Lisa’s Favorite Games of 2013

And now the games post as promised. Keep in mind, this isn’t “Games I thought were the best out of all games of 2013,” because I did not play all the games. I thought Antichamber was brilliant, but I only spectated that one. And these aren’t necessarily the artsiest-fartsiest of games, or the games with the best design. Rather, this is more of a list of “Games that consumed me in 2013,” or games that was antsy to get off work and get home so I could play some more. Here they are in order played.

Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch

This game ended up being exactly what I hoped it would be. It had that whimsical, wondrous JRPG-from-my-childhood feel that I have been missing for so long, and I was startled to realize that a lot of that feeling merely comes from the presence of a world map. It was beautiful, and a world that I wanted to spend time in. I didn’t really get into the monster-collecting aspect of it, and stuck with a core group and strategy for the better part of the game, led by MonGod, the tankiest of tanks. I loved the combat in this game, which was active while still retaining something of that menu-based combat feel that I loved in JRPGs of old. If not for Nick’s fatigue of coaching boss battles, I would have plowed through all the post-end-of-game quests. I will do any quest that is framed as helping someone out, so the frequent-buyer style stamp cards were incredibly compelling for me. I wanted to help ALL THE PEOPLE.

 

Guacamelee

I had seen this game at Indiecade the year prior, and it won me over instantly with its aesthetic and the fact that you can transform from luchador to chicken. This is a fantastic metroid-vania style brawler, and the art and animation is delightful. The theming was spot on and the music did that weird mariachi-electronica mashup that just worked so well for the game. It had some ups and downs in co-op: the brawling was a great 2-player experience, but the exploring and platforming aspects felt better in single player. I loved how many elegant design solutions showed up, especially for combining get-to-new-places abilities with specific combat needs (the different colored shields). Also you can transform into a chicken. The only bummer in this game for me was the tired old damsel-in-distress trope. I kept waiting for them to throw a clever twist on it, but they never did :( Alas, can’t have everything.

 

Animal Crossing: New Leaf

It had been a long, long time since I bought a console specifically for a single game, but the indirect peer pressure of friends posting about their villages was too much, and before long the 3DS and Animal Crossing were mine all mine. I really liked how they toned down the guilt-tripping in this game compared to previous iterations. This made me much more excited to return to my village after a small absence, rather than being terrified of the berating I would receive at the hands of my villagers. I’ve never been much for decorating house, but I do love to help run errands for my villagers, and I did manage to find all the fossils. The Halloween event was super fun, and I still feel guilty about caving and becoming another exploitive beetle farmer. I think this game consumed me so well because it fit right into my daily routine. After work every day I would take Mr. Davis for a walk for an hour, and it was the perfect time frame for checking in, digging up my fossils, watering my plants, and taking care of day-to-day town maintenance. Surprisingly, even though it was seeing other people post about this game that compelled me to buy it, I never visited a single other person’s village.

 

Papers, Please

Oh, man. This game, you guys, this game. I feel like I’ve gushed enough about how much I love this game already, so I’ll just do a short recap. I loved how simple the actual mechanic was, and how complex they were able to make it without needing much more input. It made it incredibly accessible while still having the potential for a lot of depth. I loved how many ethical dilemmas I faced playing this game, and how they just showed up without any face-rubbing or drama, but were simple but still stirring. I love how intensely I cared about the wellbeing of my family, who were nothing more than names on a screen (and perhaps that is why they became so important to me, because my imagination filled in all the meat). This was also an incredibly intense, at times stressful co-op experience. I’m actually not sure if I could have handled the later levels alone. If you have yet to play this game, please give it a try. For me.

 

Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

Buying a 3DS for Animal Crossing suddenly made me realize that I got to be excited about the release of this game! A Link to the Past is tied for my all-time favorite Zelda, and I have fond memories of how much of an impression that game had on my life, so I was very excited about the idea that this game would take place in the same world. A Link Between Worlds was like coming home, the perfect balance of nostalgia factor and fresh new content and mechanics. It also made really good use of the 3D feature, with all of its clever puzzles that had to do with verticality in the top-down world. The pacing was delightful, and even when I perceived solutions to puzzles very quickly, the discovery was still intoxicating. I did a lot of the completionist stuff purely because I wanted to spend as much time as possible in the world, and was depressed to have finished it.

My First Ludum Dare - Postmortem

Though this was my very first Ludum Dare, and the solo competition at that, I feel like it went really well for me! (My entry can be found here) I ended the weekend happy with my game and with a nice mental tiredness that was not crippling exhaustion. I'm going to write about my process and the things I think helped make this Ludum Dare a pleasant and successful experience...

1. Preparation.

By this I mean knowing your tools and your process and feeling comfortable with them ahead of time. Since I am a professional game designer, some of this was just built-in experience by this point, but I've also been recently doing a lot of rapid prototyping at work so I was already in the "make stuff really fast" mindset before the weekend began. I think this just comes with making lots of stuff over time.

2. Rest

Back in grad school I participated in a 48 hour game jam for the XO laptop, and I approached it with the whole "stay awake as long as possible" attitude that I'd done for similar marathons in the past (24 hour comic challenge, 24 hour play festival, etc). It did a terrible number on my health and I swore off game jams at the time, but I've been re-introducing them to my life and just taking a more reasonable approach. One thing I've always admired about LD is its emphasis on being reasonable with pacing, but I was nervous to try the solo competition. I did it anyway!

This weekend I got a full 8 hours of sleep both nights, and during the day took ample breaks for food, walking my cat, and just getting away from the computer. This was a big help, because the real person doing all the work is subconscious brain, and I needed to get out of her hair on occasion to let her solve all the hard problems I ran into.

3. Planning

Though the majority of working time is spent making the game logic and creating assets, I found it really helpful to set aside time to do some planning, which is why you occasionally see workflowy popping up in my timelapse video. This planning was nothing too extensive, but doing things like outlining the structure and screen flow of the game would help me spot transitions I would need early on that I hadn't thought about (or allocated time for).

I would also jot out a rough schedule, and revise it after each break. This helped me keep in scope and know when I should take a break from iterating on game structure or bug fixing to write a song. I tried to keep this very lenient with a lot of open room, which worked out as I spent a lot of unplanned time on Saturday night addressing a physics issue that I had not anticipated.

Also, just listing out to-do action items for stuff like "sound effects needed" helped me churn through asset creation without wasting a lot of time figuring out what I needed to do next. So it may not seem intuitive to spend precious work minutes writing out a next-actions list, but I found that it helped me be more efficient on a whole over the entire weekend.

4. Let your Problems Dictate your Design

On Saturday night I ran into an issue with physics syncing. I'd wanted the "preview" mode of my game to simulate the same way each time on any machine, so it would be more of a plan-and-place puzzle. but the pausing and restarting of time was making the play-through part inaccurate and making it framerate dependent caused other issues. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to record the simulation and do playback and how to stop playback and begin recording again when you placed an object on the screen, etc. It was going to be complicated.

After a good night's sleep, I realized a much easier path would just be to change my design intent. The preview would just show a general possibility of how the ball would behave, and the goal of your placing objects would be to react to what was happening in the moment. I think it ended up being a better choice in the end, too, since one level can potentially play out a different way twice in a row. A friend of mine described it as akin to "turn-based pinball."

I was able to use the simulation recording work I'd done the previous night to do a simple replay (which had its own bugs) so no work was wasted and I was able to move on from a complicated problem to finish off the game.

5. Music Composition for Noobs

By far the most daunting part of the compo for me was creating my own music. I can code, I can draw, I can spam the "random" button in sfxr until I find something I like, and I design for a living...but music? I've never written a song in my life! Fortunately I got some fast, noobish composition tips beforehand.

Step 1: Pick a chord, any chord A-G. Look it up on the internet to find out what the notes are in the chord.

Step 2: Lay out those notes in music program of choice (I used LMMS).

Step 3: Grab the notes and reorder them and spread them all around, just keep the notes themselves the same

Step 4: Hit play. Hey that kind of sounds like it could be a thing! Adjust until it's a thing.

Step 5: Layer on top of a base track of just 1 or 2 of the notes repeating. Add in a few more layers of the same process. Pull things all around until the timing sounds like it's something.

Step 6. Put the song in your game and turn the volume down super low so even if your song is terrible, it won't be too distracting. Success!

Closing Thoughts

Again, I was really happy with what I was able to accomplish this weekend. I felt challenged and the tiredness of good mental exertion. I was even confronted with an unexpected and difficult problem during the course of my work and was able to conquer it. Overall, a fine experience!

I think my biggest thing is that I get very caught up in tuning game feedback at the expense of making more elaborate art that I know is within my abilities. I don't think that's necessarily a terrible thing, though.

Will I do Ludum Dare again? Most likely!

Thoughts on Okami

People who know me well know that Okami is my favorite game of all time. Recently, when playing through the HD release, I found myself at a particular moment in the game just before I had to stop playing to go get dinner with Nick. I was turning in a side quest, and was mentally time managing what I was going to do next – “I think before doing the next story quest I’m going to train up at the dojo on my way back to Shinshu Field and get the clover that I couldn’t get before, but I need to go to a shop and get more seed because I missed some birds back there. I wonder if I should farm up demon fangs and get that mirror teleport now or wait until after I do the next dungeon…”

It struck me how excited I was about doing ALL THE THINGS in that game. This is unusual for me, because in most games of this nature I tend to be a primary-path sort of girl. Even in Zelda games, which I enjoy very much, I’m never too concerned about finding all the heart containers or whatever. So I got to thinking, what is it about Okami specifically that makes me so excited about doing all the collections and side quests and essentially 100%ing the game?

Theory 1:

In many games, the story artificially drives my sense of urgency. I’m talking about when the story is like “oh no we must rush to the castle before it is too late!” My logic brain knows that I could go out and farm for experience, complete the secret side quest in the first area, AND finish the entire chocobo minigame series or whatever before going to the castle (and when I got there I’d still arrive just in the nick of time).

However, emotional brain doesn’t quite understand this. Emotional brain feels I need to book it to the castle as fast as I can, because something very serious is at stake. I think my tendency is to let myself get engaged in the experience to the point where emotional brain is sort of guiding things, so I readily go from story point to story point.

In Okami, the story has a lot of exciting moments, but when you get to a new place it tends to frame things as not being in too much of a rush. Your companion, Issun, will be like “you’re gonna love exploring the city, there’s so much to do! I guess we should investigate the weird thing about the queen at some point…but the city is so happenin!”

It is an ever so slight encouragement to do whatever the hell you please, framing the next story point as “yeah, we’ll get around to it.” Possibly this setup sets emotional brain at ease, and makes me much more enthusiastic about feeding all the bunnies along the coastline before actually going into the city.

Theory 2:

It’s possible that the only thing compelling me to do so much of the extra stuff in Okami is that I’m so starved for a game experience that speaks to me. I know in the back of my mind that it’ll probably be over 10 years before someone else makes a game of this scope with this amount of whimsy and personal Lisa Brown appeal, so I become desperate to squeeze every last drop out of the experience before leaving it.

What about you, internet? What games compel you to do all their extra things when comparable games do not?

Indiecade 2012

I was starting to think that I had been cursed to never again attend Indiecade, as 2 years ago I came down with the flu this time of year*, and last year it was Nick who was let's-go-to-the-hospital sick right over Indiecade.  But this year we were both in good health, and ventured down to Culver City to check out all the games.  There was lots of cool stuff, but here are some of my favorites:

Unfinished Swan
I'd seen this ages ago and forgotten about it completely, and was delighted to find it again.  The basic idea is the world is completely flat white, so it looks like a blank screen.  You throw blobs of black paint to splatter and reveal the geometry so you can find your way around.  But be careful not to over splatter paint, otherwise you'll end up with the same problem as no paint at all!


Guacamelee
This game has an amazing, delightful, and whimsical art style that reeled me in right away.  The combat is kind of quirky and unusual, but fun, though the transitions can be a little awkward, especially in co-op.  But you get to play as a luchador (or luchadora) AND can turn into a chicken!  What's not to love??


Super Space
In this 4-player asteroid-shooter, every player is attached to one ship.  The only way you can move the ship is how you propel it by your shooting.  Also you're competing to steal asteroid shots, but still have to be careful and keep the ship from crashing into the sides.  Competitive cooperative game that will instantly reveal the true nature of your friends.


Against the Wall
You pull blocks out of a wall to make platforms to get to a place.  I would have played this all day if Nick hadn't dragged me away.


Hundreds
A simple yet surprisingly intense ipad game.  Circles with numbers, press and hold the circles to make the numbers go up and the circles grow bigger.  Try and get the total from all the circles to 100.  Obstacles bounce around and will run into the circles and reduce them to 0.  The bigger the circle, the more vulnerable it is to hazards, so you have to get your timing just-so.  If I had an ipad I'd get this game in a heartbeat.  I couldn't find any video footage, but there's an old browser version of the game running around.

We also bumped into Jake Sones, who showed us his iOS prototype of a sort of match-3/defense game mashup.  It was quite fun and looked promising!

Anyway, Indiecade is lots of fun and I'm looking forward to next year.

*As a metric of how sick I was at the time: I was laying on the couch right under the A/C hoping to bring my fever down.  On the coffee table were some fries from In-n-out brought by Nick (I was in the "demand comfort food" stage of the flu).  Mr. Davis had been sitting with me, but jumped down and started to pull fries out of the bag, one by one, and eat them.  I was too weak to move.  I couldn't even raise my voice to shoo him away.  So I watched in a fevered stupor as my cat ate each and every one of my fries.

Goal Progress Report

1) Free thing in LA every month. August's free activity was the Independent Shakespeare Festival's free performance of Hamlet in Griffith Park. It was really fun, and a fantastic performance! I'm glad lots of people came out and joined in on the picnic.

Also, Insomniac's Wrap Party was at Six Flags yesterday, so I suppose that can also count as a free event. As part of the gift package they gave us all free passes to the water park to use in September, so at the very least that'll be my September free-thing. I'll try and scare up a good public event as well. Potential events include...

Chinatown Summer Nights on 9/10 (http://chinatownsummernights.com/). Seems to involve food and music.

The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy has lots of nature-related events throughout September: learning about snakes, stargazing hikes, wilderness survival skill lessons, etc. However, these are usually a bit of a drive and often parking is not free, so I'd want to get a bit more organized with a small group before doing any of them.

An Interfaith Choral Concert on 9/11

The Dubnoff Outdoor Festival on 9/24 in North Hollywood - food trucks, games, prizes, various bits of entertainment

Citywide Yard Sale in Santa Monica on 9/24

Vintage Paper Fair on 9/24 and 9/25 in Glendale (http://vintagepaperfair.com/) - old photography, pinups, brochures, post cards, stuff like that.

Redondo Pier Car Show, if you like cars, on 9/25

2) Games. Nick and I have been playing Deus Ex, and I like it very much! I'm actually doing more watching and back-seat gaming with this one, which leads me to question, does this count as playing? Perhaps I should explore back-seat gaming in an #AltDevBlogADay article

3) Sewing. I'm making things! With patterns! But I can't say what they are because they are for presents.

Goal Progress Report

1) Free Thing in LA Every Month. Since my parents were in town in July, we went down to El Pueblo and then on to Little Tokyo where a music and arts festival was going on. It mostly made me hungry for Japan, but was a nice walk, and I'd never been down near MOCA before to see all that artsy stuff, so it worked out well. The rest of July was filled with non-free events (NASL and MLG).

For August, I was thinking of hitting up the Griffith Park Free Shakespeare Festival, because my parents' visit made me homesick and it reminds me of Shakespeare in the Park in Louisville. I'm thinking of trying to catch either Love's Labour's Lost or Hamlet, either the weekend of the 13th or the 20th. If you want to come have a picnic with me, let me know!

2) Games. I have actually been playing a TON of games recently, but a lot of it has been research for work, so I don't think it counts for this goal. Other than that, I've been enjoying Outland immensely. If you haven't seen it yet, it's a really fast and snappy platformer combined with color-switching bullet hell (like Ikaruga). Unlike Ikaruga, though, the platforming aspect of it lets you pace yourself, and learn more slowly, so you get less panicky and spammy.

The other game I've been playing a lot for fun is Sanctum, which is a first-person-shooter tower defense game. I really like the solutions they came up with for constructing defenses in a first person view. It's also a very mild shooter, since once the defense starts, you usually just teleport to various locations in your map, and shoot from a stationary position. Running and gunning is entirely optional.

Meanwhile, there were a few re-releases (other than Stranger's Wrath) that I was looking forward to, but I've completely forgotten which ones they were now, doh! I guess when they pop up in the PSN store, I will remember :)

Goal Progress Report

1) Games. I've been doing pretty good on this front recently! Been playing a TON of Realm of the Mad God, which is a browser-based MMO fantasy-themed bullet hell shooter. It's extremely easy to jump in and out of, and it's not a grind to build up a character. Death is permanent, so if you die you just roll a new character. You unlock different classes as you level up the base ones, and it's just a generally great time killer. I might do a more in depth post about this.

Racettear: An Item Shop's Tale was on sale on Steam, so Nick and I have been playing that the past couple of days. It's a game where you run an item shop in an RPG, and you have to acquire good items to sell and haggle prices with customers and stuff. I think it's great!

2) Free things in LA. Still have an eye on that festival in Little Tokyo for this month, stay tuned.

3) Sewing: I am going to sew something for-reals! I'm assembling a pattern and everything! I really should acquire an iron for this, I think.

4) Plugging along. Contemplating selling my PS2 and all my games, we'll see...

Goal Progress Report

1) Free thing in LA every month: I went down to the Fiesta de las Flores at El Pueblo today, ate 2 churros (probably a mistake), watched some folkloric dances, wandered up and down Olvera Street, and took lots of photos - https://picasaweb.google.com/lisa.deanne.brown/FiestaDeLasFlores

This place is really one of my favorite spots in LA, I love it! So, free thing for June checked off, though I MAY consider going down to my CSA farm next weekend to pick blackberries. Only if I can get some folks to go with me, though.

Thinking ahead to July...
- FIFA Women's World Cup. The Goethe-Institut is broadcasting select matches for this, and I'm considering wrangling up the Insomniac soccer crowd to go watch together. Matches run from 6/26 to 7/17, so it's a little flexible. http://bit.ly/jZKpwW
- Obon Festival at the Buddhist Temple in Little Tokyo. I am a big fan of these cultural festivals, may as well add another to the list! http://bit.ly/iBcoMO

2) Video Games: More LA Noire. Now that PSN is back up, I can get Outland, but I have to get around to it.

3) Financial: I've been having little mini stuff-sales that bring in bits of cash and help me de-clutter. It helps that I'm in another "stuff purge" mode. Otherwise, just plugging along!

Starcraft Nerd

If you had told me a year ago that by the summer I would a regular e-sports watcher, I'd have called you crazy. But here I am, Wednesday-Sunday evenings, planted in front of the laptop watching Starcraft 2, and all giddy about the North American Star League finals in a few weeks. Let this be a lesson, a lot can change in a year!

Anyway, you may ask, "Lisa, there are so many great pro Starcraft gamers, how do you ever decide who to cheer for?" Good question, reader! It can be complicated, especially when you're new to watching e-sports and don't know all the players. Fortunately, I made this handy guide for how I decide who to cheer for in a Starcraft 2 match...

From Blogger Pictures

Goal Progress Report

1) Games: Nick and I played a fair ways into L.A. Noire on Monday, and I am really enjoying it. I feel like it's a sort of love-it-or-hate-it game, as it is very much like Phoenix Wright. That is, it is a highly cinematic, low-impact sort of game that it is easy to play as a pair while lazing on a couch, finding clues and identifying liars together, trading the controller back and forth, and guessing the outcome of a case well before we solve it (which I find very gratifying). I am anxious to get back to it, but I would like to continue playing alongside Nick, and as it is crunch time for the programmers on R3, it may be a bit yet.

2) Financial: Today was a glorious day! I sent in the final payment for my small private student loan. GOAL ACHIEVED! Now all that money will in turn go towards the last big beast of a federal loan. I'm working on ways to break it down into short-term goals for myself, so that I can stay focused and pay it off as efficiently as possible. With my current budget, I can be debt-free by October of 2014, but I feel like I can keep pushing that further and further.

3) Free Thing in LA Every Month: When at the soap box race, we swung down to El Pueblo for a bite to eat, and I noticed banners for La Fiesta de Las Flores, which takes place June 18. I'm definitely going to hit this up, but am still perusing EyeSpyLA for other free events of interest in June.

Goal Progress Report

1) Sew 3 things. 3 of 3 complete! I have reached my goal of sewing 3 things with the sewing machine this year! I decided to try and think of more things that I could use my scrap fabric for, and ended up making a sort of hanging pouch to keep my books and notepads in when taking a bath. Just because I've completed this goal doesn't mean I'll close up the sewing machine for good, but I will stop reporting on it unless I do another project.

2) Free thing in LA each month: Yesterday, Josh Noble and I went down to see the Redbull Soapbox Race, which was really fun. It was craaaaaaazy crowded. The entries were judged on speed, creativity, and showmanship, so all the cars were decorated in ridiculous ways. My favorites were a food truck soapbox car and one that was done up to look like a Mexican ice cream cart. There was even an Angry Birds entry, and feathers flew everywhere as it zoomed down the course. There were a few spectacular crashes, too! We didn't end up seeing all the entries (there were 40!) but it was a fun time and we ended up grabbing lunch in Chinatown and eating at El Pueblo, which is fast becoming one of my favorite spots in LA.

3) Games. Still slacking on this, as I've been playing League of Legends pretty much exclusively all month. It's going to be hard to re-focus until after Gold, but I do still intend to get Outland once the PSN store is back up.

4) Financial: Nothing exciting to report here, just plugging along.

Goal Progress Update - lost count

This is what happens when the Gold deadline approaches, I fall off the wagon! Here’s an update all the same.

1) Free thing in LA Every Month: Alas, I fell off the wagon and missed an event for April. I had one lined up - a free pass to the Renn Faire, but when the day came Nick and I were so low-energy that we decided it was best to stay in. However, I am determined to make May count. Here are some ideas

Tomorrow - NASA/JPL open house. Science! http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/events/open-house.cfm

Friday, May 20 - Jazz and Steel Drums. I like steel drums. http://bit.ly/mErrAv

Memorial Day Weekend - DOG SHOW. I have a secret, guilty pleasure for watching dog shows. The genetic manipulation just utterly fascinates me! I need someone dog-nerdy as me to come, too http://bit.ly/ioKx4u

2) Sew 3 things. 2 of 3 complete. That’s right, I completed my second sewn thing! It’s a pretty simple project, a sachet I made as an apartment-warming gift for Josh when he moved. It’s filled with dried lavender leaves from last year’s herb garden, and dried thyme buds from this year’s. Simple enough that I need to buy another lavender plant and make more (last year’s plant didn’t make it). I also have an idea for project number 3, but it will actually require me to go buy fabric instead of using stuff from my scrap pile.

3) 20 minutes of games every other day. I’ve really fallen off the wagon with this one. Part of it was that my game plans were disrupted with the PSN outage - no Outland and no Portal 2 (I wanted to get it through steam to get a free PC copy), and no updates on HD Stranger’s Wrath. The other part is that Nick and I have been watching the NASL Starcraft II matches, which just makes us want to play Starcraft II. Oh, and League of Legends. Lots of League of Legends. Fortunately, PSN seems to be stirring with signs of life, so Outland may be soon within my grasp.

4) Financial. Lots of frugality for April. We had an easter egg hunt at work, and amidst all the candy, one of my eggs had a Target gift card (groceries!) and another had a free commissary lunch. I am super excited about paying off the private student loan next month, which I guess makes me a big ole nerd.

Weekly Goal Progress Report #12

Missed a week. Oh well! Forging on...

1) One free thing in LA per month. I think I'm going to take a rest on the events and instead check out the California Science Center either this weekend or next.

2) Financial: Been stickin close to the budget, and as such I will pay off my small private student loan in June, which is a big deal to me. Otherwise, budgeting isn't terribly exciting.

3) Sew 3 Things. 1 or 3 completed. Some mending, but no updates on the next project. I contemplated making a rain coat for Mr. Davis, but that might be crossing the line. Tips for good beginner sewing projects welcome!

4) 20 Minutes of Games Every Other Day: I've been a busy gamer, recently! Still charging through Okamiden and enjoying it immensely, and I'm dabbling about in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, plotting to try the multiplayer eventually. If I had the time to devote to games that I did in high school and college, I feel I would be the sort of person to just play the crap out of Assassin's Creed. Meanwhile, I hadn't played League of Legends or Starcraft II in awhile, so I took them off the "doesn't count" list. Well, now they have to go right back on! The HD Stranger's Wrath is supposed to come out this month, though I haven't heard any updates on release dates or price. Still, that is the next game on my radar.

Weekly Goal Progress Report #11

Switching up the order to keep things fresh

1) 20 Minutes of Games Every Other Day: I think I've reached my limit with Lost in Shadow, unfortunately. At first its slow and cautious pace seemed fitting with the mood and the teaching of mechanics, but it's stretching on for too long. I'm certain there's some sort of changing moment to be had, but I'm tired and anxious to move on to other games. Maybe I'll come back to it someday. Meanwhile, Okamiden came and I've been playing the crap out of it! I enjoy it very much, and it warrants a post all to itself. More lunchtime Minecraft this week as well.

2) Financial: I did my annual credit report (which you can and should do once a year, here) to make sure my credit card was closed properly, which it was! I found another error on the report, though, so I submitted a dispute and it's already been cleared and removed from my report. It was a way faster turnaround than what I was expecting!

3) Sew 3 Things. 1 or 3 completed. No updates here.

4) One free thing in LA per month: Starting to think ahead to April. I haven't run across any events I'm interested in yet, but there are still several free museums I am interested in, so perhaps I'll check one of those out in April. Ideas include the California Science Center, MOCA, and the Museum of Television and Radio. Sound interesting to anyone?

Weekly Goal Progress Report #10

Switching up the order to keep things fresh

1) Sew 3 things: 1 of 3 complete. Just some mending this week, as I got my set of bobbins. I think that'll go a long way in encouraging me to sew more, since changing thread when you only have 1 bobbin is a pain. I think I'm getting the hang of the darning foot, but sometimes my thread breaks so I might not have it attached properly. I really wish I knew someone in LA who knows sewing machines inside and out so they could come give me a crash course in these attachments. LA friends? Any tailors or seamstresses?

2) 20 Minutes of Games Every Other Day: More Magicka! I think we've just about beaten the adventure mode, but I'm not sure. I've also been Minecrafting a bunch lately. The latest updates fixed monster hit detection on multiplayer servers, so the Insomniac server is much safer. Also been playing Shining Force, which I don't think counts since it's a game I've already played. BUT! My copy of Okamiden should get here soon!

3) One free thing in LA per month: Oh man, the kite festival was amaaaaaaaaazing. There were so many kites in the sky of all shapes and sizes and types! It was beautiful! I particularly liked the dragon kites. The atmosphere on the beach was really nice, too. Everyone was super chill, and maybe your string got tangled on another kite but whatevs, there were a billion kites up there so how could anyone complain! They had a big 25ft wide kite that had a cord so thick that you could see it all the way up to where it attached. My favorite was a teeny tiny butterfly shaped kite that someone was just dragging along behind them on a short string, and it still fluttered up in the air like a pet! So cool. Definitely going again next year.

4) Financial: I updated my annual mileage with my auto insurance company, since I haven't driven back and forth across the country in a few years, and they sent me a reimbursement check on my insurance payment for the lower mileage. Nice! I wasn't expecting it to kick in until the next time my premium was due.

Weekly Goal Progress Report #9

1) Financial: It was a tough race, but I'm deciding to go with Lockheed. The main reason is, even though USAA sounds more awesome, there are a few little things I need to be able to do that they can't, and everyone's response is that they recommend to also keep a small local bank account in addition. Well, the small local bank account is the one that I'm looking for! So, credit union for now, though USAA definitely sounds super awesome.

2) One free thing in LA per month: Kite Festival is tomorrow! Nick and I also snuck down to the Lantern Festival last Saturday for our Anniversary. Got to see some shadow puppetry and a dragon dance, very cool stuff!

3) 20 Minutes of Games Every Other Day: Finished Stacking. SUCH a delightful game! I would recommend it to anyone with a PS3 or XBox to buy, it is certainly worth it. It's very low key to get through the whole story, but there are plenty of extra puzzles to solve for the completionists. Also, we've been playing Magicka this week, which is fun and hilarious! But it keeps overheating my laptop, which is unfortunate

4) Sew 3 things: 1 of 3 complete. Nothing to report here, though I did order some extra bobbins. Woo.

Weekly Goal Progress Report #8

1) Financial: Bank of America started blocking connections to Mint.com, which annoys me, and I'd always felt bad about having an account with those jerks anyway, so I'm investigating local credit unions to switch my checking account to. So far, Lockheed FCU is in the lead, but I'm still collecting opinions and recommendations.

2) One free thing in LA per month: For March, I've settled on the Festival of the Kite! I'll set up a facebook event like I did for the dragon parade, that seemed to work well enough

3) 20 Minutes of Games Every Other Day: Still playing lots of Lost in Shadow. It remains simple platforming and puzzle solving, but I still have a hunch that something is going to change in an exciting way, so I'm holding out.

4) Sew 3 things: 1 of 3 complete. Today, I experimented with the darning foot to mend a hole in a pair of pants. I've never used any of my sewing machine's attachments before, so it was a bit of an experiment. The hole is mended, though it's a bit of a patchy hack job. I feel like I have quite a piece of machinery here that I don't appreciate.

Weekly Goal Progress Report #7

1) Financial: Wrapping up February's budget on a good clip. Cutting back on eating out is tricky, but hopefully with Saturday's grocery shopping I can add some variety to my foods to bring for lunch (I want to make a pork pie, which should freeze well in pieces. YUM).

2) One free thing in LA per month: Time to start thinking about March. There are several events I have my eye on, so maybe my LA friends could help me choose! Here they are:

Chinese Lantern Festival at El Pueblo, Saturday, March 5. They'll have LION DANCES so this is super tempting!

Long Beach Mardi Gras (what is it with Long Beach and the New Orleans culture stuff anyway?), including a parade, on Saturday, March 5

The Festival of the Kite at Redondo Pier, on Sunday, March 13

St. Patrick's Day Festival in Costa Mesa, Saturday, March 13. Looks like a lot of dance troupes and musicians.

LA Friends, I await your input!

3) 20 Minutes of Games Every Other Day: Started Lost in Shadow this week. I am enjoying it so far for its aesthetics alone. So far the gameplay is pretty basic platforming and environmental puzzle solving, but I keep getting taught new things that make me think the game is going to ramp up. We'll see!

4) Sew 3 things: 1 of 3 complete

Weekly Goal Progress Report #6

1) Financial: After some budget reworking and tightening up a few categories here and there, I realized that I can actually beat my 5-year student loan payoff plan and pay them off in 3 1/2 years. Gogogo!

2) One free thing in LA per month: I actually got in an extra bonus free thing this month. At work the HR department gets tickets to various venues, and every so often calls on us to nominate someone who has done something awesome to

give the tickets to. So, apparently someone thought I was awesome! Nick and I went and saw the LA Philharmonic at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and it was very nice. Especially because we were able to take the metro and avoid driving in the rain :)

3) 20 Minutes of Games Every Other Day: Slacking on this goal this week. I played a bit of stacking, and have been playing Minecraft at lunch every day. I really need to start up Lost in Shadow!

4) Sew 3 things: SUCCESS! I completed Mr. Davis's kitty quilt, thus accomplishing 1 of the 3 things to sew this year! It's a little patchy, but he doesn't seem to min

d:

Weekly Goal Progress Report #5

I missed a week! Curses! Oh well, moving on!

1) Financial: Since eating out is my Achilles Heel when it comes to spending money, I made some huge batches of food that can be frozen and eaten over the month (the lentil soup and the kimchi borscht). I also nabbed some knitting needles and extra yarn on Freecycle.

2) One free thing in LA per month. The Golden Dragon Parade was a big hit! There were lots of dragons and lion dances and that was fine by me. Photos here. There was also an awesome moment at the end where they set off a bajillion firecrackers at once. There are no photos of that because I was too busy gawking. The parade was really long, but fortunately there was this fast food dim sum style place right next to our spot, so we feasted on dumplings. It was a smashing success!

3) 20 Minutes of Games Every Other Day. More Donkey Kong, and LOTS more League of Legends and StarJeweled. The latter two are moved to my "doesn't count" list. WoW is moved off that list, since I haven't played since my Cataclysm binge over Christmas Break. I also got Trino off Steam, since it was made by some of my ETC friends. Using the mouse to control it isn't so bad, except that it's really easy to get stressed out and accidentally click outside the game window. I also got Stacking off of PSN, which is wonderfully charming. How can a game about matryoshka dolls not be?

4) Sew 3 things: Alas, I'm slacking on this one. I have the fabric cut and measured for Mr. Davis's blanket, and I have the batting, but I have yet to fire up the sewing machine. Meanwhile, I have picked knitting back up, but that doesn't count for this goal.