What am i holding? What's the deal with the psycho kids? WTF?!?!

I got in some time with Prey from Friday through Monday. That game is messing with my head. In a good way. At the outset, it's a relatively straightforward story of a regular Joe who is abducted by aliens and has to fight his way out. But as you penetrate deeper into the massive alien spaceship, things get weirder and weirder. One of the game's innovations is that gravity is no longer a constant. In other words, the floor is not always the floor. Certain lighted tracks allow you to run up walls and across ceilings, while you also encounter switches that when activated shift gravity so that whatever wall the switch was on is now the floor. The game has given me motion sickness a few times now, but i'll gladly suffer for an experience this unique. Suffice to say, it's very weird having a gun fight with enemies who are standing on the ceiling. The plot is getting decidely bizarre as well ... the aliens seem to be harvesting humans for food or some other resource (the word "protein" occurs on many of the spaceships' placards), but i've now encountered several ghostly childlike wraiths that have me wondering how they figure into the aliens' plans. Another of the game's advances is the spirit walk, which your Native American protagonist can use to cross force fields and solve puzzles. The developers took this one step further however. When you deplete your health, instead of dying and going to a "Game Over" screen (and reloading and continuing from wherever the last save point was, etc etc), you are whisked to a spirit world where you have about 15 seconds to shoot phoenixes with a bow and arrow. After this period, you start the game where you left off, with your health and spirit energies refilled based on how many phoenixes you hit. Very cool ... removes that annoying "try this, die, restart" dynamic that slows down many other titles.

As discussed previously, V and i bought Rockstar's Table Tennis at Best Buy on Sunday, but we haven't given it a go because of our home improving. I'm curious to see how the Grand Theft Auto developer handles a simple sporting title. By all accounts it's a good game ... the cashier at Best Buy didn't stop fawning over it for the three minutes we spent paying. He did get us a $5 discount though so i'll let it slide.

Astute readers will have noticed the chain links in the menu bar on the upper right (actually, REALLY astute readers will have observed that i beautified some of the menu icons). I've added a links page, after generating one for Ana's forthcoming site. Not much on there yet, but they're coming. I drew the chain links myself in Photoshop ... not bad, eh?