This is my recap of weekend gaming activities. Harry wrote his perspective in the next post down. As he mentioned it was his birthday this weekend, but we’ve all been so busy and somewhat over-peopled that we (us and our two roommates - another couple who also game together (we’ll introduce you to them soon)) declared our apartment to be in social lock-down. No one goes in, no one goes out. Well, technically I think I left once to run and get groceries. Otherwise we all sat around and played games and watched movies and stayed in our pajamas. Bliss.

Zack & Wiki: I used Harry’s birthday as an excuse to get us this game. I’m so smart. It’s completely ridiculous and omfg cute in that way that makes you not sure if you should go “Awwww” or on a homicidal rampage. It’s style is probably not to everyone’s tastes. That said, it’s a completely successful puzzle/adventure game and makes really good use of the Wii. There, in my somewhat limited experience, aren’t too many games that make rather seamless use of the Wii controller’s abilities without getting gimmicky, but this incorporates it quite nicely. As Harry mentioned the only thing that was a bit of a disappointment is that only one person can interact with objects and move the characters, the other player’s remote is used solely for pointing and drawing (you can draw lines and arrows and such to make it clearer when you’re screaming NO YOU IDIOT, THE OTHER URN. SHAKE THE BELL BY THE OTHER URN). Thankfully I rather like backseat driving while Harry playes games, we worked our way through the whole Metal Gear collection with me making helpful (read: irritating) remarks while he drove. Totally fun. I know the Myst variety of games is a contentious issue for some but in my family, who only owned Macs, we got a new Myst game every time they came out and my Mom and Dad and I would all sit around the computer playing that together, one person taking notes, everybody making suggestions and someone doing the driving, so this method of collaborative thinking, puzzly games feels natural and satisfying to me.

Rock Band: I <3 rock band. Not as much as Harry who gets totally OCD over it and is deeply, disgustingly, throw-up-in-your-mouth good at it, but I love it none the less. And, thankfully, they somehow retooled the difficulty on it compared to Guitar Hero. I haven’t gone back and played GH in a while, but I stopped playing it with any real interest when I hit my own personal plateau somewhere on the edge between medium and hard. There was a point where I could 5 star everything on medium and found it tedious and boring but I could only get through the first couple of songs on hard and wasn’t improving. With Rock Band I can actually see myself making real skill progress, which is addictive like crack. I can claw my way through, bloody and mangled though I may be at the end, through pretty much every song on Hard on the guitar, especially with a band mate or two. One of these days I’m going to take the plunge and play some of the easy stuff on expert, just to wet my feet. Our only gripe with Rock Band (aaaaaaargh! EVERY TIME I write “rock band” (did it again) I write “rock bank”. ffs. anyway) is that WHERE THE NUT are the female vocal songs? Because honestly? Two garbage songs, one dippy alterna-averil-wannabe and Hole do not make for a good selection (ok, the B-52s are awesome. I’ll give them that). Where’s the silly Grrrl rockers? Ok Sailor? Le Tigre? April March? Slater Kinny? Come on guys. I’d say 80% of the time when we play either as roomies or with a party going on we have a female singer and there is *nothing* in our vocal ranges. And I know there are tons of good girl rocker + guitar+drums music out there. But that’s a very tiny gripe about a very good game.

EVE: Aww, poor Harry. He tried so hard. As he mentioned there was a theoretically interesting big group PVP op. going on that we went and played around with for a while this weekend. I was….bored. Really, really bored. And I’m not quite sure what to blame, or how I could have been more interested. A) I always forget how much time stuff takes in this game, and I don’t really have much else to do. EVE, I know from watching Harry, is very often a game best played while having something to alt-tab to. Sadly, my RSS feed was empty and whereas Harry often has some little coding project he tabs to I have.. well.. atm.. not much. I mean, I could grab my book, but that seems a bit silly. B) I do not yet have the shared sense of meaning towards EVE activities that other EVE players do. Let me back up a moment and put this in WoW terms which I think apply. One of the things I find really satisfying about playing WoW is that when you do something neat, kill a hard boss, get that first char to 70, get your epic mount, kill someone a bajillion levels higher than you, there’s a whole huge group of people who understand what that means in terms of an achievement and the kind of time or skill required to accomplish it. On the other hand, bring your Mom in to Gruul’s layer and she’s probably not going to be all that impressed, or tell your teacher you finally got your epic omg third tier craftable sword of death and they’ll probably look at you rather blankly. There’s simply not the shared level of understanding around what that accomplishment is reflective of. Right now, I’m the equivalent of the mom or the teacher in EVE. I hung out with a huge group of people in low sec and while I know on an analytical level that there was something really impressive about what we were doing I didn’t have that emotional connection of *really* understanding how interesting/risky/politically tricksy/etc what was going on was. I also didn’t understand much of the conversation going on on Teamspeak or in chat in game. I’m not quite sure what we could have done differently to make me feel more connected to the activity or how to transform what was basically an hour and a half of sitting around waiting for people, an hour and a half of travel time and then another hour and a half of sitting in a fleet more meaningful to me. So I’m still struggling to find a hook in EVE. I haven’t given up hope but I’m still not sure how to approach it.