| 2011.01.22 |
I've become a stepdad. My little girl touches every aspect of my life, including,
of course, leisure pursuits. My X360 has opened up a whole new avenue for leisure time for
the entire family - and in some interesting ways.
The kiddo LOVES Lego Star Wars. At five, she doesn't understand the Star Wars saga, but
she, like neices and nephews I've known before her, seems to have taken no time at all
to master the controller. She doesn't really "get" what's going on, but she can run,
jump, blast, use the helmet machine, AND has some understanding of what characters are
needed for specific activities — young Anikin crawling into small spaces, for example.
And by the way, I did not introduce kiddo to Star Wars — I believe her cousin is
responsible for that. At five, though, she doesn't have the longest attention span —
we play together for a little while before things just devolve into her making me play
the Jar Jar Binks character and her blasting me and giggling like crazy. (Jar Jar makes
funny sounds when he dies.)
Other games we picked up for kiddo include a racing game based on Disney Pixar's "Cars"
and a game based on Dreamworks' "Monsters vs. Aliens." Kiddo got a kick out of the
racing game, but I think M vs A was a flop: just too complex for kiddo at this point.
There's plenty of fun here for mommy, too — apparently she enjoyed the Final Fantasy
franchise on her PS2, so we picked up a copy of Final Fantasy XIII. I'd never played
any of those games, and after watching her play FF XIII for a while, I'm satisfied with
that. The game itself is absolutely beautiful — the graphics and imagery are stunning —
but I just cannot get into turn-based console or computer gaming. I enjoyed watching
her play it, though, and I'm super glad she'll get some use out of the console, too.
For my part, well, I'm still doing Firefight matches in Reach, and recently played
through Star Wars Force II. Force II was a lot of fun, and I particularly liked the
idea of having the option to use the good side or dark side at the very end of the game.
I completed it using the good side, and am looking forward to going back and doing it
again making the opposite choice.
A friend of mine and I plan to cooperatively play Portal 2 when it is released. We'll
do that via XBOX Live, which I recently joined.
I'm glad that Live is free, although the cost of a Gold Membership is pretty cheap —
paid in full for the year, it breaks down to $5 per month. I noticed that ESPN is
available via that Gold Membership — I may try catching a game during my free month.
Since I don't have television service right now, the subscription might be worth the
coin. We'll see.
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