December 18th, 2006 10:05 hours CST
Currently listening to: Supervitesse by Mahogany
Feeling: excellent

It is finally over. Well, pretty much. I had attracted my final piñata over the weekend. It was the Chippopotamus, which was a giant pain in the ass due to the fact that I had to convert 40% of my garden into water and then a further 70% to romance the damn things. Sheesh. Anyway, I've made a neato garden with about 15 different species now and I'm going to let it stay that way. I'll check in from time to time, even though things don't change while I get on with my life. I'll get back into it when I'm able to download some new species (a penguin, PLEASE) via the Xbox Live Marketplace.

I need to go to the gym in the worst way. I'm a little miffed at the fact that Airiel will be recording in January when I feel like a giant fat-ass. We're to be taking photos during the sessions at Engine for the album and I'm going to be very selective. You light me from above or you fuck off. The photos, not the photographers.

Mitsuwa overcharges on every single thing they sell. I spent $45 on a bottle of Yamazaki. Granted, it's imported 12 year old Japanese whiskey, but DAMN. $20 for a Japanese/English cook book. $2 for egg plant? Thank goodness Yuka and I can get all of our vegetables at Chicago Foods. It still shocks me how inexpensive everything is and how fresh it is. If they only did something about their parking it would be nirvana.

Chris has created a blog for Airiel. http://airiel.blogspot.com/ will chronicle the random thoughts and experiences through our recording sessions and album release via our very own Chris DeBrizzio. Witty, slightly intelligent and altogether sassy.

Speaking of which, Spin magazine is on Airiel's junk about the show coming up in January.

Airiel, Walking Bicycles, Arks
"The Bottle has buried the stigma of Monday shows by booking dynamic bands (including these genre-defying acts from ambitious local label Highwheel) and charging nothing."

They're flying out here to see us play? Good lord. We might have to blow up some gear or set an audience member on fire to get them to forget how bone crushingly loud we are. Fun!

Interesting. Microsoft didn't bother with the word "crushingly". Either that's actually legit or I already added it to my dictionary out of annoyance.

December 1st, 2006 09:31 hours CST
Currently listening to: the sound of snow plows outside my office.
Feeling: sleepy

Sorry, November. I just wasn't in a journal writing mood. Halloween was fun, albeit rather mild. Yuka really enjoyed Thanksgiving. Surprised to find out that most Japanese dislike turkey, claiming it's too dry and has a bad taste. Yuka, on the other had, loved it. In fact, I've never seen her eat more food. Heheheh. I brought my Xbox 360 down to my parents for Thanksgiving weekend. I wanted to see a few games in all their high definition glory. F.E.A.R. (even though it sucks), Dead Rising, Gears of War and Viva Piñata. Well, only one of these games was played at all.

VIVA FUCKIN' PIÑATA

Holy addiction, Batman. I had played this for only a few hours when I bought it, but Gears of War (which I'd purchased at the same time) took over. Gears of War is absolutely amazing and it's mind-blowing that I haven't even finished it because of Viva Piñata. I blame Rusty, really. He was the one who got it out and started playing it. We ended up devoting nearly 3 of the 4 days to this. I was actually yelling instructions to him from the kitchen as I was working on the turkey. They say that the first part of curing an addiction is admitting that you have a problem. I admit, I do have a problem. My problem is that I'm at work and I'm not at home with my Piñatas! My wife is going to read this and probably divorce me.

Let's start off by saying that I've only played a few sims in my life. The one I got most involved with was Lucas Arts' "After-Life" where you managed the parallel plains of heaven and hell. It puts me in a state of severe right brained organization where I end up dreaming about stacking boxes and putting things in their correct order. Normally I am not like this. I live in an asymmetrical world and I like it that way. Thankfully, so does my wife. While the game has a rigid sense of order at it's center, it is wrapped in that waterfall of sugar that krispie kreme doughnuts travel under in the shop. What I'm actually referring to are the characters. The piñatas are adorable. The human characters in the game are also adorable. While the voice-overs that Leafos gives you during the tutorials are long, her voice is so pleasant that she'll lull you to sleep. But then you wake up because the music has changed and you have a new piñata checking out your garden.

There is a crazy amount of variety in the game, between the 60 different piñata species, plants, fruits, vegetables, garden decorations and also the human's who can help you out with pretty much anything. Want to get a piñata back that you accidentally sold? No problem. We can do that. Want to put sunglasses and headphones on your Pretztails? Yeah, we have that covered. Need someone to water your plants for you? That will be 1,000 chocolate gold coins, please. There's another thing. Even the currency is made out of candy. Awesome.

I'm at the point now where I've seen maybe 70% of the piñatas, but only about 50% have actually been a part of my garden. I have so much work to do to get them all. I'd like to emphasize that. There is definite work to do. At first I considered it a drawback, but now I understand why it's necessary to rip up your garden and constantly change it in order to attract every single piñata. You cannot have them all in your garden at once. It just won't happen. There is so much code going on with the A.I. of these little bugger that the 360 would blow up if it tried to process it all at once.

Need a Chippopatamus in your garden? Well, you're gonna have to convert 50% to water. That means digging up half of the ground space. If you're gonna make a nice, landscaped piece of piñata real-estate, wait until you're tired of attracting piñatas. I am determined to get every single one and breed them all and get all 1,000 of those achievements unlocked. After that, I will zen the ever loving shit out my garden and make it completely rad, with only my favorite piñatas as residents. After that, I'll finally get around to finishing Gears of War. Wow, talk about shifting gears. Sorry for the pun.

One of my complaints about the game is that they throw a loooooot of information at you in the beginning. It seems like every time you hit a menu or make a move there's a new piñata intro video to watch. This gradually cools down after a while. The goal is to excite you and let you realize that there a LOT of these little dudes to attract. My other complaint is that they have a really lame-ass mode of cooperative play. Yeah, you can grab an extra controller and play with your friend, but you're both using the same cursor. So, it becomes a "no, over here. fuck, let me do it!" kind of thing. That's not so cool. I wanted to work on a garden with Yuka, but the co-op system is just not fun for 2 people. It would be fun if you could at least have a friend over Xbox Live join in and help you out with a separate cursor. Rumor has it that you'll be able to at least have friends visit your garden, but we'll see if it can happen.

You attach labels to your piñatas that mark them as yours. You can also trade piñatas and items to other gardens of people on your friends list. Sadly, I don't think ANY of my friends are playing this, so it's not so useful to me, but I think it's a novel idea.

Rumor also has it that Rare will be giving us more piñatas in the future via the Xbox Live Marketplace. BRING IT ON. I'm sure I will need a fix even after I've created my perfect garden.

One more thing (one more?). I wish they had a setup where you could log into a Piñata website to see your garden online or to check your journal. Your journal stores a TON of useful information and I would love to browse through it while at work. Especially since I'm trying to get awards for romancing each and every species 7 times. Sheesh. Lots to do. I wanna go home.

Have a snow ball fight with Yuka. Make a pot of green tea. Curl up with the cats and work on my garden. That would so rule right now.