Let's get some pic-a-nic baskets Boo Boo!

After playing a lot of a couple of great PC games (Planescape Torment and Europa Universalis 3) I went back and played a couple of bad games on the Xbox 360. Sadly, Torment made them seem all the worse. Avatar: The Last Airbender was wretched but pathetically easy. I played through with my daughter which interfered with my achievement gathering, but I still managed to get 3 for 500 points.

The other game is Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. It is very easy as well, but rather frustrating in parts. The world looks a lot more like D&D Forgotten Realms than anything I saw in Might and Magic (which generally took itself very lightly). There are little buggy quests- for instance, at the start of Chapt 2 I went into some sort of guard training area. The game had admonished me to make sure I stay friendly with the guards or else my quest will be impossible. One guard said "Hey you, come over here a minute!" So I went over and they started gossiping about how many bad guys they had killed in the recent fight. It was pretty useless so I wandered off. About 30 seconds later the screen went dark and I was informed that I had lost and had to reload. I reloaded about 15 times before I realized I had to listen to the whole conversation and then follow them over to where they would sit down and evidently wait for the cook to make them some food.

Wow, great design. Not to mention not being able to use any weapon even when you are a fighter. Mages can only use staffs, archers can only use bows, assassins can only use daggers and fighters can only use swords. So about 3/4 of the equipment you pick up in the game is useless. And when you find secret areas you usually get nothing but crap, and in the rare case you do find something new, you will find another copy of said item sitting out in plain sight about 5 minutes later. Ugh.

Anyway, enough venting about this weak game. Things haven't been going well at work but my boss is off all this week so at least I am getting a breather for a little while. And my daughter's birthday party was a blast- my nephew was bragging about how good he was at Guitar Hero and even uttered the statement "I'm better than you!" but after seeing me play Jessica he admitted he wasn't as good as me. Bwahhahahaahaha! Who says playing video games is a waste of time?

Well, my daughter is writing up a storm at the tender age of 5. And she just lost her 1st tooth. And she is about to go to school full time for the 1st time in 1st grade. She can swim and play Guitar Hero and she is smart and beautiful and everything else you'd expect a father to say about his daughter. I have a video of her playing Guitar Hero but it is rather boring so I am not actually going to inflict it on you. Suffice to say she is cute.

I also discovered on Facebook that 2 other people have the exact same name as me. Not uncommon for folks named John Smith or Jennifer Watson or George Bush but since I have a rare last name that was changed slightly at Ellis Island (when my ancestors arrived, not when I arrived) I figured that I was the only one.

Safety is an important part of my job, so every year we award the person who made safety the highest priority.

Here are some of the winners:

Most of these winners even have all their fingers and toes!