Vegas was fun. I really ended up playing Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga the whole trip. It's a great game for the GBA. It has to be one of the best I've played. I have yet to finish it but I actually want to and that in and of itself says a lot for the game. I just can't get into Kingdom Hearts.

It's pretty quiet on the gaming front. I started a game of Icewind Dale 2 on the PC. It's been fun so far. I'm still in chapter 1. The engine is outdated, but it's still fun. I've made a terrible party so I can see myself starting over pretty soon. This current party is handling things pretty well, but I can see them getting overwhelmed shortly. I made a halfling rogue of course, yet I neglected to give him the disable device skill so he could disarm traps. Not only did I do this from the start, but I didn't give it to him when he hit level 2. I'm an idiot.

Not *so* much video game related, but I'm heading to Vegas this weekend for 5 days. This is the first real vacation the wife and I have had since our daughter was born. She'll be staying with Grandma and Grandpa for the duration of our trip. I used to get so stressed in airports and during travel in general. Then I had a child. I added an extra 100 pounds of extra crap to lug around to that stress. Now a trip to the airport without child is like a vacation in itself.

Portable DVD player with 3 new movies and a stereo headphone splitter?

Check

GBA SP with a fresh copy of Kingdom Hearts, Wario Ware Twisted, and my trusty copy of the Activision Anthology?

Check

I think that'll keep me going for my 10 hours of flying and slight lay over on the way home. We'll be seeing a comedy improv show at Harrah's, the Fab Four (Beatles impersonators) one night, and the Titanic relic exhibit at the Bellagio one night. We were going to do Penn and Teller, but we wanted to keep one night open to do the Center Stage Restaurant downtown. the cost of Penn and Teller is slightly prohibitive as well. You have to REALLY want to see them and I guess we just didn't.

I plan on hitting the 30,000 square foot arcade at the MGM Grand pretty hard. I spent a limited amount of time there on my last trip. Basically long enough for my wife to snap a picture of me and 5 8-year olds playing a sit-down pod racer game. That game is incredibly fun.

I will get her on a DDR machine this trip. OH YES I WILL!

It seems like I'm just adding more and more games to my Now Playing list without taking any off. IS THAT BAD?!?!?! Hahaha, maybe, maybe not. Who cares? You can't take the money with you when you die so you might as well spend it on something you enjoy right?

I've recently added Forza for the Xbox to the list. I've played all of the Gran Tourismo games in the past. Not to completion of course because well, that would take 800 YEARS! But I had fun with them. The main determining factor for buying Forza was the fact that a coworker was buying it and would be playing it on Live. We look for games that we can enjoy together over Live because they really are difficult for us to find. While my coworker is what I would call an avid gamer, he's not exactly a good avid gamer. We met up for a Halo 2 session once that consisted of me walking up behind him, placing sticky grenades on his neck and stepping back while he blew up. I had a great time, but he was really bad at the game. I tried to keep things low key as I am just not the kind of person to rag on someone because they are not good at a game. I don't think I gave him a hard time. It was just very obvious that we were not matched up well. Things should prove a bit different in Forza.

The meat of Forza is career mode and simulation not arcade racing. It's a thinking man's game if you will. At least in the online portion of the game, the more you know about tuning your car effectively, the better you should do. Combine strong tuning decisions, smart upgrade applications, and superior driving skills and you can become a real force to be reckoned with. Everyone on Live will know what cars are the fastest for each class and hopefully tuning will allow the smart competitors to excel.

In any case, maybe I'll do a full review later when I get to play more of the game. I don't want to get too involved in a journal entry. I did that in my first few entries and it became a bit of a daunting task to write. The game is fun and I'm really looking forward to spending more time on Live because at least two real-life friends own the game.

Time for gaming is at a real premium right now. We had the lawn seeded at our house Monday. Which means Matt is outside until 10 pm every night watering the lawn. You may not think 0.5 acres is a lot of land, but let me tell you it is when you have to water it every day. It's kind of nice in a way because spending that much time outside in my yard I've experienced a few minor things. I've talked to one of my neighbors a whole lot. I now know the fence in the back of my yard separating my yard from cows is electric (keep children away). I also know that there is a huge groundhog hole in the very back of my new yard. I'm conflicted over the last one because part of me thinks it would be neat to have a "pet" groundhog in the backyard and part of me wants to exterminate it. By exterminate I mean shoot in the head with a projectile made of lead. What would you do with a groundhog living in your backyard?