It was my birthday weekend and we decided to spend it quietly hanging out and playing games.  And play we did.  Here’s the rundown of what we spent our time on.

Zack and Wiki: Sally got this for us as a birthday present and we got to spend a couple hours playing around it.  First impression is that it’s a totally solid adventure/puzzle game.   Super cute graphics, pretty clear game mechanics, and fun little puzzles.  We’ve finished off the first area and started working on the second.  So far the puzzles are pretty fun to work through and it is turning out that two heads are better than one, most of the time.  It certainly wouldn’t be hard for one player to play through the game, but a second person certainly doesn’t get too bored and can have some good input into the solution process.  The puzzles and game mechanics can sometimes be a little obtuse, but between in-game hints and a little tenacity, it’s not too bad.  The most annoying thing we’ve encountered so far is in one of the earlier levels - there’s a sleeping bad guy that you have to incapacitate to be able to use a fishing pole.  The only problem is that the timer for when he wakes up is a little unclear - there’s no real way to know how long he will be out and you only have a few seconds before he wakes up, so it’s very easy to get caught and either have to revive or restart the level.  Overall, I’m looking forward to playing more of it.

Rock Band: Spend a decent amount of time every day this weekend getting some songs in, sometimes just me playing guitar (expert Highway Star can DIAF), and sometimes three of us in the house manning the instruments.  I’m getting closer to being able to play hard drums reasonably well on most songs.  We’re getting pretty close to being able to do all three instruments on hard for the group tour, so it’ll be fun to try and get some more fans for our little band.

Any expert RB guitarists out there?   The solo on Deep Purple’s Highway Star is just killing me.  I’ve been using the older guitar without the solo fret buttons and I think I might have to use the new guitar for those buttons.  Hopefully we should be getting a replacement guitar in the next couple of days since our strum bar is too loose and often misses strums.

EVE Online: So, my corporation had a big outing on Saturday.  I dragged Sally along to check out a large group (the fleet was almost up to 200 at times) PvP operation in low security space.  The whole experience was really slow (waiting for a smaller group to form and move out to the main fleet, getting into the main fleet, getting into the right squads, etc).  We ended up sitting on a station with about 150 people harassing some local pirates for most of the times we were actually there.  Got to see a pirate’s dreadnought undock for a little bit (he redocked as soon as we got him into armor), I was on the killmail on a Dominix (the pirate posted on their killboard that he was giving us some fun and collecting insurance for the ship), and just sort of milled about.  A pirate sniper Eagle showed up and took out a couple of our frigates and kept warping around bookmarks, so we never had a serious shot at getting him.  One of our covops pilots also managed to get into position near an interceptor and allowed a lot of our smaller ships to warp to his location and get a kill.  I had a pretty good time just being with the fleet and being part of a couple of kills.  I found being part of such a large fleet pretty fun even though we didn’t see much action - really, no one is going to mess with a fleet of 150.

I’ll let Sally talk about her experience of the op but I think it’s safe for me to say that she found the whole thing pretty boring.  She was in a Vexor and lagged out for the kills or didn’t really know what was going on or why it was happening - this is certainly my fault to some extent.  I was hoping the op would be a little more interesting and maybe spur some more interest - I cling to the idea that Eve would be a lot of fun to play together if we could find some common goal in the game or if we could find something that Sally could sink her teeth into.  Honey, please tell me to stop if I become insufferable and/or let me know if I’m already there.