We got up at five this morning to see Aunt Gayle and Gwen on to the road. They were up very early and managed to get out of the door by seven after five. That will put them up in Kentucky, their driving goal for today, in very good time. Liesl even got up and came out to see them off. She loves having company. She wishes that they could stay.
We all went right back to bed and slept in nice and late today. Huzzah for holiday weekends.
Once we got up I drove to Panera and got breakfast lunch. I was trying to get breakfast but, for some odd reason, they decided to not serve breakfast as late as they normally do on a holiday weekend. But we managed to get leftover suffles. Yum.
Today’s project is to finally complete my game of Dragon Age: Origins. I got DaO for Christmas but did not get to play it for quite some time. Long before I got a chance to start playing it, Dominica played it all the way through, then played the expansion, then started going through it a second time! Then I got to play it but never managed to quite complete it. I got stuck at the final, massive battle and went so long without getting a chance to pick it up again that I was so out of practice that I felt that I could not make it through the final battle. So Dominica said that she would do that for me.
I ended up spending a bit of time working with Brian on an OSX server today. That was pretty cool as I have not had a chance to work on OSX’ server edition previously nor have I had a chance to play with Snow Leopard, the latest release of OSX, so it was a good learning experience for me.
Dominica was able to complete the final battle pretty easily – I did have a very powerful party, I was just out of practice with the controls. Once she completed the battle I went on and finished the remaining game elements. Overall the game was awesome. The amount of story delivered in the eighty-two hours that it took to play through the game was truly amazing. The Dragon Age franchise is definitely pushing the envelope in terms of video game story telling.
The ending of the game was not a let down and it hinted at exciting new chapters in the game to come in the future. We already know that DaO2 is slated for release in March and, of course, Dominica will not allow us to wait at all for that. I am sure that we will have it pre-ordered and will pick it up on release day.
It only took about forty-five minutes to wrap up my DaO game. Then I popped in Dragon Age: Origins Awakenings and kicked off playing through that. I managed to get several hours into Awakenings this afternoon which was nice. I have not started a new game in quite some time. Awakenings is really a continuation of the first game and is not a stand-alone title but an extremely large expansion to DaO.
I managed to get deep into the storyline already today – which is easier to do as there is really just one storyline and it feeds off of your decisions, choices and accomplishments in the first “game”. There aren’t six different characters to choose from, each with their own life story to get into. This dives straight in doing a great job of taking over where the original game left off. Anyone who plays the first game really needs to play this expansion as there is tons of great stuff in here.
It was a very relaxing day. I am extremely glad that I got time to relax and game for a while. So seldom that I manage to pull that off. Liesl spent a lot of the day either sitting on Dominica or my laps or just playing with her toys in the living room. Oreo spent the day on the sofa right beside me snuggled up. It was very sweet.
After I couldn’t take playing Awakening any more we watched G.I. Joe, the new big-budget movie remake of the 1980s cartoon. It was awful, as you would imagine that it would be. Dominica actually liked it. I was less than impressed. Now, to its credit, I did not watch the cartoon as a child, ever, and had no idea about the characters and which parts were cool nods to the old television cartoon so I am sure that there was a lot of cool stuff that I did not catch. Still it was an extremely weak movie with very little going for it.
I have tomorrow off from work. We have no plans whatsoever tomorrow so most likely I will dive into Awakening and see how far I can get. It is not a full-blown game and I want to get it wrapped up as quickly as possible. Then I will be able to get back to Oblivion. I try my best to just focus on one game at a time, or two at most. I learned some years ago that if I start a lot of different games at the same time that I will just lose interest because I don’t get deep enough into any one of them. So I try really hard to focus on just one and complete it before moving on to the next now. Or maybe two, so that I have one in Liesl’s room (Oblivion) and one in the living room (likely going back to Fable I: Lost Chapters) so that I can play depending on which television is available for my use.