Stacking is out.

Stacking is the newest game from Double Fine and was released yesterday on the PSN.

The story revolves around a poor family who's father leaves the house to get a job and disappears.  After a few months of him disappearing the family is in financial dire straights and can't pay bills.  The debtors take the children in the family to work as slaves to pay off the debt.

Are you Active?

One of the stigmas associated with video games is that of being lazy.  Sure you may not be physically moving around but depending on the game you can certainly get a healthy mental exercise.  For Christmas one of the presents I got my wife was EA Sports Active 2.  I know what you're thinking, "What guy gets an exercise program for his wife?"  "What does he think of his wife if he gets her exercise games?"  Stop right there with those thoughts.  Secretly I got EA Sports Active 2 because I was tired of fitting into that stigma of being a lazy gamer.  I'd get home from work (and if there wasn't Cub Scouts activities to work on or drive my kids to soccer or dance) and I'd want to veg out in front of my PS3.  I could feel myself becoming an atrophied sack of meat and bones.

Now I've never been one to be completely gung-ho about exercise, but I do enjoy taking my mountain bike out and hitting the trails.  In high school and college I used to go to the gym regularly.  But now that I've got a job that keeps me a "slave to the man" and need to take care of three children, a wife and a house, regular exercise is not my top priority.  At a doctor visit last year (or maybe even two years ago now) I was encouraged to get some exercise in the morning to help boost my energy for the day.  Because my wife is fairly fanatical about exercise, we have an elliptical machine, a stationary bike, and a slew of exercise DVDs.  I tried the elliptical for a while and even one or two of the exercise DVDs, but some how the elliptical has become "sabotaged" by one of the kids (none of them will admit to it) and I can't seem to get the damn thing to stop being a relatively painfully jarring experience. 

Good bye old, hello new

With a new year upon us now I wanted to take a few minutes a reflect on last year's gaming as well as what I am looking forward to this year.

There are several games that I have played in the last part of the year that I haven't had a chance to discuss the are certainly worthy of mentioning.

The first one that comes to mind is Pac-Man Championship Edition DX.  This little downloadable gem takes a classic tweaks everything to make a new classic.  The idea is that while you are gobbling up the little white dots you WANT the ghosts to start chasing you.  The white dots are placed throughout the board in a direct path near sleeping ghosts.  As you move past them they wake up and begin to chase you.  Collecting all of the dots and fruit on one side of the board makes the opposite side of the board change the shape of the maze and puts down a new series of dots and sleeping ghosts.  The payoff comes when you have a nice long chain of ghosts behind you and hit the power pellet. Suddenly that train of ghosts becomes a smorgasbord of edible delights for Pac-Man, chaining bonus points together for a huge scoring run.  There are several different visual styles that are available as well as new maze patterns that unlock.  The one thing I don't care for entirely is the way the leader board is implemented.  Sure it lets you view global stats, your position in the global standings, and the leader board lets you see how well your friends are doing in the game.  The friend leader board doesn't include your own points, so you have to switch back and forth between your global view and the friend view in order to see how you are ranked among friends.  In game music is a collection of trance grooves that help set the tone and adjusts as the timer on each board counts down.  This is definitely a must have game.

Santa and the Culling

I hate Christmas.

Let me clarify.

I hate retail Christmas.

I don't mind spending time in church, listening to carols, driving through neighborhoods to look at houses decked out in lights.  But I hate what retail has done to Christmas.  This coming from someone who isn't overly church-going.  I follow Christian tenants, encourage my children to do the same, but I don't attend church every week.  

Yesterday my family (my wife and after much prodding, all three children) tackled cleaning out kiddie toys in the basement.  The culling as my wife put it.  We aren't finished but we have gotten a huge swath of toys sorted, bagged, and processed (either for donation or garbage).  During the process there was much, "I want to keep that", "What was that from?", "Oh look it's the kid's first X", etc.  Along with those sentiments there were several tears shed by my youngest.  The tears could have been from her seeing part of her childhood being bagged up and given away, or from a bit of a cold that she is fighting.  Our society is very much a "give me what I want", "that's mine", self centered culture.  Mostly due to Television and the constant barrage of the cool new thing.  My family has fallen into that societal shift.  The evidence of that is currently in my basement where there are seven rubber tubs now empty of what used to be stuffed animals, dolls, play sets, etc.  I have three full 30 gallon sized garbage bags full of old toys ready for donation, a banquet table covered with play sets too big to fit into large garbage bags, and eight 15 gallon sized bags full of trash.  Why?  Seriously.  Why do we have so much crap?