Ow… ow… ow…

Since I’m starting to get self-concious about my remaining gut, I started my ab workout routine this morning.

OW. I’ve recovered from it already, but, for 30 minutes I was pretty sore from it. It takes a very very short period of time to start feelin’ it in the abs – took some serious convincin’ myself to actualy complete the routine. Made me think of a T-Shirt I saw on some gal at the gym last night: “Pain is just Weakness leaving the body.” If that’s the case, I just lost a lot of weekness.

Starting tonight I’m moving to a every other day rotation of upper body and lower body to see how well it works.

Finally completed Deus Ex last night. I discovered three different ways to complete the game, each with it’s own ending. None of them are a ‘perfect’ ending. I kinda like it that way – it feels a bit more like good story telling than most games. Heck, for the most part it doesn’t even deal with killing a big boss bad guy – something I thought was excellent. I kept assuming I’d have to kill this bad ass guy, and never had to.

One interesting note: there’s some interesting possible forshadowing of extreme political possibilities. At one point, the US falls under Martial law, and Constitutional Rights are suspended entirely. What happened? The US President sets up as absolute controller (but is really a puppet) of the US after a series of terrorist attacks on US soil. FEMA (one of the agencies the tends to be picked on by authors anyway) ends up in control of pretty much everything. In reality, it ends up the a shadow govornment is really in control of the situation (actually, it’s more complicated than that, since you really have more than one shadow govornment trying to keep control, culminating in one of them tossing a nuke at the other’s HQ – successfully even.)

The only thing that I didn’t really like – the main character (that you play) has the emotional levels of a block of wood. Despite everything that’s going on, he’s somewhat detached from everything. Basically, he’s a tool of the establishment – of course, the problem is WHICH establishment he’s a tool of is what you determine through your gameplay. I suppose that really your internal responses to what’s going on should just be associated with the character, since he’s who you are playing. But, since he does all the talking on-screen, it’s hard to really have that association.

I’ll end up playing the game from begining to end one of these days again – I really enjoyed the game experience, and would really like to see a Deus Ex 2 (oddly enough, they really pretty much ‘finalized’ everything within the game with all three endings – it would be damned hard to use the main character, J C Denton, again in a sequel.) However – due to lack of time I won’t be playing it all the way through again right now. It’s gonna have to wait a couple o months.

Instead, it’s time to get back to working on the kitchen cabinets again, and getting prepped to move my office (My office moves to the exersize room, the exersize room moves to the bedroom, and the bedroom moves to the office. Heabo’s office also partially moves to the new office, and we actually will spend our time together more often cause of it 🙂

One more thing concerning Deus Ex – it really has gotten me to thinking about how to present the next evolution in games as a story telling vehicle. I can think of ways to improve upon it, but, it would take YEARS to develop a game that I have in my head. I’m not sure I have that much patience. So instead, I’ve been thinking about the engines themselves that have to run a story – instead of a true storyline, what’s needed is something that runs the game more like a GM runs a fantasy game. I have a feeling I’ll be doing some serious research off in the future.

Ok, time to crank down and do some serious work.

“I say Cool is a rule, but,
Sometimes Bad is Bad.”
– Huey Lewis & The news, Bad is Bad