No Business Naming Things

Lexy and I hopped aboard a train mid day Thursday and headed off to Montreal to meet up with a friend so that we could all go and see Rush play at the Bell Center.  I saw them in Ottawa last year and they were excellent and this show was as good or better.  The seats weren’t nearly as good (no 12th row floor this time) but the sound quality was much better and there was an added vignette that was both funny and creepy.  The highlight for  me was once again Natural Science with Subdivisions as a close second.

It wasn’t all good  though. Once again we had to deal with That Drunk.  You know, the one who slops beer on you and elbows you in the head?  Yeah, him.  He was sitting directly behind Lexy and was knocking her chair around quite a bit.  He must’ve realized what he was doing because he eventually leaned over and put both his arms around her neck.  Apparently he was apologizing to her but of course, to me, I see a drunk man strangling my wife-to-be, so I haul off and smack him and push him off of her.  He gets this “oh shit, I’m so drunk and sorry look” about him and backs off.  From here on out I’m watching him out of the corner of my eye waiting for it to happen again, but I think he decided to bug his neighbor instead.

Still, an excellent show and I’ll definitely go see them again if they’re close by.

I may have mentioned before that I don’t often finish games. My attention span is remarkably short so if a game fails to introduce anything new or interesting for a period of time I tend not to go back to it. In fact, if I had to put a number to it, I would say that I finish 1 out of every 10 games I play (and even that might be generous).

Last night I somehow managed to finish the 20+ hour beast that is Half Life 2. I’m not sure how I did it. For a shooter, the game is monstrous - if I played less than 20 hours I’d be surprised. What’s more, I’d actually seen the game play to the end before in a speed run so there weren’t exactly any new surprises for me as far as settings/plot were concerned. I loved it all the same. The game offered some of the best level design I’d ever experienced in a game (behind Resident Evil 4) and managed to mix the styles of play up often enough to make it feel that I was playing a bunch of different games. I think that’s perhaps how it kept my interest. Just as I was beginning to tire with a particular gameplay mechanic it would change things up and I’d be doing something different (be it driving boats/buggies/swarms of insects).

It wasn’t all positive, of course. The PS3 port of The Orange Box deserves all of criticism it received for slowdowns, jitters, and abominable load times. It’s a monstrous cock-up of a port if there ever was one. I’m looking forward to playing through Episodes 1 and 2 all the same.  The quality of the game itself has won it a great deal of leeway in my mind.