Monthly Archives: April 2007

Colossi Cast Really Big Shadows, Or: It’s Time to Clear the Backlog.

Inspired by a thread at 360 Arcadians, I’ve decided that my Xbox 360 going in for repairs was the perfect time to begin attempting to clear out my game backlog (that is, the games I own that I have not yet finished). The entire backlog is listed below.

I began with Shadow of the Colossus, which actually took me about a week of real life to get through, mostly because there were several evenings I didn’t play anything at all. I’m determined to play through only one game at a time, to make sure that I actually finish a few this time around.

Colossus was pretty good in the end. There was a period with a few of the mid-game colossi where I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to like the game as a whole, and I believe I stated that I hated the game in those circumstances, but when the 12th colossus and later rolled around, I found I was actually having fun. I still think the controls are a bit iffy and the camera is detestable, but the overall experience was a good one. The game has atmosphere by the bucketful and pushes the PS2 pretty well.

It started strong and ended strong, so I’m willing to forgive some of the sloppiness and poor enemy design in the middle few encounters. 1 through about 5 or 6 (maybe even 7) were great and introduced everything well, and the last four colossi were simply amazing to play.

For the record, the final time to completion according to my savefile (which includes watching the credits) was 9:38:09.

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We’re Thankful That the Answer to Our Question Appears to Be “Nothing.”

I have two other, much more mundane posts in the draft hopper that are going to be posted later today when I get the time to do so, but both video games and my stuff breaking seemed at least a bit trivial in the wake of this afternoon’s slight scare that I’m not too worried about getting to them until after the children are in bed and my wife has returned home for the evening.

Early last week, Amanda began to display very faint signs that she was headed for pre-term labor with Hannah. We didn’t think much of it the first day, but when it happened a couple of days in a row, we were mildly concerned, so I had her call her doctor. She was told that she should report to the women’s evaluation unit at the hospital if she should experience any further symptoms like those she had seen, to at least go through some tests and maybe an examination to make sure she wasn’t going to have the baby anytime soon.

Guess what happened today.

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Where Did Everything Go? And What Happened?

Long story short:

I’m moving the family stuff off Drupal and back to WordPress. There are two side effects to this change:

  • The Drupal-originating posts won’t be here for a little while as I work on exporting/importing them, which shouldn’t take all that long.
  • My entire archive, from the last six years, is now once again available as part of my blog. It’s stuff that’s been missing for some time, and it still suffers from some Unicode problems from an import gone awry from long ago, but it’s all here, including the stupid categories I used to have (which I’ll be cleaning up soon).

This doesn’t change much for most people who are going to visit the blog, but my feed *has* been moved as well, and I’ll be redirecting my FeedBurner feeds in order to compensate.