I think it’s safe to say the munchkin had a good birthday. He’s flaked out willingly and gone to bed. He wound up not having a nap. He got a lot of nice gifts, and we all ate a lot of good food, and he got to play with our friend’s children. We had a mini-incident, where he pushed my friend’s daughter because he wasn’t getting his way about something and had to be put in time-out but overall everyone got along well.

He was spoiled rotten really. I’ll post some pictures tomorrow of the amazing cake that my friend made. She made him the dragon last year, and this year she did a cake with several characters on it seeing as we couldn’t decide, so it had Sarah from “Land Before Time” on it, Clifford, Curious George and Elmo all sitting around presents and a little birthday cake. It was amazing. She’s apparently made a Smurf house before too. I’d love to see pictures of that one.

The munchkin himself got a nice list of gifts.
From my Mum he got two sets of pajamas, 101 Dalmations pictures for his room, a Thomas the Tank Engine interactive DVD/book, two plushie Cars from CARS.
From our friends he got sidewalk chalk, a ball, a training bicycle, $40, pillows, bed sheets, a toy chainsaw, and some clothes.
From us he got the party, Curious George in a police car, several board books (The Very Hungry Caterpillar, the Very Busy Spider, Cookie Dance) and a t-shirt that says “Reasons why I’m in Trouble: 1. Won’t Share 2. Won’t Give Mum a Break 3. Refuse to Nap 4. Keep Breaking Stuff”
My Gran sent him a cute pants/t-shirt set that says “Cheeky Monkey” on it, and a Paddington Bear book and a teach/turn book which is neat, I haven’t seen anything like it before, it shows you how to tell time and count by turning dials on different pages to match the story.

Last Sunday we had a mini-party at my FILs and they got him a neat phone which you can record messages on so that you can talk to the child through the phone and a dump truck to play in the yard with, and a couple of outfits, a plushie basketball and a bubble wand.

One of our friends showed up early to clear out brush from the back yard so that we had more kindling for the fire pit. It kept a nice fire going for most of the afternoon so we were able to randomly make smores, and toast marshmallows, and then we also made hot dogs and burgers and turkey burgers, and our friends brought meatballs, black bottom pie, tiramisu and the one set brought the birthday cake.

We have tons of leftover food so we should be going for a few days. So, that’s nice. I’m tired after all the prep work over the past few days and definitely don’t want to be cooking or anything like that.

I think I’m going to go have myself a piece of birthday cake given I didn’t get any really today. I had a bit of the black bottom pie and the tiramisu though. It was so funny, the munchkin was so excited when I lit the candles that he didn’t wait until the end of “Happy Birthday” to blow them out. I wound up having to relight the right as the song was getting to the end so that he could blow them out again.

I think he had a fun time though. There was one hilarious point where a friend of ours was spinning the laser pointer around the living room floor and the kids were all going nuts chasing it. The grown ups had some fun tag-teaming each other in “Super Smash Brothers” which we got for the Wii last week. That was my game treat seeing as hubbie has “Grand Theft Auto IV” on pre-order.

I haven’t been much on playing with our XBox 360 since we moved because it’s up in the loft and I don’t like to be up there when the munchkin is awake because it’s all full of electronics that he could easily destroy. When he’s in bed then I feel I have other things that I should be doing like cleaning the house, doing the laundry and so on.

Hubbie was feeling sorry for me and we got another of the HDMI switches for the downstairs television and have moved the PS-2 and the Wii downstairs so that we have gaming systems on both televisions now. I still haven’t played on the video games much. We’re missing part of the cables for the PS-2 and I just have so many other things which are more pressing that I feel I should be doing, or that I want to be doing so that I can spend time doing things which don’t involve staring at a screen while sitting on my butt.

Ah, well. I do like the switch set up though, it does make it easier to play video games. I remember the dark days of having to climb behind the television any time you wanted to do anything to get tangled in cables and switch them all around. Now you just push a button.

Our wedding anniversary is coming up and I’m trying to decide what to get my husband. It’s hard to think of what a thoughtful gift would be when he’s not really the kind of person who likes or wears men’s jewelry. Generally in this case it’s finding the appropriate video game or strange and unusual DVD because he does like to use the XBox 360. I’ll have to browse the EB website and see what’s up and coming given we got Devil May Cry 4 just recently when we traded some other things in.

I think ‘Army of Two’ might be the one to get now, but I’ll have to have a look and a think. He hasn’t been playing the Wii too much so we moved that downstairs so I can finally play ‘Elebits’ which I got for Yule. My husband has pronounced the game insufferably cute. I could always buy him another ‘Katamari’ game as a gag, but I think that might be grounds for divorce in this house.

My husband and I were out at the local mall yesterday and decided to pick up another game for the XBox 360. We have XBox Live so that we can take advantage of things like demos for various games before we buy them.

I’m not that up on first-person shooters, but when I was asked to vote on whether we should get Jericho or Conan I voted for Jericho. It was pointed out to me that Ron Perlman does the voice of Conan in that game, which is superior than the voice acting in Jericho, but the game itself seeing it played and playing it in demo. It was God of War with Conan. Seemed pretty pointless to me when we’ve already had God of War, and it’s sequel played to death in this house. Jericho is new, different, written by Clive Barker and has zombies. All pluses in my book.

I think the clerk at Game Stop was amused by our discussion.

But Jericho was what came home with us, and it’s very interesting. The graphics, of course, are stellar, and the acting is good especially compared to something like Two Worlds. The plot device is a threat of apocalypse, and involves a team of army specialists who all have paranormal powers who are trying to prevent the end of the world. This interests me doubly because of my own following of the occult. I’m fascinated to see how things are portrayed.

I just beat Dead or Alive 4. This morning I completed story mode with all of the characters, and unlocked “Helena”. I completed story mode with Helena and beat the game!

I’ve unlocked the easter egg character of “Lady Master Chief”, but haven’t had a chance to play with her yet. Looks interesting. I had a go at time attack this morning but didn’t get very far. I did manage to get 17 chain in survival mode though with Kasumi. I’m going to have a go with La Mariposa next as she’s another that I’m pretty able to work with and do a lot of the special moves.

I think the hardest for me was fighting with Bayman. He’s very slow moving and I felt extremely uncoordinated playing with him, I had to redo each level several times over, whereas with other characters I could usually beat at least half of the fights without having to use a continue.

We picked up Dead or Alive 4 for the XBox 360 over the weekend, but playing it was thwarted because the disc was broken inside. It would boot up but very sluggishly and would only let you play a few rounds before freezing up.

Then the XBox decided that the disc was in fact a DVD but that it couldn’t play it. It’s very amusing to have it switch to DVD player mode and then go, “This is an XBox 360 disc please put it in an XBox 360 console”  um…it’s in a 360 console? Identity crisis in a game system is an amusing thing.

So, yesterday I took the disc back to the store and exchanged it for one which actually works. I spent a bit of time last night actually going through story mode, which seemed really short, but then I’ve been playing first-person games for a bit and RPGs, and there are a lot of people to work through and get the stories for. As of now I’ve beaten story mode with Kasumi, Hayabusa, Kokoro, Hitomi and Brad Wong. I got stuck last night on the last fight on Eliot’s game, his master Gen Fu and wound up having to give up on it because I needed sleep and was just getting incredibly frustrated with constantly being thrown down stair cases…

I had a brief sortis into Survival mode with Kasumi who I’ve worked out most of the special moves for and am having a great deal of fun with the game overall. I like a game that I can actually play my husband at and hold my own, too often fighting games we play wind up with me just getting my ass handed to me over and over again, but yesterday we played team combat and tag versus and won a pretty equal number of times.

My husband is sick. He’s been fighting tonsillitis on and off for over a week. He was getting better, but then this past week between the out of state visitors and work calling him in at 10 in the morning when he works nights and has barely had any sleep and the parade and having to stand out in the tropical storm when the tornadoes came through he’s sick again.

He has the doctors tomorrow and at the start of October.

His birthday is this week and Halo 3 was pre-ordered who knows when. I got excited yesterday that Amazon might have sent it to us early because we got something which had “Time sensitive material” stamped all over it. It, however, turned out to be a copy of “Berserk” manga which he had requested last week.

Much frustrations and disappointment. I don’t even really care about the game all that much. I’ve tried to play Halo2 before and wound up running around in circles staring at the sky while I got shot repeatedly and died, re-spawned, lather, rinse, repeat. I tried playing Halo itself after we got the 360 and I’ve managed to get through the first “level” but it’s frustrating me the way the controls work. So, I know I’m not going to touch Halo3, which is probably just as well, because I doubt I’ll be able to pry the XBox controller away from him while he’s awake the anticipation and whining and begging that’s been involved with this game.

Most wives right now are complaining about being football widows, but me I’m a Halo3 widow and it’s not even here yet!

As you might be able to tell by previous posts of mine, in particular one right before this, we have a video game system, in fact we have several. We have a Playstation 2, a Nintendo Wii and an XBox 360. A lot of games that we have we don’t play around my son because they’re pretty darn violent, and why when we were looking at game systems to invest in around Yule time we decided at that time to invest in the Wii, rather than the XBox because it looked like we would be able to not only exercise with it but also that once the munchkin was old enough to really properly be playing video games it would have educational games, and be less violent.

Last month we decided we would get the 360 because there were a lot of titles coming out that we, the adults, really wanted to play, and the PS-2 is not getting new titles given the PS-3 exists.

Video games are a big part of our life, and chances are they’re going to be a part of his as well, as movies are because both my husband and I are big movie fans. I would imagine he’s also going to be a gamer as we play “World of Darkness”, “Dungeons and Dragons” and “Savage Worlds”, but if we introduce him to table-top it will be the same as with video games. Slowly, gradually and with careful monitoring to be sure that things are going more on the side of education versus mindlessness.

Some friends of ours were over the other night for a “Savage Worlds” game. Since the munchkin’s accident they’ve been gracious enough to come to our house any time we want to game and while we were waiting for two of our friends to come back from the food run some of them were playing an Arcade game on our XBox while I gave the munchkin his supper. One friend was saying that she’d been having a talk with her boss about the fact that, “there aren’t any kid-friendly games” for XBox 360. My husband and I were both pretty boggled by this statement. His answer was, “XBox has never really been marketed as a kid-friendly system. If you have a young kid it’s best to have a Wii.”

We asked her what brought that up exactly. Apparently her boss’s children had bought their six-year old an XBox 360. I about did the classic “head-desk” maneuver. I’m sure there are some out there who wouldn’t agree with me on that one, but I just don’t see buying a child that young that sort of game system. Of course I don’t know the full situation, perhaps they are monitoring the child very carefully when they play on the game system. The system may well be kept in a public area and not stashed away in the child’s room, but I remember my former co-worker who was constantly complaining about their son trading violent games for his games at school and getting away with it because he would play them in his room, and feeling it’s a situation like that, especially given some of the titles my friend listed that this child had.

I’m not sure I can name one child-friendly title for XBox; except perhaps a couple of Arcade games like: Bejeweled or Feeding Frenzy.

ETA: Reflecting on this as I’m cooking supper I realize that I’m coming down heavy on the violent aspect, when I’ve seen first hand that violence in video games is less likely to correlate to a child than violence in person, and I know from studies in Comm classes in college that video violence isn’t the mitigating factor in children developing violent behavior.
I don’t think it helps, though, and I don’t believe children under a certain age should be exposed to certain things when their brains are still in that stage where it’s hard for them to distinguish fantasy and reality. That’s my main issue. I remember my nephew last Yule when he was playing Halo2 on his XBox, he’s fourteen, and he was saying that someone they know in New York their three year old had been playing Halo long enough to actually be able to work it, and would talk to classmates in pre-school as though they were all aspects of the video game, as though the Horde was going to manifest right there in their schoolroom. That’s my issue.