Professor Layton and the Curious Village

Professor Layton is the 17th DS game in my collection. I finished the games in about 4 - 5 days (but i did stay up till like 4am one night), totally about 13hrs of game play. In my opinion, I think it's kind of short and wish it would be more like a 20hr game. But at least we know it's a trilogy so there are two more Layton games coming (the 2nd, titled Professor Layton and the Devil's Box, is already out in Japan. Hopefully it can make it to the stateside this year).




It's a collection of puzzles and brain teasers string today with a fairly good story. With the hint coin system, i didn't have too much trouble figuring out all the puzzles. Though at times it got frustrating because you've used 3 hints coins (the max per puzzle) but none of them give you really useful tips. Fortunately that wasn't always the case.

The art style is exceptional and i really dig it - absolutely loving the cute cartoonish look. The cut scenes are pretty neat, though i do think some of the voice acting could be better. All in all, Professor Layton is definitely the type of games where you keep telling yourself "Just one more puzzle, just one more" and finally realize that you've spent an awful amount of time in it. Well, in my opinion, that might not be a bad thing. =)

Lastly, I will be patiently waiting for the release date of Professor Layton and the Devil's Box.

P.S. I actually remembered seeing a couple playing this game (the "unofficially-translated" Chinese version) in the MTR once during my vacation.

A typical weekend

My normally weekend finally returned! Ever since I came back from my vacation, my weekends were either spend at work, or something unexpected happened.

So it was nice sitting in my favorites Starbucks for an afternoon yesterday (despite it was a 15 minutes drive, and there are other Starbucks close by), taking my time to do grocery, and sleep-in on Sunday (didn't get up till like 3:30p today...Mwahahaha).

Second week in a row I made soup. Last week I made 雪耳 + 紅蘿蔔, and this week is 西洋菜 + 紅蘿蔔. Since I still have some 紅蘿蔔 left over (I use about 2/3 bags each time), probably next week will be 青紅蘿蔔 or 妅蘿蔔 + 蘋果. By then I'll be sick of 煲-ing 紅蘿蔔 and switch to something else. :P

There Goes Another Weekend...

But the good thing is that, this was a relaxing weekend (well, not really relaxing) and not one of those "wake up at 3p, grab something to eat and head straight to work till mid-night" weekends I had couple weeks ago. We are at the tail end of our release cycle, so in terms of development, things pretty much quiet down a little. There probably will be some fixes here and there, plus a lot of catch up with reviewing documentation, but "shouldn't" be too hectic.

So back to this weekend. Saturday was a trip to Chicago for haircut. I figured it probably would be nice to get one before the Chinese New Year. Normally if I am going to Chicago for a haircut, most likely it would just be me since it's difficult to convince King Snort and MyEvilInsideYou to come along (let just say oriental food is not their type of cuisine). However, this time, I actually had a travel companion. He started at my company in January, also from HK, and driving 2.5hr to Chicago for a haircut totally make sense to him. Perfect match for me. Ha ha ha. So that was what we did on Saturday: Dim Sum > haircut > Mitsuwa > WoodField > Bowl House (dinner). I think we were seriously short on time - didn't even get a chance to hit Ikea. Maybe we'll need to cut WoodField next time.

Sunday of course was the Super Bowl Sunday. Jamie once again organized a Super Bowl party at his place. Like he mentioned in his invitation e-mail, it was the 3rd year he organized the party (can't remember whether I was at the first one though). See Faith running around was cute - it always amazes me how quickly she grew up. :P There were a bunch of no shows, so we even ended up with packed sandwiches to take home. So let me take this opportunity to thank Jamie once more for the hospitality.

The game was quite fun to watch. I seriously thought that the Giants would be dominated by the Patriots, but apparently that wasn't the case. Tom Brady really couldn't do much throughout the whole game. And the last quarter was absolutely amazing.

2:45a already? Definitely my regular time to head to bed. :P

MacBook Air is Nice...Real Nice

I've been to the Apple store last Thursday AND Friday, hoping to find the MacBook Air on display but to no avail. Well, small town in Wisconsin, not much hope anyway.

But today it was a different story. I finally got my hands on a MacBook Air at Woodfield's Apple Store. And it sure is lovely, and definitely has the "Wow" factor that I am looking for. It was so tempting to see if they have one in stock and just hand over that little plastic card (XD). Luckily (Unfortunately) I haven't done my tax refund yet so I really don't have the extra cash laying around, otherwise, I might be an owner of a Mac today.

I was debating between the MBA and MBP earlier, but after holding one, the scale's leaning towards MBA. Well, it's rumored that MBP is going to get a update soon, so maybe i'll just wait a bit longer. Like I said earlier, the computer budget is still with the IRS now. :)