Media Consumption:

I’m at what I believe is the last checkpoint in The Mark of Kri – a game I haven’t played since early 2003, I believe. It’s quite good, but for some reason, I got to the last level, then stopped playing it cold. No idea why, but that’s what happened. I picked it up again a week ago, because I remembered being pretty close-ish to the end. Of 6 levels, I was on level 6. So, I figured I’d close it up. Now I’m stuck because it’s actually really damn hard to fight like, 10 guys, and archers, all at the same time. So, I’ve gotta get back into the groove, and remember how to actually play the game, in order to beat the last level. Alas!

Haven’t been playing much xbox recently. Probably because GTA:SA took up 100% of my gaming time, and I’ve got a hankering for RE4, which has gotten such stellar reviews that I’m probably just going to get it outright, rather than rent it through Gamefly. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak, as one might say. I still haven’t even *touched* Otogi 2, because I’m not yet done with Otogi (I got it from a friend at Sega for cheap – I’m not *totally* insane). Up next on the xbox though is to get deeper into KOTOR 2, and PoP:WW, if Mercenaries doesn’t come in before that. Mercenaries has some of the best TV spots I’ve ever seen for a game, but the best trailer in a good long while for me, is for Mark Ecko’s Getting Up, which was just posted on Gamespot a few days ago, and just came to my attention today. I was leery about the premise at first, but damn – they really hit the urban dystopia vibe perfectly, and actually found an angle that gives the graffiti aspect of the game the feeling of doing something *powerful*. Find it, watch it, revel in it.

Also picked up the first disc of Shinichiro Watanabe’s Samurai Champloo, which is this weird hip-hop samurai thing. So far? Awesome. Not Cowboy Bebop or Firefly awesome, but awesome nonetheless. Where Spike Spiegel was more or less your chaotic good character, Mugen is actually pretty well chaotic evil, or at best, chaotic neutral. Strange, for a main character. Also got the Broken Saints DVD for Christmas from some friends, which is epic – almost daunting in length. It’s apparently 12 hours of content spread over 4 discs, and I’ve seen maybe the first 20 or so minutes, which I’d seen before on their website way back when. So, I’ll have to dig into that as well.

I’d been watching and listening to some random stuff at work in the background, while doing other stuff, but work’s actually required my entire capacity the last week and a half. Now that we’ve got actual work to do, and I’m actually getting to do work I *want* to do, rather than simply stuff I have to do, it’s both tiring and effortless. The results of the last week or so have been better than I’d expected – I thought it would take me a little while to overcome the “got too much to do, and not enough info” paralysis, but I guess I’ve been thinking about this long enough, and was confident enough in my ideas, that I think it’s going quite well, and that it’ll make it into the game in a form that is recognizably my own. Which, as most of you know, has been a dream of mine for the last several years. Happening pretty quick, all things considered.