A Stay At Home XBox Weekend

I've been quiet over the past couple days because of one thing: I bought myself an XBox 360 this Friday. I had intended on waiting a bit before getting it, but…I have no willpower and once I set my mind to getting something, I usually just end up with it no matter what. It got down to where I was (jokingly, might I add) convinced that it was going to help the economy and consumer confidence.

But anyway, I got it, along with Tales of Vesperia, because rock band 2 is so darn expensive and I didn't want to pick that up quite yet. I'm really enjoying it a lot. My next big purchase after Rock Band is going to be a decent yet not terribly expensive HDTV though. This thing really needs HD, I can tell that now. I've still got that new toy fever which means it's hard for me to do work type stuff that I want to do, such as keeping up on my programming practice.

There wasn't any hanging out with the friends this weekend because they had a lot of stuff they needed to take care of on various projects and such. So I stayed in mostly which very nearly drove me crazy by the end of the day Sunday. I've got a tiny little apartment and staying in there nonstop for that long a time made it feel like the walls were closing in on me.

But I spent most of the weekend playing the 360, Tales especially. It took a while to get going but now it's got a good story and I've just encountered my first dungeon with totally inexplicable puzzles which is a trademark of the Tales series. Waiting for the first box pushing puzzle now! The one I encountered involved a tower which you had to spin certain gears to get the staircase to the next area to descend. Which, I would imagine, makes it difficult for the owners of the tower to navigate between it's floors… Anyway, good game, and great graphics. It looks like I'm playing an interactive anime game. I'm going to like this 360.

I'm not going to like the price of the games though. Most of them are like $60. I've been considering signing up for a service like Gamefly which would let me rent a couple games to play at a time. So if it's $22.95 a month for 2 games out…at a time…that's going to save me a crapton of money even if I only play 1 game every 3 months. It seems totally worth it, and especially for games that I'll probably only play for a short period of time. And if I like something I can just buy it from them. So I think I will actually do that once I finish Tales.

For dinner sunday night I made the Chicken Cacciatore that I was shown how to make last weekend and it turned out very awesome. I might be able to cook after all! I need to change a few things around since you always make a few mistakes here and there the first time out. I let it simmer for a tad too long because I underestimated the amount of time it would take to boil the water for the pasta. But overall…mmmm…excellent. This week I'm going to be trying Swordfish and Halibut, two things which I've never had before but we're going to give them a shot anyway. Looking forward to seeing how they turn out. I'll probably have more on that tomorrow, since thats when I'll be trying the swordfish.

Read and post comments |
Send to a friend