Food:

Gonna try to make Boeuf Bourginon (sp?) this Saturday. Probably gonna take on the order of eight hours of prep time (~4 hours of cook time, ~4 hours of marinade/prep time), but it should be worthwhile. I hope. We’ll see. Gonna get a good chance to use the giant stockpot we’ve got, and see if the burners can easily maintain a simmer. Man, I’m boring.

Games:

Looks like SVC Chaos and Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders are both off the “buy” list, and on the “maybe when they’re $10” list. Both were on the OXM demo disc, and both were so bad, they were almost unplayable. SVC Chaos just lacks any sort of the fine polish that’s absolutely necessary in a 2-D fighting game. The graphics suck, to boot. I’d much rather spend $20 on Guilty Gear X2 #Reload, and deal with the stupid title, and idiotic metal-inspired character design in beautiful 640×480 than deal with the SVC sprites, some of which date back to 1998, and are rendered at what appear to be Game Boy Advance levels of resolution.

Kingdom Under Fire is just garbage. It controls like crap, the writing is *painful*, and basically, it looks like a great concept whose execution was just completely mangled. Definitely an instance where something that looks good in screenshots looks utterly, totally awful in motion. Couple that with an awful Yu Suzuki quality musical score, and you’ve got a game that I’m not gonna touch with a 10 foot pole. Sneh.

So, of the original list, I’ve picked up Sims 2, Gungrave: Overdose, Katamari Damacy (finished), Gradius V (finished), DDR:Extreme, Donkey Konga, and finished The Urbz. Next up would likely be Def Jam: Fight for NY, or Dawn of War, which I’m pretty excited about (but reluctant to get, ’cause I’m out of HD space).

Work:

Better adjusted at work these days. It’s weird, though – there’s almost nothing at all to do, other than “look into” various issues. I’ve submitted a short design summary of an idea I’ve had since I first set foot at Maxis. We’ll see what other people think, but I’m gonna try to get a working version of it hacked together once the content is locked up for the Urbz, and I can start playing with stuff locally, and not risk screwing up the live content. Whee!