A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

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.

Late to the party (ha ha) as usual, I just finished last year's sleeper hit. Yes, it's everything everyone else has already said it was. Sad that the sense of humor and discovery was dulled by my already having been overexposed to the game's key concepts and jokes, by virtue of my having used the Web at all during the last six months. ( Bleep ) Still absolutely worth playing.

Only one real disappointment: the pace is a little messed up towards the end, when you're presented with some truly hairy puzzles with harsh penalties for missteps. I found myself saving constantly, as with an old-school IF game - not because I didn't know if doing Action A would kill me, but because it would take many attempts to get right. The game (using a typical FPS ruleset) lets you save literally anywhere,a o I'd get into a pattern of save, load, load, load, load, load, success!, save, load, load, load... The game made that feel unnecessary for most of its length, so that it breaks down at the end and makes you spend half your time working with the save/load menus is too bad. This in no way kills the game, though.