Some Wii Action

I played my new Boom Blox game on the weekend. It was pretty fun. It’s a pretty simple game – using the Wii remote to aim at stacks of blocks to throw a ball and remove the special gem blocks in as few throws as possible; it takes a bit of lateral thinking. It’s a fairly kiddy game but I love my puzzle games. I can see how it would become a competitive game shared between a few people; Azreal would love trying to out-do me (or anyone else).

I also played Wii Tennis for an hour and surprised myself at how poorly I did. I actually got worse. I even went to the training drills to practise my aim but it hardly helped. I did win a few games but unfortunately I came out with a lower score than what I started with. I scared myself off playing because I don’t want to decrease my score too much! I think I’m just too impatient.

One of the Frag Dolls, Jinx, is leaving the group to work for Xbox in Sydney. How awesome. I’ve played with the thought of working for a games company – either developer or distributor. In Australia I’d either have to move to Sydney to work for a distributor to work in the marketing department (which would be awesome and probably something I’d be able to do without too much of a change) – but moving to Sydney isn’t something I would want to do. But here in Brisbane we have a fair few developers so I’ve considered working as a project manager however that would be harder for me to get into as I currently have no IT project management experience (currently working on that career move on the web side of that at the moment). I’ve always come to the conclusion that I didn’t want to work in the games industry because I wouldn’t want to tarnish my love of gaming with working in the industry. That’s probably true for the technical side of things. But the thought of working for Xbox marketing is awfully tantalising. Although I’d probably get stuck marketing something like Barbie’s catwalk fashion show or something like that.

Gaming in absence of the boyfriend

I played Crysis on the weekend for the first time and damn, it was hard. I was not expecting it to be that hard! It usually takes me a little while to get used to a game but either I was atrocious or it is a hard game. I only had it set to the medium difficulty and I don’t want to have to swallow my pride and set it to easy. But maybe I’ll have to. It didn’t help that I kept forgetting the controls for things. I still can’t figure out how to do a few things. How embarrassing.

I’m quite a lot shorter than Azreal and he has his monitor set at a certain level that I don’t want to change, but it’s so high that I can’t see the top of the screen properly because it reflects at the wrong angle and all I see is black. I’m scared to break the monitor stand – he would be very sad if I did that.

I’ve been improving my Wii Tennis score, in hopes of becoming a pro and I’m almost there. I’ve only been playing a little bit here and there whilst waiting for other things so I’ve been progressing slowly and steadily. Azreal became a pro before he left so I must become one by the time he gets home! Can’t let him beat me!

I bought his birthday present to give him when he returns in two weeks – Sins of a Solar Empire – which he’s been talking about for a few months now. I got it surprisingly cheap, only $70. I also found Boom Blox for Wii which we’ve been looking for for months now (is that grammatically correct?). I didn’t buy it because it was kind of expensive but now I’m scared it will disappear again. I think I should go back and buy it. I’ve been spending so much money since Azreal’s been away. I've seen ads for the new Trauma Centre - I wonder if it's as good as the first one, which I've never seen for sale here in Australia.

Since I did my presentation at work about being a gamer I’ve had people coming up to me for various gaming advice – girls wanting to play games with their partners, our media department wanting to book ads targeted at kids studying gaming, our creative department designing ads targeted at the same audience and our account service (client service) trying to convince their clients why gamers would understand this ad concept versus another concept.

I do miss Azreal. We're now at the half way point so it's only two weeks till he comes home. I haven't spoken to him for over a week because of either conflicting schedules or because the wifi is so bad at his accommodation that Skype isn't possible so we've just chatted on messenger. I miss his voice. He always knows what to say though. Apparently Paris isn't the same without me. How sweet. I can't wait to come home from work, run through the front door, give him a big hug and cover him with kisses.