1 year with an electric car (2017 Chevy Volt)

• Yes, I still love it and I'm realizing that an electric car would work for more people than you might think
• It has a battery large enough to run about 50 miles, then it starts the gas engine to recharge the battery. I've used 14 gallons of gas total, to go just under 7000 miles, saving me roughly $1000 from my SUV. That includes electricity cost of a couple hundred.

• 94% electric according to the excellent voltstats.net that uses OnStar data if you opt in.
• I've definitely gotten a feel for how far I can go on a charge, and what types of things will drain the battery faster. The heater and driving over 65 are the two biggest killers. 
• I can get as low as 40 miles of range in the winter and as high as 70 miles in nice spring/fall weather
• If I know I'll be driving further than the electric range, I try to put it in "Hold" mode to use gas at highway speeds instead of in stop and go driving in the city since it's more efficient that way, but the car would be fine if I never even thought about it.
• I burned more gas than I probably needed to last winter before I found the setting to lower the ERDTT (Engine Running Due To Temperature) threshold down to 15F instead of 32F
• I've found that the onboard 3.6kW charger is too slow to really bother plugging in while out on the go unless I'll be there for more than an hour (or if it makes the difference between me burning gas for that day)
• I often find chargers near where I'm going in KC, but a lot of the time they're just far enough away that it's not worth walking (also see above).
• I've joked with friends about plugging in at their house while visiting for a few hours but never actually done it. Still doesn't seem socially acceptable in 2018 in Kansas.
• Still using level 1 (normal electrical outlet) at home every night or two. Usually just 8A instead of 12A since I haven't had the time to run a dedicated circuit and I don't want to trip the GFI since a chest freezer is also out there in the garage.
• Very few times where I needed more charging than overnight at home on a normal outlet gave me
• Only a handful of trips longer than the ~50 mile range
• Having a new baby in the spring (that hates her car seat) meant that I drove less in the summer than I probably would have otherwise
• I could have gotten a Bolt instead and been fine. I was worried about driving 150mi. to the Lake of the Ozarks and back, not being able to charge while there, which would exceed the battery capacity. But I haven't even done that. Still the anemic non-Tesla fast charger situation in the midwest makes me a little bit glad that I didn't. Well that and the ~$5000 price difference in the Volt's favor.
• Since I bought in December of 2017 I got my full $7500 tax credit when we did our taxes earlier this year
• Considering taking it in to the dealership for the first service. Oil life is still at 52% (whatever that means) since I have so few gas miles but I'm getting close to 7500 miles for the recommended tire rotation.
• I tend to not use the Sport mode much. I tend to get more satisfaction seeing my efficiency numbers than the acceleration plastering me in the back of the seat.
• I usually drive in L "gear" except when I'm on the highway. I like the combination of regenerative braking when I let off the accelerator and even more on demand with the paddle behind the steering wheel. This also seems safer in icy weather since you just automatically start slowing down when you let off.
• But D "gear" is nice for when my wife drives it and just wants to treat it like a regular car and not think about crazy things like regen
• The back seat sucks
• I originally hoped that I could stick a car seat in the 5th center seat, but neither of the ones I have will fit since the plastic of the car seat and the silly cup holder overlap.
• Android Auto and Apple Carplay both work well 90% of the time, but sometimes the system doesn't seem to recognize that a device is plugged in. Sometimes re-plugging it fixes it. Factory and 3rd party cables both have the problem. I've heard other people complain about this on Volt & new Leaf as well.
• Cruise control sometimes just won't turn on and needs the car to be restarted to fix it. Not always an option when you don't realize this until you're on the highway. Similar with the turn signal sounds. I've seen both of these reported on the GM Volt forum.
• I've heard complaints about the Bolt's front seats being too narrow. The Volt's seem fine, but one very minor complaint is that the heated seat area isn't quite wide enough. On a really cold day you can definitely feel where the heated section ends on the outsides.
• Rear visibility is kind of terrible and I really have to rely on the backup camera and the rear cross traffic alert.
  

Why I pre-ordered a Nintendo Switch

While the short version is "I have to play the newest Zelda game!" I'll try to give a list of justifications for a new toy that some people think is overpriced or irrelevant.

First, some quick video game system background is probably in order. I have a PS4 and have been thinking about adding a PS VR to it. But the $500 price tag is hard for me to justify for something that doesn't seem to have much more than a few cool tech demos. I have an original 3DS that I (very) occasionally play Mario Kart with friends. I've been somewhat interested in a few of the Wii U games that came out over the years, but never enough to justify the cost of that failing system.

So a Switch gives me basically everything I would want out of a Wii U (Mario, Zelda, play without taking up a TV) AND act as a 3DS replacement for a price that's less than PS VR. I worry a little bit about eventual 3rd party support, but I'm okay with it being a Nintendo first party machine. Anything beyond that would just be gravy. I don't care much about streaming services on Switch, I probably have 7 other devices that I can watch Netflix or Amazon Video on. Oh, and I'd be more likely to hand my still-a-bit-too-young-for-video-games kid a Nintendo controller than strap on a VR headset to her. That's a pretty weak rationalization I know, but whatever...Zelda!

I donated bone marrow

I didn't actually tell a ton of people, but yeah, a few weeks back I donated bone marrow since I was a good match with a stranger with a life threatening blood disease like leukemia. Not the 'stick a huge needle in your bones and extract marrow' type, more like the 'take shots for a few days and give blood' type. There was a bit more to it than that, but you get the idea.

Okay, let's back up to the beginning. Several years ago shortly after I got married, my wife's friend's dad went through some battles with leukemia. He needed a transplant or two and she convinced my wife and I that we should sign up for a marrow registry (Be the Match) to help out people like him. We swabbed our cheeks and sent it off in the mail. It was quick, it was free, and we didn't really think much of it after that. Many years later, I got a call that said I was a good match with a ~70 year old guy I didn't know with a similar disease. I had lots of questions of course, but I soon decided to donate. I figured I'm relatively young and healthy, why not help somebody? What really sealed the deal was the description of the process. It's called apheresis and really similar to giving blood plasma. They hook you up to an IV and a machine that separates your blood, then feeds it back to you, no surgery or anesthesia necessary. Wait, but I thought you gave bone marrow, you say? Well...sort of. I technically gave blood stem cells, which is what the shots from the days before told my body to start producing more of. They took out all the extra blood stem cells with apheresis and I was back to normal pretty much by the end of the day.

Let's see, other questions that people ask about? I did have to travel for the donation. I got on a plane on a Sunday night, did the donation on Monday morning, and flew back Tuesday morning. I was pretty exhausted that Monday afternoon, but I was actually feeling pretty good by that night. The shots for 5 days leading up to it were actually a bit more of a pain than the recovery. Since I had an excess of blood stem cells, I had some pain and stiffness in my lower back, and an occasional mild headache. During the actual apheresis they set me up to watch a few movies and it was a bit uncomfortable at times, but never really painful.

I'm looking forward to hearing how it went for the recipient. Usually that's around a month after the donation. Different organizations have different policies on contact between donors and recipients, but Be the Match doesn't allow contact until a year after, I believe. All I know about him is age, gender, and his disease. All he knows about me is age and gender. I'm sure they have good reasons for their rules, but it was almost too disconnected for me. I had to remind myself a few times that I was doing this for some guy out there that was relying on me. He had to go through severe chemotherapy right before my donation to completely kill off his immune system so that he'd be able to accept my stem cells. He actually gets my immune system and blood type after this. If I had backed out at that point he'd almost surely have died. Even with the donation the odds are around 50% survival, but that's literally his best option.

I decided that my motivation for doing this had a lot to do with my wife, 2 year old daughter, and my dad. I really like spending time with those girls and I'd want someone else to get as much time as possible with the people they love. Plus I want her to grow up in a world where people do stuff like this for other people. My dad died from cancer more than 10 years ago. I would have loved to have the ability for some kind of transplant to cure him but that wasn't an option in his case.

You might think about signing up. If you're under 40, the entry and cheek swab kit from Be the Match is free. They're slightly more likely to call if you're younger and male, just because men have more marrow and have more to donate. Minorities and people of mixed race are in even more demand, since the percentages of donors in the database mirrors the population as a whole.

Dead Space 3

It's not good. I looooooved the first two. This one sucks. Too much action and the dudes are bullet sponges, even on Easy. I sent it back after two hours. That is all.

Catch Up

I've played a few games lately but don't feel like making a post for each one. I picked up Dishonored and Call of Duty Black Ops. I really haven't been liking the stealth in Dishonored. It feels like I can't really tell if I'm going to be seen or not. And of course as soon as they see you, you're pretty much dead.
Black Ops is fun, but man, you know the part of the action movie where stuff is blowing up all around you, and there's dudes shooting in every direction for a minute or two? That's the WHOLE GAME of Black Ops. It got to where I learned not to play it before I go to sleep since it kind of put me on edge.
I also played through almost all of Resident Evil: Revelations for the 3DS. It was okay, I guess. The voice acting was terrible and the story was kind of a throwaway, but it was occasionally pretty, and it was something to do on the portable system.
Okay, just this weekend I plowed through all of The Last of Us. Holy crap that game is good. The story was excellent, and the gameplay was a lot of fun. It had decent stealth and a great variety of types of play and locations. So when I gush about the story and voice acting, don't think I'm glossing over the other stuff. It's the kind of game that made me stay up late to finish more of it, think about it while I went to sleep, then start playing again first thing when I woke up. So, so good. They made some really unexpected choices with the direction of the story at some points. Which just made me like it even more. Okay, I'll stop typing so you can just go play this one.

Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon

I was finally able to snag a copy of Luigi's Mansion from GameFly. The timing worked out pretty well too, since I headed out on a long weekend trip shortly after I got it. I did a lot of ghost-sucking on the three hour flight, if you know what I mean.

I actually took the GameFly return envelope thing with me thinking I'd finish it up on the trip and drop it in a mailbox and have a new game waiting for me when I got home. That didn't quite work out. This time it had nothing to do with GF shipping and everything to do with the last levels being really tough and complicated. Also, it was a much longer game than I was expecting. On the last night in our hotel room, I was thinking "sweet, this is the last level." But no, there was a whole 'nother section to go. Don't you just hate it when games give you your money's worth?

The game itself was charming, occasionally clever, and rarely frustrating. I sort of wanted to record the sound of Luigi's (old school phat) Nintendo DS "ringing" when the professor called him and make it my ringtone. Also hearing him say "yellllo?" every time always made me chuckle.                                                      

I had played very little of the original Gamecube version, so I can't say how much it compares to that. But I managed to enjoy myself pretty much all the way through the 14 hours or so it took me to get through the story mode. There's also a multiplayer mode that works either in person (with download play) or over wifi. I put in a little bit of time through that, but I mainly focused on the story.

I can't say it was especially challenging since I went through 90% of the game without even knowing how to dodge or jump while sucking up ghosts (the "combat" portion of the game). But the difficulty ramps up nicely towards the end for some of the boss fights and the sheer number of ghosts that get thrown at you for one brutal (timed) level.

In summary, if you have a 3DS you probably ought to get this one. As for me I'm on to the next one, Tomb Raider on the 360 and I'm enjoying it quite a bit.

(Editors note: I typed this one on my Nexus 4 with a Bluetooth keyboard, because, hey, why not?)

Far Cry 3

I'm not sure why I thought I might like Far Cry 3. I played a few hours of 2 and gave up because everyone was shooting at me wherever I went. It got pretty frustrating if you're just trying to get to point B and you get distracted by dudes shooting at you. Then you die. Repeat times...(more than I'd like to count). 

The third installment didn't have nearly as much of that, maybe because of the more prevalent fast travel to a location. But I just wasn't having much fun with it. Maybe because of the laughable voice acting and story? Or possibly because I was supremely bad at the game. Low level bad guys would continually take me out and I couldn't figure out a way to make my character handle it any better other than ramping down the difficulty setting.

You'd think a game that let me drive around on boats and four wheelers to my heart's content would grab me more, but it didn't. I didn't think the vehicle controls were much fun since it felt like the land vehicles were driving on a giant sheet of ice. 

I did some fun open world things like riding in a hang glider, but I think after just coming off of Sleeping Dogs I'd had my fill of open world settings. 

Next up is something completely different: Luigi's Mansion for the 3DS. I've heard good things.

Sleeping Dogs

I finished Sleeping Dogs today. I almost gave up on it a few hours in when I got frustrated with it being almost a rhythm game. You see, it's basically Grand Theft Auto in Hong Kong. But there's a much bigger emphasis on melee fighting than GTA. And you usually need to take out a group of about 6 or 8 dudes at a time. They invariably get on either side of you and interrupt you when you're punching their buddy. Rude, I know. But you start out without many special moves that will give you much of an advantage. I failed one mission about 10 times in a row before I changed very little and suddenly passed it. Gaining experience and new moves was a slow process, but I eventually got used to it. Compared to the shooting and driving sections, the "punching dudes" part of the game was actually the most fun in the long run.

Another thing worth pointing out is that since it's in Hong Kong, you drive on the left side of the road. I can't tell you how many times this messed me up. I was constantly pulling out of alleys into oncoming traffic or carjacking somebody on the wrong side of the car. Speaking of that, once you get to a boat, the steering wheel is on the left, opposite of the cars. But boats typically have the steering wheel on the right (for some reason) in the U.S. Anyway, maybe that's accurate and boats in Hong Kong are actually like that.

The story is fairly interesting and it's refreshing to see a game in a sort of new setting with something other than a white male protagonist. Of course they all speak English, only throwing in some Chinese phrase every once in a while.


I'm glad I stuck with it, I was entertained. Not sure what game is up next. Maybe I'll finally get to Tomb Raider. In the meantime I started New Super Mario Bros. 2 on the 3DS. It's sort of okay, like I expected. Not nearly as impressive as Super Mario 3D Land. For some reason that one really got its claws in me and I wanted to collect everything. I don't think I envision that happening in NSMB2.

Zelda: Wind Waker

This won't be a full review because I doubt I'll make it through the full game before my next GameFly game shows up (Sleeping Dogs is on the way). I've had a vague craving to play this game again for a while now and things lined up to allow me to play it in the last few days. It's still incredibly charming, and I'm over my "what is the cartoon bullshit that they've done to Zelda!?" phase. Or maybe it helped that I played two more fairly good Zelda games with this art style on the DS so I've had time to get used to it.
It holds up surprisingly well for coming out over 8 years ago. I'm playing it on the Wii and it decided to turn on progressive scan (480p?) on the 1080p TV I've got it hooked up to. The only thing that looks bad is when things that aren't in the foreground are a bit blurry. The only frustrating thing has been the controls. I've played a ton of first and third person games in a 3D space since this game came out. Let's just say there's been a lot of standardization and improvement. I keep wanting to use the right "analog stick" to move the camera in a way that would feel at home in a Gears of War or Mass Effect game. Nope. And there's a surprising amount of making sure Link is lined up _just right_ to make a jump or something. Even in the beginning levels.
So maybe I'll keep going back to this game when I have the chance. We'll see. I did like that it's been long enough since I've played it that I really felt myself getting into the role of a young kid on a tiny island. I could almost smell the sea salt in the air when I climbed up a cliff and looked out at the ocean.

Paper Mario Sticker Star

My latest GameFly game was Paper Mario Sticker Star. http://www.giantbomb.com/paper-mario-sticker-star/3030-31755/ (Sorry for the lack of hyperlink, I'm trying out the Blogger iPad app with a bluetooth keyboard and I can't figure out how to, ya know, hyperlink.)

When I first started it up, the cartridge still had a previous renter's data in there. The saved game seemed to be near the end, and was at 18 hours of playtime. 18 hours!? There's no way I can put that much time into a silly Mario 3DS game. But after an hour or so I was really looking forward to spending that much time in the funny little world it creates.

Most of the games in the Paper Mario series can be described as RPG-lite and this one is no exception. You use items on enemies in a turn-based battle that deal some amount of damage. If you press the A button at just the right times you can deal more damage or avoid taking some damage. Pretty simple. There's a little bit of strategy with pairing the right items or type of attack with the right enemy, but there's not much to that. The boss fights can get a bit more complicated since you'll usually want to save your more powerful, rarer stickers (attacks) for them. Picking the right one in the right order is the key there.

Other than that you just have to make your way around in the world and find things that will let you progress to the next section, adventure game-style. This is where the game sometimes falls flat. I spent a lot of time looking at a walkthrough to tell me where to go next since the game didn't always make it very clear. Several times, I had been to the place I needed to go and tried the thing I needed to do, but not in _exactly_ the right way. That can be pretty frustrating.

I got most of the way through the game (about 16 hours in) before I got tired of the tedium of "go here, do this, come back." I think level 4-3, the haunted mansion level was what finally broke me. Don't get me wrong, it was well done and pretty funny, but there was a _lot_ of walkthrough looking on that one.

While I wait for the next game I started up Zelda, Wind Waker. I'm playing the Gamecube disc on the Wii, using the trusty old Wavebird wireless Gamecube controller. I knew I kept those around for a reason.

Bioshock Infinite and the return of Gamefly

I started back up on Gamefly and managed to get Bioshock Infinite about the time it came out a couple weeks ago. It took me about a week to blaze through the (roughly 12 hour campaign) on Easy difficulty. I played it quickly for one, because I'm back on the "time is money" when it comes to games idea. But also because I was enjoying it so dang much.

The world they create is beautiful. The sounds of the world and UI are familiar but consistently great. The visuals are like that too. It's really a great job of creating something that's at the same time believable and unbelievable. A lot of the sounds and cues will be familiar to players of the first two games. Which is a good thing. In fact, and I can safely say this without spoiling anything, there's a few pretty excellent callbacks to the first game in the ending sequences of Infinite.

As for GameFly, lets just say it was targeted e-mail marketing at it's best. They still have my e-mail address, of course, and they've been pretty good about not sending me too much annoying crap. So when I got a note that said there's a new shipping facility in Kansas City I thought pretty hard about signing up again. That the first month would only cost me a dollar was just gravy. If you'll remember from before, one of my biggest complaints about them was the terrible shipping times. I would typically go for a week of dropping a game in the mail before getting another one. I knew that Netflix had a KC shipping facility and knew how much of a difference that could make. As for queue management, I still don't think they're nearly up to par with Netflix, since the second game I got was down near the 9 or 10 position since all the other, more popular games were unavailable. Both the PS3 and 360 versions of Tomb Raider were in there, and that game's been out for a month or two. What gives, Gamefly? But maybe it's not an entirely fair comparison since games cost so much more than movies. We'll see how it goes.

So my next game up is Paper Mario Sticker Star. Something that looked sort of interesting, but mainly just gives me a reason to use my 3DS. I've had trouble finding a lot of reasons to do that. I played through most of the first party Nintendo stuff that they've put out, but the new Castlevania: Lords of Shadow game is the first 3rd party game that I've enjoyed. I liked most all of the 10 hours it took me to finish the story in that one. Aside from me wanting to scream "Dammit, Dracula!" (spoilers! Well, sort of) a few times towards the end, I had a lot of fun with it.

Halo 4, continued

This weekend I had planned on replaying Zelda, Wind Waker until I realized that I didn't have the disc. I must have loaned it to somebody and forgot about it. I'm looking at you, Craig.

But since that fell through, I figured I'd make use of my free month of Xbox Live Gold with some Spartan Ops (a Halo 4 play mode). It's cooperative or solo, but I've been playing the first 5 episodes solo. It's a weird mix of the old Firefight and competitive multiplayer. By that I mean you have tons of dudes you have to kill, but they stay dead every time you respawn. Which is different than the campaign. So sometimes I just plan on getting killed 5 or 6 times in a row when a ton of dudes all come out at once in a big open area. As long as I take down one or two before I die, I don't feel so bad. I don't know though, maybe I'm playing it wrong?

Anyway, I thought I'd post about it as I wait for episodes 6-10 to download (36% complete). Oh, that's another thing, this game is really chewing up my limited hard drive space. I'm still using a 20 gig version and just being careful about what I keep around. I typically have about 7 gigs free, just enough to install a game if I know I'll be playing it a lot. But this has had two separate installs of about 2 gigs a piece. And I never know what stuff will run well on the 16 GB USB memory stick I have stuck in there. Basically, I"m just trying to limp along on this hardware until the new stuff comes out in the fall.

Winter game catch up

Almost 3 months since my last post. A new Dave Record! I think. I don't feel like looking it up. Anyway, I've played a few games but only one or two have really stood out.

I picked up Halo 4 and immediately realized that I'm not very good at Halo. This is without ever even connecting to Xbox Live to play other humans. This is just getting destroyed over and over by the computer. So I dropped it down to Normal difficulty from Heroic and carried on. I wouldn't have said I loved it at the time. Not nearly as much as I loved Halo 3. But I apparently loved it enough to play through it again on Heroic once I finished. So maybe it gets a solid B overall. I still need to try Spartan Ops at some point. It sounds like it's sort of a single/multiplayer hybrid. I suppose I could stomach that.

And for something completely different that grabbed a hold of me for a week or two: 10000000. A silly little iOS game that's a combination dungeon runner and frantic match 3 puzzler. All of this in 8-bit throwback graphics (even more so if you play the iPhone version at double resolution on an iPad like I did). It sort of reminded me of the fantastic Henry Hatsworth game which had you sliding blocks around on the lower screen and platforming on the top screen. 10000000 solely has you sliding blocks, but you need to match different things depending on what's going on up near the top of the screen. It's called 10 million since that's the number on the dungeon wall where your guy starts out that says "Freedom: 10000000." That's it, that's your whole motivation. Get 10 million points and your guy goes free. You upgrade your sword, etc. in an attempt to get more points faster. Listen, I can't fully explain why I liked it, but it's probably worth your time.

I was about to wrap this up when I remembered that I made my way through another one in it's entirety, XCOM: Enemy Unknown. That's what happens when you don't write for so long. You forget about games that you loved. Look, I can't really do this game justice. I liked the strategy of plotting out my moves with no time constraint. I also liked the slow leveling up, RPG-style. I also had to get this game out of my house as soon as I could since it sort of took over my life. As soon as I finished I considered playing it again on a harder difficulty. But that seemed like crazy talk and I took it back to Matt the next day.

Wireless

UPDATE: I wrote this over a week ago, but just now realized that Blogger's "schedule a post later" never actually posted.

I knew it had been a long time since I'd written here, but I didn't realize it had been almost half a year. Whoops. Part of the reason for that is that I haven't been playing a ton of games since I canceled GameFly. Don't get me wrong, I've still been playing things occasionally. But I haven't really been diving into a game like I did when I felt like I was "on the clock" with a rented game. Time is money in that situation and now that I've been buying games outright, I tend to take my time. 

Another reason is that to blog, I have to be at home and have my laptop on. I hardly ever bother to switch on my (aging) laptop since I have a phone and tablet that are instant-on and much easier to walk around the house with. Related to this, keeping up with news on phones & tablets is kind of a hobby for me. Sort of taking the place of keeping up with news on videogames if you're going by what's in my Google Reader compared to a year or two ago. With this in mind I thought I'd write a bit about what I've been doing with that lately since it's way too much text for twitter. Feel free to skip this post if you don't care. I'll get back to videogames eventually. Probably.

Still reading? Ok, well I've been on T-Mobile for over a decade. It's been fairly decent for the most part, but in the last few years when everyone switched to data-centric smartphones they've been falling behind. Not being able to sell a phone with an "i" at the start of it is not something that I really care about, but it's sort of embarassing for the company and a big deal to lots of customers that are leaving in droves. Also, the TMO data network itself is falling behind everyone else's. LTE is still a year away and if you get far from a major city or highway, you're on dialup modem speeds. That basically means text-only internet and don't even bother trying to upload anything.

I've been frustrated with this and approaching the end of my contract with them so I wanted to check out some other options. Since I have an unlocked Galaxy Nexus that works just fine on both AT&T and TMO, I thought I'd try AT&T. But AT&T is really expensive. So when I heard about Straight Talk wireless (that just uses AT&T's network but for much lower prices) I jumped at it. You also have the option to use TMO's network, but that wouldn't really do me any good. I ordered a SIM card and put it in my Nexus about a week ago. So how is it so far? 

It’s been better than T-mobile at my house only. At my brother’s house, just south of KC, I was expecting to get 3G on AT&T where TMO only has 2G (based on looking at AT&T data coverage maps) but I only ever saw 2G. Speed tests on AT&T have been pretty dismal and it stutters even trying to load Instagram.  Not too impressive. 

Another situation where TMO has been suffering in the last year is at places that are really crowded like stadiums or parades. A few weeks back I went to a Chiefs game at Arrowhead stadium and I couldn't do a thing with my TMO phone while a friend was having no problems with his Verizon LTE. So when I tried the Straight Talk AT&T SIM with the same phone I expected improvement. But I never did get any data once I got inside the stadium w/ AT&T. It was even having trouble getting a voice signal. I swapped SIMs back to TMO in my seat after about 10 min. of being frustrated (and Verizon LTE once again working flawlessly). Surprisingly, the TMO wasn't bad this time. It probably had something to do with their recent improved network coverage in KC.

I’ll be curious to test it out down at my mom’s house in the Ozarks, but so far I’m not impressed. I may be sticking with TMO after all. You may be wondering why I don't just switch to Verizon if it's been so impressive. Well I may eventually end up doing just that. But for now, I'm enjoying my unlocked phone, cheap TMO plan, and no-contract freedom. So that's my little wireless experiment. Hopefully it can help somebody else.

Mass Effect 3

I finished Mass Effect 3 a couple weeks ago. It's really been the only game that I've really dug into lately. Everything else has been downloadable and I haven't consistently played anything like I did when I was into ME3. Every chance I got I fired up the Xbox and I have it set to auto play whatever disc is in there. So it didn't get used for any other games for a few weeks. I think I did most of the "side" mission type stuff as well. So I got a lot out of that game, I guess you could say. And I didn't think the ending was that bad.

I may mention some general spoilers here if you haven't finished it. I think it tied up the big arcing series fairly well. The only thing I didn't love is that you didn't really get a sense of what the heck happened to your crew. A few of them were shown on the Normandy at the end. Am I supposed to assume the rest are dead somewhere? I may go back and play through it again as the other gender and make more Renegade choices. But I haven't wanted to dive right back in just yet.

As you can tell from the post frequency, I just haven't played a lot of games. I figured I should write about ME3 since it closes out the trilogy and I was way in to it while I was playing it. But now I'm working my way through Fez and the Walking Dead from Telltale.

Now Playing

I updated the list to you left (assuming you're not reading this in an RSS reader) so you at least know I'm still playing lots of things. Also I played through Mass Effect 3 and didn't hate the ending. Maybe I should write about that? More soon, I promise.

Awww COME ON!

The above title is sort of Marcus Fenix's catchphrase.

Gears of War 3. I played it, I finished it, I don't feel like writing a whole lot about it. It was a pretty good looking shooter that reminded me how bad I am at those sorts of games. Especially the hiding behind cover and spraying a ton of bullets into dudes over and over. And reloading. Lots of reloading. I've played all three of them now, but I can't remember much about the story. And no, I didn't play any of the multiplayer.

Yes, I realized this is probably my worst post ever. I just don't want you to get the impression that I haven't been finishing any games lately. :)

Zelda

In the last two days I finished several long running entertainment...things. Zelda: Skyward Sword, World Without End, and Friday Night Lights. It would have all been in one day but Zelda, true to form, was frustratingly difficult and long and drawn out in the last battle. This being a videogame blog, I should probably stick to Zelda.

< I try to avoid all but the most minor spoilers in the following paragraphs >

I was at 52 hours when I hit the last save point. The last boss took me three attempts because, like a few other boss fights in the game, you have to be incredibly precise with the (often imprecise) Wii Motion Plus, and you don't get much feedback as to if what you're doing is even correct. So I looked it up like I had done several times before while playing through this. Trust me, if I hadn't done this my tally would have been closer to 70 hours and I may have never played a Zelda game again. Sometimes at my discretion I "cheat" to save myself a ton of time and frustration. So the game was incredibly long. I would have preferred something topping out at around 30 hours. But while the credits rolled, I was trying to think about what made it take so long. The answer, besides all the dialogue that sometimes treated you like you were brain dead and had never played a videogame before, was that there was just a ton of content. People give Nintendo grief for backtracking and making you replay levels but there really wasn't much of that. Or at least it was done in such a way that there was a valid story reason for you to go back to somewhere and the terrain and enemies were different enough as to make it feel almost like a new environment.

This game looks really good for being on a 5 year old, underpowered, non-HD system. I can't wait to see what they do with better hardware. Which leads me to my next point. I'd love to see a refresh of the series. Throw out all the sacred cows and give me something new. Maybe Retro Studios can breathe some new life into the series. They've certainly shown they can handle some of the old Nintendo greats.

So I disliked the length and some of the dialogue along with the some of the controls. But there was a lot to love too. The world seemed incredibly full and fleshed out. The enemies were interesting 3D takes on the old Zelda standbys. Some new and old weapons and tools were used creatively. And for once the helper character didn't make me want to stab my eyes out. At least not all of the time. Some of the late game content where you had all of the tools at your disposal were really neat because they asked you to combine all of them to get past obstacles rather than just "use the bow and arrow a lot in this dungeon since you just found it here." I liked the somewhat subtle explanation they give for there always being an evil power that tries to take over the world, always a pretty blond girl with magic powers that gets herself into trouble, and always a boy in green clothes that has to save her.

Monthly Blog Post

Looking back at my last few posts, they seem to be no more frequent than about once a month. Since it's the end of January, I guess I'm due. Thing is, not much has changed since the last time I wrote. I'm still making my way through a bunch of those games, and haven't started anything new or finished any of them. I was on the beach for a week last week, which would make you think I played a lot of 3DS, but that wasn't really the case. Bright sun and bad battery life had something to do with that I suppose. I rediscovered a lot of books I've been meaning to get to, whether in actual paper (useful on a plane when they make you turn everything off or on a beach where I'd rather not risk an iPad) or on the Kindle app. I guess I did pick up the 3D version of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and made my way through a bit of it, enough to get the bow and arrow anyway. The re-release looks pretty good, and still holds up well in 2012.

I've been making my way through Sword and Sworcery on the iPad. Remember how I said that the bigger screen makes it easier for games? Well, since the art style of this is all pixelated it would probably look fine on the smaller screen. But that's not been my problem with it. For a mobile game, it really demands a good solid 20-30 min. per chapter. And don't even think about app switching over to the browser to get you out of a jam. You tend to lose progress. I'll get through it eventually if only for the great atmosphere and humor.

Game Over(load) continued

I usually like to post here after I finish a game. I've been starting a ton of games but have only finished one. Even if I don't write about every game, I try to keep the list to the left current for what I'm playing (click through if reading through Google Reader).

For mobile games, Mario 3D Land is still pretty cool, but gets fairly tough after the first "ending." Mario Kart 7 is a great upgrade from the last DS game, and our DS Lunch group has been playing it for a couple weeks now. The only big complaint is that multiplayer matches are divided up into sets of 4 races. The last game let you play as many as we wanted and tallied the points as we went. Now we have to keep an eye on how many "sets" of 4 we think we can get in over lunch, and don't know who's the overall winner because we'll probably forget to keep track of who won the most of the 4 sets. My wife asked me how I did the first week we played and I didn't have a clear answer because of this. Did I "win" or not? Yes and no. (Also, yes, I realize she probably didn't care and was mocking me for playing a game over lunch anyway.)

Speaking of mobile games, I guess I could mention a couple iOS games I took for a spin. I say iOS when I really mean iPad; I find an iPod/iPhone too small to really see much of anything. For instance, I tried Jetpack Joyride on the smallscreen and thought it was dumb. On the iPad though, it's oddly addictive. Also, Mirror's Edge was pretty well done and is completely worth the 0.99 it's on sale for now. It makes good use of tablet controls like swipe and tap and doesn't make you deal with a stupid onscreen joystick.

I did finish one game, like I mentioned at the top. That was Rage for 360. It looked great and was a pure shooter. There was a story and some side stuff to do, sure, but it really shone when you were blasting through a bunch of crazy dudes with the fluid controls. I had a lot of problems keeping stocked with my preferred kinds of ammo, especially on levels where you only fought mutants, who don't drop anything. I had heard it was short, around 12 hours or so. Well I was about that far in, but only on disc 2 of 3. I got to what I realized was the end and was a bit confused. So after the credits rolled I popped in disc 3. Oh that's where they keep the multiplayer stuff. No thanks, I don't have XBL Gold and I had enough trouble with the computer controlled crazies.

No if you'll excuse me, I have to go spend more time with Skyrim. Or maybe Zelda. No, Skyrim...