Things I think, pre-triptophan edition

• My review of Dominion Hinterlands would contain no new information, so why bother?
• I’m playing through Deus Ex — Human Revolution on the XBox and its clever and kind of a slog. The controls are odd, the story is so cliched it may be brilliant (although, to my rather big shock, I haven’t been betrayed yet. I figured it would’ve happened by now). I do think that the cybernetics augmentation system (effectively letting you play as a stealthy hacker, guns-blazing cowboy, tank, or whatnot) is rather clever. I almost quit during the police station set piece, I couldn’t figure out how to sneak past the cops (and there are lots of hidden passages to try) so I eventually broke down and watched a walkthrough. The demo a) found a useful mcguffin hidden in a hard to find place, b) involved one timing piece that even after seeing it took me multiple times to execute and then, to top it off, had one place where the correct solution is to just walk quickly through a guard’s LOS. He doesn’t alert. I don’t think I would have thought of that. (Oh, I was playing on Easy).
• I am now the only one in my immediate family without an iPod, as the TaoLing got one today (bought with his own money). I’m not sure if this is something good or bad (said the guy blogging at midnight).
• Triptophan may not cause drowsiness, but to respect and honor the cherished beliefs in childhood, I will not to risk staying awake after eating on Thursday.
• Did you know the Animaniacs did a song about the presidents?

Update — Spent  last night playing Deus Ex, so I should point out that (once I got past the Police Station) I like the game. The experience system is pretty much the same as BioShock (etc), but thematically makes sense, and there are lots of ways you can ‘solve’ each scene. Stealth, Guns, Combat, Hacking, Extended Jumping/Falling ability. I’m sure it would be a much harder game if you voluntarily decided not to use a subsystem, but I suspect it’s solvable.

Double Deux Ex Update — Finished the game (probably 40-50 hours of playing time total). The one thing that I hadn’t hit yet was how phenomenally boring the boss fights were. The first one was OK, in that I died a few times, then realized the ‘trick’ to winning it, and won a minute later. I gave up on the second and look for walkthroughs. Ditto the third. The final boss fight was easiest of the three, but you had to really do everything a few times.

Still, I did like the game, but it was terrible at times.