complich8’s journal

So check it …

Friday I didn’t do much, kinda came home and played DMC3 a bit (played Vergil’s normal mode through to about level 17). Vergil’s interesting, because if you want to have any flow at all you’ve basically got to tear up on custom combos, because he’s got so few canned strings. So lots of weapon change combos, and a lot of whoring beowulf.

Anyway, that was all well and good, and a lot of fun. But then Saturday … oh, Saturday.

Saturday me, Adam, Josh and Kefer headed up to Chicago. It was a good trip, good times all about. We were planning on meeting Jason at Gino’s East in Rosemont, having a pizza with sausage layer, and heading to the Play symphony. But when we got there, Jason informed us that he was going to a Shack-meetup before the same. So we opted to go along with him, and met a decent sized group of shackers, had a decent (but majorly overpriced) dinner at this hotel cafe (I think it was a Hyatt, but I could be wrong). Lots of nerd discussion, some good times in general.

Then we headed off to the Rosemont Arts theater, and caught “Play! A Video Game Symphony” — the reason we went to Chicago in the first place.

Man … it was incredible. So many great artists and composers there. We had Koji Kondo do a piano solo, introducing the music for the next Mario game. We had Angela Aki singing both “Kiss Me Good-bye” (which apparently will be in FFXII) and Faye Wong’s “Eyes On Me.” Her voice is incredible, by the way. An incredible percussionist, Rony Barrak, did some solo work, and supported the Battlefield 1942 theme and the music from Mitsuda’s Chrono Cross. Oh yeah, and let’s not forget Nobuo Uematsu and Yasunori Mitsuda. And an unbelievably kickass guitar solo Akira Yamaoka.

There were a lot of other guests there too … many of whom I’ve forgotten. But there’s an entry on Wikipedia about it … apparently someone was paying more attention to the who’s who than I was.

Anyway, it was incredible. Other than the fact that they didn’t have a good encore selected, and just tossed out a replay of One Winged Angel.

Then we parted ways with Jason and his sister, and headed back to the apartment. A fairly quick drive later, and we hooked up the PS2 in the living room and started playing Guitar Hero. Guitar Hero officially owns my soul now… but we’ll get back to that.

So, that was Saturday. Sunday, we all woke up, Adam went to work, we played some Guitar Hero again, and then we headed out to the theater to catch X-men 3. That was a dang solid movie, I tell ya. Haters will complain about the lack of witty banter, about the non-realism, and about how it deviates from the random and confusing comic book storyline. But haters suck. It was a good movie, with excellent effects, a bit of humor in otherwise dark times (“Don’t you know who I am? I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!“)

Then dinner at Taco Bell, which I hadn’t eaten at in close to a year, and then back for more Guitar Hero.

I put in about 4 hours total playing Guitar Hero. That’s all I needed to know that I would certainly buy the game. In fact, I plan on it. It was a lot of fun.

Then there was new Fate/Stay Night, Yakitate, Doctor Who to watch. And then MORE new Yakitate! And I got to share the joys of things like Doctor Tran, and let more people in on the line “Let’s do this, I’m a cashew!” Lots of good stuff, ya know?

It’s good having other nerds around to share this stuff with, I tell ya.

So yeah, the hilarity and random entertainment lasted well into the morning hours, when we all sorta crashed out for the night. Woke up this morning suffering a bit, aftereffects of eating fatty foods for two days after not eating them for 6 months… I think the sour cream and the potato chips with dip probably pushed it over the top. Nice to know that my body’s barely even willing to tolerate that stuff anymore though … ’cause fatty foods are bad for me.

Started the afternoon out nicely though: I started it up by 5-starring Thunder Kisses on medium (98%, pretty passable I’d say). Then handed the guitar off, the other guys played a bit, then packed up and left about 4:30. So I finished off DMC3 Vergil Normal, and SS’ed easy mode level 1 with him. Damn, easy is FREAKING EASY. I mean … it’s disturbingly easy. That SS was basically effortless. Shame they wouldn’t all be like that… also a shame that I’m nowhere near good enough to do that on DMD yet. In fact, in DMC land, I should focus on getting better at styles that aren’t Trickster, and weapons that aren’t Rebellion.

Oh, and to top it off, my cell phone plan went upgrade-eligible this weekend, so I ordered a new phone — a black Razr v3. I’m sure there’s other phones out there that would meet my needs, and a bit cheaper (ended up dropping $100 on it after a MIR, boo-urns). But hopefully it deals with the dropped calls problem. Should have it in a couple days, which is nifty.

Oh yeah, and last but not least, I tore through Terry Pratchett’s “Reaper Man” toward the end of last week. Excellent book, particularly if you’ve gotten a fair dose of Death already. If you’re looking for some tasty fiction to pick up, and haven’t read anything of Pratchett’s, start out finding a copy of The Last Hero, then head on over to The Color of Magic and Small Gods, then Reaper Man should be the fourth Pratchett book on your list to read (with 3 books that feature Death, how can you go wrong — and one of them is illustrated!).

Yeah, I’m feeling pretty good about life, the universe and everything right now. All in all, I’m just plain happy.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 29th, 2006 at 5:20 pm and is filed under Beyond Nerddom, life and times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.