Woo woo! Well, that didn’t take long. A few hours after I posted about the site tweaks I wanted to implement, they’re done. Except the tweaks to the stylesheet, but that’ll come later. I need to refer to some stuff on my machine at home.

Spent some time with the Xbox last night. Played some Driver 3 first. You know that mission I was talking about before, where it seemed like the thing was so damn impossible I’d never beat it? I beat it on my first attempt last night. So that seems to lend credence to the “take a break, then approach your problems with a clear mind” theory. Unfortunately, the strange, stitched-together mission design of the game prevented me from assembling a replay of the destruction. Don’t ask.

After tiring of the missions, I went into “Take a Ride” mode, where you can just pick any car available and drive around the city. Thought I’d incite a police chase or two and create a Film Director-ized replay. Unfortunately I couldn’t get any cops to come after me, which made it quite boring. Never thought I’d say there were too few cops in a game like this, but I think there are.

I noticed something weird in the game last night. You know how I said there’s a 1980 Turbo Trans Am lookalike in there? Well, there’s also a Maserati Merak lookalike, and of all the weird crap, it has the Firebird screaming chicken decal from the Trans Am’s sail panels stuck on it in three places! It also says something underneath; probably “PONTIAC,” but the texture is too badly munged to be sure. Too funny.

After getting tired of Driver3, I put in Silent Hill 4: The Room. In the last few days I’ve gotten into playing this game really for the first time, seriously, since I bought it last month. Like all the previous games in the series, it is completely disturbing and seriously creepy. Just the way I like it! My earlier suspicions that SH4 is going to tie in nicely with SH2 have been proven correct. The developers took the tiniest of tiny subplots from SH2 and based the entire story of SH4 on it.

In SH2, you may remember finding a newspaper at the bottom of the trash chute in one of those old apartments. It told the story of Walter Sullivan, who apparently chopped two kids to death with an axe as they were playing in their yard. He then killed himself in his jail cell, most disgustingly, by stabbing himself in the neck with a spoon until he bled to death. That was basically the last we heard of Mr. Sullivan (with the exception of a riddle puzzle later in the game), and he had nothing much to do with SH2’s plot. But for some reason his story really jumped out at me, perhaps because of how horrific a tale it was. And so I was gruesomely excited to see SH4 based on the killings of Walter Sullivan.

Apparently, as SH4 tells, old Walter killed more than just those two kids in the yard. There’s plenty of weirdness surrounding this dude. Then there’s some kind of connection between Walter and Frank Sunderland, the superintendant of your character’s apartment complex. Apparently Mr. Sunderland knows…something…of Walter Sullivan. Something majorly weird happened in the apartment building during the time of the original killings ten years ago, and now it’s happening again—to you. I guess I won’t say any more, cause that might spoil things, eh?

Well, time for me to wrap this up for a bit. I’m heading home now to prepare some Hamburger Helper and watch some Voyager. Then it’s back to SH4, probably. Adios!