It’s been a long time since I have done a ‘Monday Musings’ post. It’s mostly because I haven’t had a decent weekend that I wanted to expound upon in a long, long time. Life is turning around for all of us here at The Shafer Homestead, and thus, life is getting a lot better. So what happened? Let me amuse you.
The weekend started off a little early by taking Minuet for her first grooming since we have had her. In fact, her first grooming of her life. We went to drop her off and they said it would take about two hours to do her up. Jack and I went for a bite to eat and when we came back, we had this skinny little dog with a bow in her hair. It was weird because I had never seen her with so little hair. When we got her she was only 8 week old and had her dull puppy coat. Then she grew out of her puppy coat and had her regular long coat. To see her now she looks funny, like right after I give her a bath. She’s still damn cute though.
The next day saw something that was unexpected and glorious. Jess and Jack went down to meet her mother in Allentown for lunch, and then to do some shopping at a teacher supply store. She told me to take some money out of the bank and to go enjoy the day by myself. I know I posted about this before, but it bears a little repeating. I left the house, went to the bank to get some money, picked up a prescription at the grocery store, and then headed north to Scranton. There, I got to go to my comic book store, Comics On The Green. After shooting the shit with Dave the owner, I picked up some new comics and headed out to lunch. Undecided on what to eat, I headed over the the Scranton Mall, also known as The Steamtown Mall. Yeah, it’s a dive anymore. But I did go into GameStop which did give me an idea.
Jerry has been after me for a few weeks to pick up ‘Doom 3’ for the PS3. It’s been marked down to the oh-so-nice price of $19.99 and he’s been enjoying the hell out of it. In fact, he and his brother have been DeathMatching on line and loving every minute of it. While I was there, I decided to try and look for it. No dice. Long story short, I ended up driving around for another 40 minutes before finding a copy of the game. Once I had the game in hand I grabbed some pizza from our local mall and headed home.
When I got home I decided to relax. I talked to my wife and she said they were going to stay down there for the rest of the day, so that meant I had most of the night to myself. I decided to utilize this to my advantage. I sat down, read some comics, and even threw in ‘Doom 3’. Granted, initially I played more ‘Doom II” (also on the disc), but I eventually loaded up ‘Doom 3’. Not wanted to get involved with a game, I decided to shut it off and decided to get some other stuff done. I went into the bedroom and brought all of my long boxes out into the living room. I opened them up and started to reorganize since I they had reached their limits. I assembled a short box that I had laying around and put a lot of my old comics in there. Once room was made in the long boxes, I decided to tackle the task of bagging and boarding all of the comics that I had purchased the past few months, but never got a round to doing. I set up my bagging and boarding station in front of the TV, and watch a few episodes of ‘Weeds‘ on Netflix. I find the process of bagging and boarding to be almost like meditation. It calms me and put me in a very Zen state. After about an hour I had all of my loose comics bagged and boarded. Although after looking at the stack I had assembled inside of a long box lid, I think I need to do this more often.
After all of the was said and done, it was time to play ‘Doom 3’. I loaded up the game, got a glass of soda, and turned off the lights. It was Doom time!
Hang on a second. I know I’ve heard this song before. Yes, I have played ‘Doom 3’ before. In fact, I have done it several times. In fact, I’ve tried to play through this game since I first got the PC version back in August of 2004! I stopped playing for a multitude of issues such as time, health of the computer, time, time, and more time. Do you see a pattern? So, giving my past track record the middle finger, I loaded up ‘Doom 3’ on my PS3.
So how is the game? Better then it was on the PC. Although the graphics were indeed better on the PC version, the games plays a lot smoother for the PS3. This is because they were able to re-code the game specific to the hardware of the PS3, and since every PS3 is the same, it runs smoothly on every console. However, one of the best changed from the PC to PS3 version is the ability to use both the flashlight and a weapon at the same time. In the PC version, it was one or the other. This did enhance the creep and strategic value of the game, but ultimately, I prefer to have both working in conjunction. But how is the actual game? The game is kick ass. It’s everything and more that I remember about playing the PC version. It’s so much fun, that I got further in 24 hours then I ever have since I started playing in 2004. That should tell you something. I did find a nice surprise playing through the game. The beginning part of the game is very industrial; lot of metal and shiny surfaces. it isn’t until you get well into the game (further then I ever got before) that you really start to see the ‘Doom’ look come into focus. You start to see how certain room layouts and coloring harken back to the ‘Doom’ games of yesteryear. For those of use who lived and died by ‘Doom’, this was truly awesome.
And that was just Saturday….
Sunday was a bit of a lazy day. I went outside and put most of the summer furniture away until spring. I also played ‘Doom 3’ for a quite a bit of the day in between doing laundry. Jess spent most of the day upstairs looking for more teaching resources and doing a bit of cleaning. The evening was spent with all of us relaxing over some pizza. It was indeed not only a good day, but a great weekend as well.
