Had an excellent housewarming on Saturday. I think I had in mind a combination of the game-filled parties I'm so used to, and the sit/stand-around-drinking-and-talking parties that are more exotic to me and my ludocentric lifestyle. Since it was a round-the-clock (one lap) party, there was in fact plenty of the latter activity, but also lots of times when nearly all the the attendees were gaming. I accept this as both unavoidable, given who we know, and just fine. I was in there Racing for the damn Galaxy a couple of times, myself.

Because we have the only XBox 360 among everyone we know, our living room quickly became a campground for a bunch of folks who spent the party chomping through about half of Braid and then the entirety of Portal, for lo, they had heard so much and seen so little. This was not a problem, because hey, big apartment, with backyard; plenty of other spaces to gather, and indeed, everything worked out fine. I thought it was pretty great, really... but we'll have to consider putting a kibosh on the video games if we ever have any wintertime shindigs!

N.B.: Nearly all the non-teetotalers who came brought beer or wine of some format. Next time we host, we can almost certainly get away with buying far less of this stuff than we did. :)

I gotta say, I'm glad this party happened, because our apartment is totally awesome as a result. We planned it only two weeks after our move so that it would be the whip that drove us to unpack quickly... and boy, are we sore from it. The labor was so hard that I sometimes forgot what the larger goal was, and would bitterly think ugh, all these days of work, just to set up a damn party? But in the end we got many nice compliments on how great the place looked, and I graciously agreed.

Posted some thoughts over on the shelf, which as usual don't have much to do with the actual gameplay but I think they're interesting anyway.

My favorite thing about the actual gameplay was that it quickly earned my trust, and never let me down. It didn't take long to learn that every single object, platform or creature on the screen serves a purpose, so getting stuck on a puzzle means stepping back, taking stock of what materials the game is handing you, and wondering what you can do with them. I love this.

There was only one puzzle I took issue with, where it took me quite some time to realize that my approach was wrong, versus my reflexes being too slow. The first (incorrect) solution to it almost works, missing the target by milliseconds, and encouraging another try. Which will also fail. Fortunately, it was deep enough in the game that I didn't completely lose hope, and the correct solution occurred to me while I was in the office this morning, working on something else. And that's a sign of a good puzzle game.