·:[ Smiling Politely ]:·
• • • • •

When I first acquired my 360, I quickly hopped onto the Xbox Live Arcade train and snapped up a handful of titles, all of which have treated me well more or less. I probably would have traded Puzzle Quest for something different as it wore out its welcome after some time, but the killer duo of Pac-man CE and Space Giraffe has had serious staying power, and Castlevania: SOTN is a classic I wouldn’t be playing if it weren’t for XBLA.

In recent months, however, I’d mostly been kind of curtailing the XBLA spending despite a few notable temptations like Rez HD and Ikaruga. This summer though, I think I’m going to have a hard time because there appears to be a ton of good stuff on the way.

Of course, the one game I absolutely must get as soon as it is released is Braid. I’ve mentioned my excitement for this game before, and it has been kind of a long time coming. I suspect this game, being a puzzle game on a non-portable system, is going to tank. This prediction would have been a no-brainer a year ago, but the surprising success of Portal makes it a bit less of a forgone conclusion these.

My charitable, polite explanation as to why I think Braid will fail where Portal succeeded is: “I dunno, just a gut feeling.” My less charitable, contrarian explanation relates to my beliefs that Portal is an overrated game. I think Portal succeeded despite being a puzzle game because: a) people were all buying Orange Box anyway, b) it was an easy puzzle game, c) it was funny, and d) it had a ton of good press because it fit into a very pleasant media narrative that was repeated on every gaming site in existance and probably took up 25% of every single review text out there. (The narrative being: college kids make cool school project, get bought by Valve, steal the Orange Box show.)

Now I’m not quite sure yet if Braid is going to be easy or not, but it doesn’t look to be particularly funny, seems to be trying to appeal to the games-as-art crowd rather than the “hurr hurr the cake is a lie!” internet meme crowd, and the developer basically alienates every game designer and journalist out there every time he gives a talk. If the game does turn out to be challenging at all, it’s gonna get a bunch of middling reviews with the executive summary “innovative, but too challenging for all but the most hardcore players, 7/10.”

Oh well, it’s coming out and I’ll be buying it so what do I care how well it does? It does have a pile of competition this summer though. Castle Crashers looks pretty fun, Geometry Wars 2 is tempting (less so since learning the co-op mode is local only), the Bionic Commando remake I didn’t initially care about has been gathering good buzz. Oh, and Galaga Legions I would normally not be overly excited about, only it’s by the Pac-man: CE team apparently, and as I mentioned above that game is definitely one of the best ones I’ve seen on the service. Oh oh, and Mega Man 9, of course.

And on top of all of that, soon the fruits of the XNA community are going to start appearing! Man, I should get in on that. Who wants to help me develop my sidescrolling Metroidvania roguelike?

Nintendo fixes their broken controllers.  Allegedly.

It’s E3 time, and nobody really cares any more but there is at least one bombshell that has gone off: Final Fantasy 13 coming out for the 360 (in the States at least.)  Kaboom.

Oh, and there is a ton of awesome Rock Band news, but I’ll get to that later.

One advantage to living in central Canada:  Amazon ships from Mississauga.  The “free super shipper saving”, which I’ve used twice so far, which used to take 1-2 weeks to get to Fredericton if I was lucky, has basically been overnight here.  I think if I dared pay for the express the goods would be in my hand within the hour!

Google has been ordered to turn over the full records of every video seen on YouTube, including the user names and IP addresses of all viewers.  Privacy concerns were set aside because, hey, “in most cases” only knowing an IP address isn’t enough to identify someone so like, it’s probably not that big of a deal.

That’s what everyone’s talking about.  The actual ruling mentions that Viacom had asked for, basically, Google’s search engine source code.  Luckily for Google, they didn’t end up having to do that, because, hey, that would probably hurt Google’s business.

Not that I think that Google should have had to hand over its code.  And there is the question of how relevant the code would be vs. the logs, and I’m not one to judge that question either.  I just think it’s a bit funny as it comes across as basically, Google’s bottom line is worth more than our privacy.

I say Google should just apologize to Viacom and make sure this never happens again by removing Viacom material from YouTube and, hey while they are at it, delisting every Viacom related business from their search engine.  I wonder how they would like that?

Then again, Viacom probably owns half of the media out there so they couldn’t be shunted aside that easily.

I hate the media industry.

Went wandering around downtown looking for my bank.  I found it, next to a local game store that, while modest in size, puts any other game store I’ve seen to shame for variety of selection, save maybe the one in Rochester.

If only I knew anyone around to play with.  Next up, to find the record stores.

Collectively, May and June have been pretty much the most intense, busy, nerve-wracking, confusing, and all around crazy period of my life.  These are the sorts of things that other people “blog” about these sorts of situations, where my response is mostly to cut off contact with the outside world until everything settles down.

Well, things have mostly settled down.

The big news (that isn’t really news to most anyone reading this but you never know,) is that I’m now a married man.  Many of you know that my relationship has been, well, a unique one, and I don’t care to discuss that further here.  The important thing is that Mononita Roy is now Mrs. Mononita Roy, married to this goofball right here.  The ceremony was held in Mississauga at the Toronto Kalibari, a Hindu temple devoted to the goddess Kali.  Arranging everything was pretty stressful, but the ceremony itself was relaxed, involved fancy colorful getups, fire, and you didn’t even have to wear shoes.  All in all the coolest wedding I’ve ever been to, if I do say so myself.

On top of that, we are now living in Ottawa, Ontario.  Mononita, this very day, has just started work as a resident in the Internal Medicine program at the hospital here.  I will be starting a Ph.D. at the University of Ottawa in the fall (doing some RA work in advance this summer.)  We are in a nice condo that is virtually next door to the Hospital and a short bus ride to campus.  The few weeks have been mostly a mess of moving, obtaining furniture, assembling furniture, trying to straighten out addresses with everything, and trying to get the phone and internet hooked up, which, after several inexplicable delays has finally gotten through as of the other day.

If anyone wants to see photos of the wedding, know our new contact information, or anything like that, send me an email and I’ll decide whether or not to lie to you.  I’m not quite so bold as to put that stuff online.