playtime

I dropped off my Lexus at the body shop yesterday to get the scratch repaired, and I am driving the Spyder to work this week. What a nice opportunity to reacquaint myself with the 5-speed manual transmission, and the satisfaction of revving and snarling my way around every street corner, exhaust and engine singing together behind me. Sure, a brand new Porsche Cayman would be nice, but this will do just fine for now.

The weather has been actually pretty nice this past few days, no rain for a while. But man is it cold outside at night. I don't know if I have the courage to put the top down for a drive. Maybe a short one. V. just bought me a new hat to keep my big dome warm, so maybe with that and a heavy jacket I can tough it.


Still haven't received my games for the PS3 yet. To my chagrin however, the Best Buy gift card arrived separately today. Well I have been downloading a bunch of demos from the Playstation Store, and so far they are impressive. Of course the first demos I downloaded were racing games. MotorStorm is pretty awesome. It has quickly become the best-selling game for PS3 in Japan. The graphics are amazing but what is really cool is you can turn on the motion sensing for the SixAxis controller, and tilt it to turn like a steering wheel. Formula One Championship Edition is also fantastic. The sights and sounds of racing were so realistic I thought I was actually watching an F1 race on TV.

For more arcade-style action I checked out Blast Factor and Cash Guns Chaos DLX. Both are fast-pased arcade shooters where the goal is basically blow everything away around you. They're both fun at least for a little while but I don't think I will buy either one of them -- just playing the demo gives you a taste and you can imagine how the rest of the game would play out: just more of the same.


And last but not least I checked out a sports game, the demo for NBA 07. Along with the Formula 1 game this is probably the most challenging game to learn I have seen so far. There's a bunch of buttons for offense and defense, and special moves you can make while dunking, etc. Visually the game is very nice in hi-def but to me the players' skins seem a little too shiny -- it's like they're all sweaty even before the tip-off. The demo only has a quick game mode where each quarter is 2 minutes. I got slaughtered my first game, I didn't even score by the end of the first half. I'm getting better with my defense though, but I still can't land a 3-point shot to save my life. Maybe it's because I'm trying to use Shaq to shoot them...