It’s amazing the things you’ll pass the time with when you’re crazy-bored.  There’s a meme floating around the internet that has you create an album cover thusly:

1 – Go to Wikipedia.  Click “Random article”
or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random Wikipedia article that comes up is the name of your band.

2 – Go to Quotations Page and select “Random Quotes”
or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very LAST quote on the page is the title of your first album.

3 – Go to Flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
The third picture in the top row, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 – Use a graphics program to put it all together.

Here’s my album:

Every time I go on vacation I seem to completely forget about this site and neglect to update it, which, I suppose is a good thing, but it doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten about gaming.

I’m currently in Miami, tagging along with my wife who is attending a conference here for work.  It’s nice getting out of the cold of Winnipeg, but dang is it crowded here.  We took a drive down to South Beach last night and very quickly regretted not taking a cab.  I’ve never seen so many cars and people all massed in one place, and apparently, traffic signals mean absolutely nothing here.  It looked as though the local drivers just made up their own rules and did whatever they wanted to.

After about an hour we managed to find a parking spot and took a walk along the beach and then up to Ocean Drive.  It suddenly dawned on me that we were walking through Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.  I haven’t played that game in years, yet I recognized the area instantly.  It was pretty cool.

In other gaming news, I popped in to a Circuit City to see if any deals were to be had what with the chain going out of business, and as reported by most other deal hunters, there weren’t very many bargains to be had.  The games are all marked at 50% off, but most of the good games have had their original prices jacked up so there’s no real deal to be had at all.  You have to really know your prices.  I did manage to find one deal however, and picked up King’s Bounty: The Legend for $20.  I’ve been interested in this game for a while now, but it’s still $50 in Winnipeg, so I’m a happy camper.  Other than that, prices, for the most part, seem to be the same down here as they are in Winnipeg, which means I’d end up paying more for them here after the exchange rate.

Okay, enough sitting in front of the laptop, I’m off to go do the tourist thing.  There’s a Best Buy not far from here I want to check out.

I fired up my Xbox 360 last night to dive back into Fable II, which I had put on hiatus while finishing Oblivion.  I’m not very far into it, but so far it’s been quite enjoyable.  There’s just one slight problem with Fable II though.  For whatever reason, not long after I start playing it, I get incredibly sleepy.  After about half an hour of playing last night, I opened my eyes and saw my on-screen character running into a wall.  What the hell?

It was getting late in the evening, but no later than when I normally do my gaming.  It also wasn’t the first time it’s happened, in fact, my eye lids seem to get heavy every time I load up Fable II.  I know it’s not a matter of the game being boring, because I genuinely enjoy it.  Maybe it’s the soft music and peaceful vistas featured in the game.  Maybe it’s the British accents… I don’t know, but something’s up.  Something in Fable II is putting me to sleep.

Oddly enough, this has happened to me before with the Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance series on my original Xbox.  My wife and I would play co-op, but for reasons unknown, I could only play for an hour or so before my eyes started closing on their own.  It was the first time I’d ever experienced anything like it.  Now that I’ve discovered another game that has the same effect on me, maybe I can somehow link the two to figure out what’s going on.  If I can stay awake long enough that is.

Having freshly dinged level 79, I’m now just one level away from the cap in World of Warcraft.  I’m currently questing in Sholozar Basin and to be honest, I couldn’t be any more indifferent of my experience there.  It’s the same old, same old.  The environment, like all of Northrend, looks very nice but the quests are just more of the same uninspired stuff I’ve done a thousand times previous.  I’m using the same attacks, spells, and button-press routines I’ve done countless times before.  WoW is very cyclical for me; sometimes I log in and have a great time, other times, not so much.

Pictured above is my two year old daughter, my little budding rock star.  She discovered our Rock Band 2 set a few months ago and since then it’s rare that a day goes by where she doesn’t ask to go downstairs for “music”.  Sometimes she wants mommy and daddy to play the instruments while she dances, shaking her tiny butt back and forth, while other times she likes to whale away on the drums.  Either way, she has a blast, as do I just watching her.  Unlike WoW, I’ve never equated Rock Band with not having fun.

This past weekend my wife and I had some friends over for a Rock Band night.  Once my daughter was bathed and soundly asleep, we brought out our band (The Ginger Toupées) and rocked away into the night.  Much fun was had by all.  When it came time to shut down for the evening we discovered that the “No Fail” mode had been left on from my daughter’s earlier play session and none of our tour progress had been saved.  Oops.

No one seemed to mind though.  “We’ll just do it all over again on our next Rock Band night,” was the common refrain.  There isn’t one member of The Ginger Toupées who is dreading the next Rock Band night knowing we have to re-do a bunch of gigs; we’re all looking forward to it in fact.  If it were up to me we’d be playing right now, dag-nabbit!  Now, just imagine that for whatever reason the WoW databases were rolled back 24 hours.  How willing would you be to re-do content you just completed in WoW?  I for one would have to seriously force myself to do so, and would probably be pretty ticked off while doing it.

So, why is repetition in one game fun, while an annoying grind in another?

Yes, this is really our band. The Ginger Toupées. Click the thumbnail for a wallpaper-sized version.

I was browsing the Xbox Live Arcade yesterday and noticed that R-Type Dimensions had just released.  Way back when I lived in Ottawa, The Chapel Hill Quickie Convenience Store in my neighborhood had an R-Type arcade machine into which I fed many a quarter.  The store was right at the end of my paper route and I’d stop in and play almost daily.  R-Type was the sole reason I begged and pleaded my parents for a TurboGrafx-16 which had a “near arcade-perfect” port of the game.

The TG-16 ultimately failed miserably in North America, but I loved that console.  I was big into shoot ‘em up games and the TG-16 had the best library of them available.  Aside from R-Type, I can remember playing titles like Blazing Lazers, Super Star Soldier, and another of my favourites, Soldier Blade.  I was crazy-good at shooter games, and often impressed my friends with the zen-like state I entered when playing them.  The games seemed to slow down for me and I could fly through the hail of oncoming bullets like they weren’t even there.  I was Neo in a shoot ‘em up Matrix.

I downloaded the R-Type Dimensions demo and smiled when the familiar sounds and music of the opening level flowed out of the speakers.  Three enemies in I flew into a bullet and blew up.  Times have changed.