! In the meantime, thank you Katie and Randy for an awesome afternoon! Next time I'll bring the others with me (if they're available)!

Games Night

As I write this, my friend Andrew is playing with my sister's PS2... We have tidied up the house after an inspection, and we used the opportunity to have company over, so naturally we made it a bit of a games night.
We had a few rounds of Buzz!, which was one of the gifts Santa brought my sister last month. The game is itself loaded with innuendo, but it makes for a much more surreal game if you give your character a suggestive name, and have the game announce "NIPPLES is the Winner!"
Then, we had a play at SingStar for my sister's benefit, because she hardly gets the chance to bring out the mikes; sadly, I'm the only other one game enough to play along with her, and my singing is not the best.

We also tried to get a LAN thing going, but it took a few hours before all the bugs got sorted out. There were more than a few swear words flying back and forth before the system was set up properly, but in the end it all worked out, and a few rounds of Quake 3 were had.

I managed to finish M&L: Bowser's Inside Story yesterday, and now my sister is having a go at it after bugging me for the past week. Now, I begin the journey into LoZ: Spirit Tracks, which is a very strange game indeed. Most of the Zelda series have been based in a "middle ages" environment, but this one features, of all things, a train as the central plot device. What next, a motorcycle?

I go to the dentist on Monday, and hopefully go to visit my friend on Tuesday (assuming my car is up to the task); and then I'm back at work for another few days. Oh, rapture. Well, guess I'd better make the most of my free time!

I Should Be In Bed By Now

...but for some reason I'm not sleepy. Damn wacked-up sleeping pattern.

Right now I'm struggling to get Windows Media Player to rip some CDs so I can listen to them via my new MP3 player.
It works perfectly fine for CDs printed en-masse, which would therefore have an entry in the media player's on-line database; this saves me time when it comes to labelling each track, because the software just looks up the CD on the Internet and fills out the necessary details.
It's just that not all of my collection are so easily found. Some of them are magazine cover discs, which usually contain an odd assortment of tracks by various artists. Since they are usually a limited edition, there isn't anything for WMP to find about them online - so what it normally does is find the best match possible (which is frequently totally WRONG).

What's worse is that the version of WMP I have won't actually let you correct the false tracklist unless you are connected to the Internet! WTF? If it can't find the correct listing, why the hell do I need to go through that menu anyway just to fix the problem? Silly design, I don't know... I just hope they managed to fix that problem in the next version.

...I've also been accumulating a bunch of new DS titles, partly because I scored some $$$ over the last month, and also because a lot of them were really cheap:

• Impossible Mission - I remember playing this game on the Commodore 64. I had absolutely no success in completing the game, mostly due to being crap at it the first time (not having access to the manual didn't help). I managed to complete the game this time around, thanks to the far better interface that the DS offers - the only complaint was the apparent bug that prevented me from getting extra powerups in the puzzle-screen room. :(
  
• Rubik's Puzzle World - this is a puzzle title based on the eponymous brainteaser from the 1980s. It features the actual Rubik's Cube puzzle (with the original 3x3x3 cube, but also a 2x2x2 and a 4x4x4 puzzle to solve) and a bunch of other cube-related puzzles and games.
• Arkanoid DS - this is an updated version of another game I played on the C64. And yes, I was pretty bad at the C64 version too, but Arkanoid was so damned hard... This version uses the touch screen instead of a paddle/joystick, which makes it much easier to complete. A review I read complained about the "dead region" in the gap between the screens, where the ball is invisible, but I didn't have a problem with this since there usually aren't any obstacles in that space for the ball to bounce off, so...
• Puzzle Bobble Galaxy - oh, dear, I really am into the retro-themed games, aren't I? I had to take a break from this game after a while, because when I closed my eyes I kept seeing bubbles and patterns from the game scattering across my vision... Seriously, it's a very weird experience, and it's usually a sign that I've been playing a game for far too long. (And it seems to be related to the puzzle-type games; apparently Tetris is good for producing this effect.) Anyway, it's a really fun game.
  
• Super Monkey Ball: Touch & Roll - having never played a Super Monkey Ball game before, this was an interesting introduction to the theme. I totally suck at controlling the spheres through the levels (and some of those bananas are in really difficult places), but I guess it takes practice and a delicate hand.
• Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story - =D VERY HAPPY with this game! I was pleasantly surprised by the first M&L role-playing game for the Game Boy Advance - that, and Golden Sun: the Lost Age were both excellent titles to start my collection. However, the follow-up M&L: Partners in Time was rather lacking in the side-quests and secrets that distinguished the first title, and it made the game seem far too linear for most RPG fans. I am pleased to report that the third title is a stunning return to form, with recognition of what made SuperStar Saga such fun; plus new features (you get to play as both the Mario Bros. and as Bowser Koopa! Who gets to turn into a GIANT)!
• Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks - is one I don't actually own yet, but I still have some $ to spend yet, so...
  

Looking at the above list, and at all my games in fact, shows me that I have a very narrow field of interest, as far as my taste in games is concerned. Maybe I can chalk it up to my advanced years, but most if not all of the games I own are retreads of older titles. I wish I could say that it was trust in a brand name, but sadly Sonic the Hedgehog has shown otherwise. and I shall be looking at this Project Needlemouse thing very closely over the next year
Perhaps I'm just concerned that the newer titles won't be as good as the older ones? Am I a games elitist? An e-snob, stuck in an historical cul-de-sac of gaming genres? Or... is it just because the only alternatives available in the local stores are titles like My Little Pony, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and 101 Game Compendium? ;)

At any rate, stay cool folks, and keep gaming!