11 posts tagged “games”

Note: This is the fifth in a series of posts looking back at 2007, in some key areas of my life that were important to me.

I played games this year.  

This was not just restricted to video games this year, however.  Eric and I became the proud owner and players of really good board games, too.

Board Games: We had an excellent year where we actually bought good quality enjoyable board games.  Most of these are European games, many which have won awards, and we like to pick the ones that are from companies we've heard of so that we know the pieces will be good quality and the art will be well done (Rio Grande Games is my favorite publisher because of their quality).

I got several for Christmas (Bohnanza and Jambo, I think) last year, and that set us on a course to find more.  We visited multiple specialty game stores on multiple occasions, and this was great fun.  Z Games here in Vancouver is one of our favorites to browse.  We purchased Puerto Rico and Carcassone, and then San Juan.  Ruse & Bruise and Thurn and Taxis came next, I think.  And then before a trip, we found a good deal at an online store, Phoenix Games, and got Coloretto, the Puerto Rico Expansion, several Carcassone expansions, and my favorite, Ticket to Ride and its expansion.  Our trip to California in July was a great chance to play a lot of this type of game with Eric's friends, and Gabe gave us an extra copy he had of Attika while we were there.    

One of the other fun things about this year is that we started to get our family more interested in board games.  First it was just Bohnanza (or Beans, as Jon says), and then during the trip to the beach, we got more adventuresome and introduced new games to the group.  Sarah had a lot of fun playing with us whenever we got together and so we are always looking for games that play nice with 3 players for us to enjoy.  We ended out this year with games with Sarah and even convinced Leonard to play a round of Coloretto with us.

Our full list of current games is at BoardGameGeek, which is a super site for finding good quality games for many sizes of groups of people.

Video Games: I didn't play as many this year as I have in the past.  I made a conscious choice to knit instead of playing a lot of video games this year because I was enjoying my knitting so much.  I did watch E play a lot during knitting.

I got a Nintedo DS for Christmas last year, so I used this to play in bed.  I started out the year with Super Mario.  Then I played Age of Empires on my DS until the game started giving random errors all the time (I bought it on clearance, so maybe it was was faulty for everyone).  I played Eric's old Zelda (for the Game Boy) on my DS and almost finished it, with almost everything gotten.  The last battle just killed me too many times to keep trying.  

On my Mac, E found the old installation of Age of Mythology and I again dove into this for many hours of entertainment, both playing through the story and then lots of random maps - and we can play random maps together which is very fun.  

For the PS2, I played much of Sly Cooper 3.  I believe I did some replaying of Ratchet and Clank, and I think some old Spyro too.  I did make a conscious choice to knit instead of playing a lot of video games this year as I had in the past because I enjoyed that so much.  I've watched Insomniac's site this year because I love them, even though I don't have a PS3 to play the new Ratchet and Clank.

I don't have a good record of what I played really, to remember what I played this year versus previous years (I'd love this to be a future feature of Vox!).  I wish I had a site where I tracked all this - I added things as I got them to GameSpot, but there's not any date context to that.  Does anybody have a favorite site for tracking their games?

So it was a good year for gaming!  My favorite board game was Ticket to Ride, with San Juan close behind, and my favorite all around video game was the old but good Age of Mythology because of the number of hours I was able to enjoy it.

3 player Ticket to Ride with Sarah. With crackers, cheese, and fancy yummy bread. :)

Last week or maybe a few weeks back, our local paper reprinted this article on the front of the Life  section.  Of course, it caught our eyes because we enjoy more unique board games.  Many of our recent games are actually mentioned in the article!  (tip, if you want to see our games, my boardgamegeek profile shows them.)

It's fun because we were influenced greatly by Eric's friend Gabe, who owns more games than we could ever imagine.  And now we are sharing those games with my family, and they are regularly requesting that we bring along our games when we get together for family stuff.  It's cool to watch how they are expanding into playing more than just Bohnanza ("the bean game") and starting to know that if it's in our game box, it's probably going to be fun. :)

My favorite right now is Ticket to Ride, which is a US board where you place train cars to go between your destination.  Every game is different, because you draw destination cards "tickets" and so that makes for new routes to figure out each time.

Anyhow, this article was a nice introduction to why board games are coming back, even in the age of video games and other activities.

Zelda from the gameboy advance. Getting close to the end. :)

This weekend, we did a lot of stuff.  This was good, and we had a super time.  I'm taking it a little easier than some mondays to get back my energy!

Saturday, we celebrated my sister Lisa's 22nd birthday at my parents house.  We had delicious sandwiches and cake and ice cream, and it was the first time in a while that we actually went to my parents house, we've been visiting all the other family houses more lately.  It was a nice party and we had fun together even though some of the family wasn't around.  Last year at this time, we were getting ready for Lisa's wedding, so it sure has been an eventful year!

Afterwards, Lisa and Jon wanted to go to IKEA, and I'd been wanting to go a lot too, so we decided to do that together.  Portland's IKEA is brand new, it opened the middle of last week, and the parking lots are still really full!  It was super fun to see everything, what an awesome store.  Definitely my kind of place.  I'd like a big pile of money to redo some rooms in my house (or better yet, an even bigger pie of money to get the next better house and then set that up perfectly! :D)  We came away without buying anything, but I'll definitely go back and dream s'more (maybe during the day instead of a weekend evening with so many people!!)  We finished out the evening with some games, I've been really excited over Ticket to Ride with E lately, and that seems to be my first pick when we decide what to play; even when I don't win ;). 

On Sunday, we got up and went to church with Leonard and Sarah and family.  They just started attending a new church, and it was nice.  We heard the head pastor speak and it was a good sermon with some Bible stories I hadn't heard the background too, and really interesting tips for being bold.  One of my favorite parts of going to church is usually the music, and they didn't disappoint.  They were having a cowboy theme and led into the service with Steven Curtis Chapman's Saddle up your Horses; an oldie of his, but I can't help but like even his old stuff.  (Ahh, he's got a new album coming out this week!  It's been a long time.  Check out the single on his site.  And dude, he has a TypePad blog! :) )

After church, there was a big giant summer festival going on for church members and friends, so we went over there.  They had entertainment, food,  a TON of blow-up bouncy things, and even ponies and camels!  We played with the kids and E ran around going with Leah to the blow-up things (her favorite was one that was Noah's Ark, it was a nice size.  Baby Leonard tried several times to try and grab other people's food (mine included), but one was hilarious because he just jetted (he crawls fast) to another person's blanket and Leonard grabbed him JUST as his hand was almost in their food!

We came home and I was tired so we sat and watched part of our next Netflix tv show, and then played another game (Thurn and Taxis this time) and I made some nice long routes and won.  Oh, and then we watched Feasting on Asphalt, we are so glad they decided to make another season.  It's such a cool concept and beautiful camera work and photography.  I'm hoping that one of these seasons, he'll make it up the Northwest, since he did the South, and now Mississippi river.

At the end of the day,I went to brush my teeth and noticed that the top of my forehead was a little red.  Oops, I guess I did get some sun.  And then I looked down, and ohhhh no, my arms are red too!  I'll have a bit of a farmers tan for wearing a t-shirt yesterday.  But for now, they are pretty red.  I'm usually the queen of sunscreen.  My face had some because of my day solution (Mary Kay, I think it's spf 15), but I'm a dork and didn't bring my sunscreen or bother to use Sarah's.  I guess it wasn't that HOT out, and the sun wasn't shinning directly, so it didn't seem as obvious to remember.  Ooops.

It certainly was a weekend of fun, and the memories will last much longer than the sunburn arms and sore legs :)  It's so nice to have family members to hang out with for a variety of things!

New game, whee! This is the game our current fav San Juan is based on.

With little meeples - e won by 2 pts! We played with a river this time.

Post a screenshot of the videogame you've been playing.  Bonus points for capturing it yourself!
Submitted by przyklenk.

The main thing i'm playing right now is my christmas present, super mario on the DS. :) also Sly 3 on the PS2, but i slowed down on that a bit.

What was your favorite arcade game growing up? What's your favorite game now?

I think I've only ever been in a real arcade once. The closest was the games in Pizza Palace when we'd go there infrequently. I remember the jutebox more than the games, I was more likely to put my money there (they had Hotel California, and for some reason, that was always the one I wanted to play!). But I do remember a few times of playing the Simpson's games with my siblings there.

The first real video game I remember seeing was Super Mario Bros, the first one. The first real games I played extensively were sidescrollers that we got from a family friend for our first computer (Commander Keen, and later Cosmo, woo!)

As for games I love now, there are a lot of them. We have a PS2 and Game Cube and Game Boys, so there are a lot of games floating around the house. The Spyro games were my favorites for the PS. Ratchet and Clank/Jak and Daxter are favorite early PS2 games. Kingdom Hearts of course. And now I'm learning the fun of Final Fantasy - I played FFVII and now I'm on FFX.

Fun stuff!

What's the best television commerical that you've seen in recent years? Did it make you want to buy the product?

Some of my favorites in the last few years would have to be the series of Ratchet and Clank commercials using real people. The tagline was "Weapons not fit for this world" and they gave examples of why that was true ;)

The Morph-o-ray was probably the first one I saw, even before I played the games.  It was just like... omg, what did they just do?

And then the next game had the Tractor Beam, and I got the game shortly after.  Heh, it really worked!

There's more of these on YouTube, but these were my favorite two that were there.  Seems like there was another one that was funny in this series, but I can't remember what it was to search for it. :D

What can i say, i guess i'm really a geek if my favorite commercials are for video games. :P  I do have a lot of other favorites, but these stood out in my mind!