Thanksgiving

The past few years, I've done Thanksgiving with loree and tithonium. Last year we went to out with jeliza et al to Marie Calendar's. This year jeliza and her family were busy visiting relatives, and I decided that since I have a house this time I'd host the dinner. It was the first time I tried my hand at turkey and stuffing, but I had the pies and yeast rolls well practiced. Thanks to some recipes from my brother Todd and the advice of Alton Brown, I managed to pull off an excellent turkey. We only went with a 7# breast, and thanks to my convection oven it was done and done fast. loree and tithonium brought the sides. The stuffing didn't turn out quite right, but it was decent and everything's better with gravy. Because it was a small bird, there wasn't really much to make gravy from but the Metro Market turkey deli gravy was quite good.

Today is national "completely avoid retail stores" day, but I'm enjoying some down-time away from work. Movies make a good escape, but I'm not sure there's really anything I'm all that excited about out right now. Hitman looks silly. Beowulf's rendering would probably give me a headache. The Golden Compass doesn't come out until December 7th. Back to Mass Effect then!

Mass Effect Update

So far I'm having a good time. The engine and design is very reminiscent of Knights of the Old Republic, with a lot more sophistication and much updated rendering engine. After about 12 hours of play, I made it through the initial mission, the first space station, and got to the 'branch-out' point where you are basically free to pop around the entire galaxy looking for clues. After another 12 hours of play, I'm still working through the first 'main line' quest planet, so this could well be a monsterously long game.

The facial animation is decent, although the lip-sync is a little off and the expressions are somewhat limited. Still the characters look great, which is good since you spend a lot of time staring at them doing the chit-chat. Apparently you save the universe primarily by chatting up everyone in the galaxy and fix/ignore their problems...

And elevators. You spend an inordinate amount of time in elevators. They use this shtick to hide the load-times. At first it was amusing because it's complete with elevator music and occasional 'news announcements', but they eventually begin to wear on you as being just as slow and annoying as real elevators.

I just went to Extras\Credits and the music sounds like "the love theme from Mass Effect". That's funny. BTW, daemonwolf your name appears in the 'special thanks' at the end.

Update: I was trying to figure out what's with the dithering effect. On my 1080p HDTV it looked kinda silly. Eventually I found a setting option to turn off the 'Film effect' and that removed it. Probably looks better on lower-rez monitors.

Update 2: To sum up RPGs exclusively released on the Xbox 360: I hate the bloody gimpy-ass controller instead of an intuitive mouse/keyboard, but hey achievements are kind neat, right?