Been working my way through Resistance: Fall of Man.  In short I'm enjoying it, though it would look vastly better if they were willing to use some colors every now and then.  Not my favorite Insomniac title, and I've had to turn down the difficulty, but still generally enjoying it. 

Resistance has a system of "skill points", like the Ratchet & Clank games, where you can unlock little bonuses like concept art.  You get these by meeting cryptically named requirements like "Passive Aggressive" (which turns out to be killing X enemies with non-weapon damage), which earns points to spend.  This is kind of neat, but I'd enjoy the system so much more if I knew what those goals were so I could try for them.  As it is now the system is so random as to be valueless to me.

Also it just really rubs salt in the wound of there being no Achievement equivalent on my PS3...

Kind of a weird week this week... first half shot with travel, second half is full of various holiday goings-on around the office.  Today was our in-office party, gift exchange, etc.  Fun opportunity to hang out and watch the crazy gag gifts get passed around.  Tomorrow is our official holiday party though, our nice yearly affair with spouses at a nice restaurant or club.  Good times.  The office effectively shut down at 3PM today and official shuts down at 2PM tomorrow (with a nice Halo 2 tournament the Halo Wars guys are running) so it's definitely the "don't plan on having any normal meetings or work hours" time of the year.

I'm still annoyed by our gift-exchange rules each year though.  For a company full of game developers you'd think we'd find a deeper minigame to play... :)

Just flew back from another business trip up to Redmond.  I'm not used to a lot of business travel... I don't mind it much but it sure is exhausting.

Fortunately the flight home was actually fun.  Our lead designer, Ian, and I played a hotseat game of Dominions 3 on his laptop.  The flight was empty enough we just got aisle seats across from each other and handed it back and forth.  It's really an excellently designed game for that sort of thing, we can just about finish a 1v1 during the flight and it definitely helps pass the time...  There are so many strategies in Dominions 3 to explore, it can be pretty overwhelming but just being there on the airplane helps focus on it.

Whew, tired though.  Travel is always strangely tiring given how little actual effort it involves.

We love our Tivo around Chez Xemu.  We've had one for ages and even though I watch more and more of my TV on DVD or via downloads, it still gets a lot of love.  Unfortunately, it doesn't do HD.  My wife had a wonderful plan to surprise me on Christmas Day with a new Series 3 HD Tivo!  Truly a think to melt a geek's heart.  :)

Sadly, her plan was foiled by the fact that we live in a part of Dallas that still has fairly ancient circa 1980's "dual line" cable, which the Series 3 Tivo can't handle.  This is probably the last straw for Time Warner Cable for us, which has generally been pretty poor quality in general, so now we're looking at maybe DirecTV or the like.

Which is all kind of sad since we love our Tivo so much...

So what I'm wondering is why neither the PS3 or the Xbox 360 have PVR functionality built in.  They easily have the horsepower and the HD space...

Around here in Dallas, if we get any accumulation of snow at all, it's like a major disaster has happened.  Today was such a day, and our offices were basically abandoned.  Years of driving in Boston mean that the snow doesn't phase me at all, though all the other drivers who have no idea how to deal with it does... 

I kind of like the days no one else is in the office, be it due to snow, holidays, whatever.  There's a neat kind of vibe to it, plus I usually get tons of stuff done...