That was a pretty good weekend. Finished Lost Planet, which was alright. It’s sort of funny – where I couldn’t tell Dead Rising was made in Japan, Lost Planet was an obviously, obviously Japanese game. It had a lot of design “quirks” and narrative quirks that no western developer would do. Overall? Not a bad game – definitely had its moments, but by and large, it’s a B, B- sort of game. My my old rating system, I’d give it about a B:70 – ambitious and innovative enough, but not executed well enough to realize a lot of what they’d intended, I believe.

Saturday night, we went out to Karaoke, which was a ball. Started out the evening with Korean BBQ at Samwon, where we haven’t been in a while. For BBQ, it’s pretty damn good, IMO. Lots of sides, and everything’s uniformly good. Karaoke was pretty crazy, with something like eight of us in a room singing for almost four hours. Good stuff.

Today, I ended up getting up at 9, for no good reason, though I felt like I really wanted to sleep some more. Spent the morning reading cooking books. I was in the mood to cook something sort of involved, which was either going to be coke-braised or maple-glazed ribs, or a lasagna. Yeah, I know – usually lasagna’s a pretty low-intensity meal. Cheese, maybe some frozen spinach, a jar of tomato sauce, and a big pile of mozzarella, right? Nah.

I used Jamie Oliver’s “Top 10” “Easy Baked Lasagna” recipe. Sure, it’s easy, but it takes for-fucking-ever. Last time, it took about four or five hours to make, the first time I made it. The problem is that the sauce is supposed to simmer for a couple hours. Not this time. We used the pressure cooker to blast the sauce to doneness in about half an hour, while we roasted the butternut and acorn squash (replaced half of the butternut with acorn, ’cause we had another recipe that uses the other half of the butternut in the queue for Tuesday). Basically, it ends up being a pork and beef and tomato sauce, noodles, squash, creme fraiche (with a little anchovy paste), parmesan, and fresh mozzarella in layers.

It’s an incredibly mellow lasagna – the sweetness of the squash, the richness of the creme fraiche and the meat all just … harmonize. It’s awesome. I’ll post a picture later, but visually, it’s the best-looking lasagna I’ve ever seen. Ei-Nyung made a great praline bread pudding, and some braised radicchio, which at first seemed incredibly bitter, but only the tougher outer leaves – the inner leaves were silken, and almost sweet.

We’d reduced some $8 supermarket balsamic vinegar a while ago, and it’s *fantastic*. We’d reduced balsamic any number of times before, but this latest stuff… when we run out, I’m definitely getting the same brand again. I can’t remember what it is, though, so I can’t tell you what brand it is anyway. 😛 But yeah, the radicchio with that balsamic… mmm.

Lasagna, radicchio, salad, and bread pudding, accompanied by a blood orange Italian soda Joe had picked up. Dang – I can’t think of a more satisfying home-cooked meal we’ve had in a good long while. Awesome stuff.

Tomorrow, the roofers are (in theory) coming to (finally) fix the leak in the roof. I’m not holding my breath, and I’m not even sure that they’ll have fixed it once they leave. It only leaks in really heavy, persistent rain. But if they do manage to fix this, it’ll be one of the biggest weights off my back in years.

Work? Well, work’s work. The game’s almost done – I think our end date is something like the 5th, which would mean only another week or so, but my understanding is that that date’s pushed back a bit, to something like the 9th. Beyond that? Well, we’ll see.

February, though, is (barring un-or-marginally-forseen circumstances) PerGaDeMo, in which I work on writing a doc for an idea a couple friends of mine and I had over lunch one day. Oh, that’s Personal Game Development Month. I’d realized that I’d really let myself slack, in terms of working on stuff outside of work, just because at times work can be so grueling that coming home, and working more, even on something you really love, can be a pain.

But NaNoWriMo was great impetus to actually buckle down and DO something, so I’m hoping that I can motivate myself with a goal – to finish a basic, but complete design document for this concept in the span of a month – enough that it honestly, and clearly communicates the core of the idea, and how it could be implemented.