Where Have I Been?

Since Ben has busted my chops a couple of time now about lack of posting, I figured I would explain. First, it was only two days of no posts. I think that's allowed. I've been nursing a cold, but that's not the reason. You can blame Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. It's a Wii game I got for Christmas. It's a first person shooter. I think it pales in comparison to the Quake series, but it's good enough to keep me interested I suppose. This is the first Metroid game I've ever played, so one aspect of the game that I found odd is the character has the ability to morph into a small ball. And this is seen as a good thing. The main character is female and I don't even want to think about the contortions required to get into the shape of small foot tall ball (or maybe I do want to think about it, I'm torn). I don't know if this trait is logically explained in some previous game, but for now I'm just going with it.


I'm not a big fan of the controls though. In Quake you could strife and you would use the mouse to turn left and right and look up and down and would shoot at the middle of the screen. In Metroid you move forward and move left and right with the nunchuck and the Wii control is used for free look and turning, but you shoot not in the center of the screen, but where the Wii cursor is. Since your turn rate is limited it's a bit like playing Quake using a joystick (which I hate to admit that I actually did initially for the longest time until a thorough butt whooping by a keyboard player made me see the error of my ways). It may be possible to adjust the turning sensitivity, but I haven't looked into it too much. If you played a lot of Quake the controls can take some getting used to. Plus the storyline is a bit lacking. They try and give the impression that you have free will by letting you go anywhere, but in all locations other than the current objective area you'll run into limits of how far you can progress without the proper weapon to clear the way, and you only acquire the weapon as the overall story objectives are cleared. Sadly even though the play style is not quite to my lacking I still find myself being sucked into wanting to finish it (I attribute this somewhat to my potential obsessive compulsive nature when it comes to playing video games at times). I had even planned on going into work for several hours a day this past week and only made it in one time (this is not only because of the game, but the kids and a puzzle we're working on that's been insanely difficult).


So aside from the Metroid I should play catch up on what's been going on around here for the past several days. Ginger's family left around lunch time on Thursday and my Mom left later that night also. The kids have been pushed to their endurance limits I believe in getting so little sleep lately. At this point Quinn seems to be on edge constantly. Part of that though is because I think he got used to getting his way a lot when everyone was up, and now that they're gone he's having trouble readjusting to fact that Mom and Dad rule the roost. Catherine got a hair cut yesterday although being a guy I really didn't notice a difference (I included a picture of her and Quinn below, you can see if you notice it's shorter). And several of the new Christmas toys have already been broke (just minor pieces on the Playmobil castle and something else).


We also had Ben come over tonight and we were planning on going out to dinner. Which the kids were excited about since that meant they were going to get to play their new Nintendo DSes. Quinn even asked if we could go where it would take the longest to prepare the food. Turns out everywhere had a 90 minute to two hour wait though, so we ate at home (although we let the kids play the DS while they waited, that's what the picture above is from). And since we stayed in we got some quick lessons from Ben on the Mac user interface (which I must admit is lightyears ahead of Windows). I also got to hear all about his new job in which he gets to do lots of coding (I'm jealous). I scattered a couple of pictures of ornaments throughout the post. I would be interested to hear which one people like the most. I'm partial to the second one myself.