Ugh. Avatar, The Last Airbender VG

Last night, after the girls had gone to bed, I wandered downstairs and spotted the video game they have assiduously been playing with their alloted hour of raster burn every day. It's the PS2 version of Avatar: The Last Airbender, and American-made anime with bad pseudo-Chinese themes. There are some cute moments: When you walk past bad guys you hear them say thing like, "What do you think of the Feng Shui in here?" "I dunno. I don't like seafood."

But it is a very boring, very limited game with an enourmous bulk of tasks clearly intended so that the player spends a lot of time walking, wasting time, going over the same ground many times, and all within a very constrained if beautifully rendered world. On the other hand, the facial animation is awful. And I don't get it: they got the cast from the anime to do the voices for the cut scenes, so why is all of the dialogue done in text? It's not exactly a free-form, AI-driven game. Grand Theft Auto this ain't.

I just wish I had figured this out before wasting four hours of my life on it. It wasn't until almost 2 that I put it down. I could have spent those hours working on a story, or polishing something.

That said, I had Omaha read a small snippet from Sodomy in September and she agreed: I got the voices just about right.

I'm sappy

I decided to review what is done of the Mystical Treefort stories. I haven't looked at them for a while. Chapters 1, 2, and 4 are done, but I'm still missing the major plot complication (and, *ahem* climax scene) for chapter 3. Whatever it is, it can't be too profound, not like what happened in Chapter 2. It's supposed to be a breather.

I realized I'm a sappy and sad sentimentalist. Unlike my recent melancholy, this story has a very happy ending, and not having looked at it in six months, I had forgetten the ending. Okay, I choked up and had tears at one of my own stories. That's what it's supposed to about.