Last night Paul came by and hung out. As always it was good times. We went to the Coney Island near my house that I’ve been meaning to check out for a few months now for dinner and it was totally great. There’s something about a Coney Island place with friends that is just fantastic in my opinion. The food was pretty good too I can happily say; not quite to Zorba’s level (and certainly not as good as Lafayette) but it was pretty damn good.

We headed back to the house where I gave a quick demo of some of the beats I’m working on and then moved on to Professor Layton and the Curious Village for the NDS. This is a game about solving puzzles. It’s very much like that comic shows actually. Every time you try and do something, a person tells you, “Hey, how about you do this puzzle first.” Being a jerk of a professor who acts like an insufferable know-it-all you have to prove to the simple villagers that their pointless mind games are child’s play.

The game is actually quite pretty, with very nice looking art and a level of animation for critical scenes that surprised me, even voice over work (which was hilarious on in its own way). We hadn’t really gotten too far into the game to see what exactly made the village so curious except for the obvious stack of homes reaching into the sky. We did, however, learn that I am an absolute bloodhound at finding “hint coins.” Must be from those days as a kid playing pixel-hunting adventure games.

The puzzles kind of attempt to fit with the game’s plot/story/environment but sometimes they’re pretty blatant about the “Hey, solve this math problem,” attitude the game has. That said, a couple that we came across were actually quite tricky and fun. I don’t really have any puzzle games like this that encourage actual critical thinking (I have to do a lot of that at work as it is…) but this might be worth picking up when I can find it used for cheap.

After that we watched a few episodes of Flight of the Conchords, one of my favorite shows as of late. Paul seemed to appreciate the dry and often wacky sense of humor that the show has, and that we both also share.

Before it was time to call it a night Paul helped me unlock level 5 in Rez HD. After failing on the final boss (making me realize just how bad I am at this sort of thing now) I realized it was after 11:00 and that I should probably head to bed.

I have no less than seven drafts sitting in my WordPress right now. Seven. Several of these are really good posts too… Or will be when I actually write them. Work is really hitting hard right now and I’m running on all cylinders to keep up. Hopefully I’ll get some time this weekend to do a little writing.