My bags are packed, I'm ready to go...

I'm on vacation! To make it better, I'm on vacation for FOUR WEEKS! Yes, that's right, FOUR WEEKS. FOUR. WEEKS. I'm obviously pretty happy about that. I've never had this long of a paid vacation before. It's been a pretty crazy week or so since Carolyn flew to New York to visit family on her FOUR WEEK vacation. I'm hoping we'll be able to get her down to Texas or me up to New York so we can see each other for a few days, because I really miss her.

Anyhow, I had to stay behind in Korea for about a week to finish up classes at my school. During these few "man days" as I like to call them, I've taken care of some big business...video games. Mom sent me a few games for Christmas: Saints Row: The Third, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and WET.

Saints Row: The Third is one of my favorite video games now. I really enjoyed the over the top action and customization. The story line is solid, the humor is great if not outright vulgar, and I differ from the reviews of the game that I've read that say that the pacing was flawed in the final third. I thought it was wonderful.

WET got terrible reviews and the gamestop staff told me not to buy it when I went to get it a couple years ago. It was actually a solid game! I really enjoyed it. It was very similar to KILL BILL but it stands on its own and was a lot of fun.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare was simply a call of duty game, and you know exactly what you're getting when you play one of those.

So, that was the important thing I did over the past few days. Today I had some actual business to take care of though. I had to go to the immigration office (with no Korean friends!!!) and extend my visa for a year. It was actually really easy! In and out in 30 minutes or less. I also went to KEB to reset the pin number on my Global Visa card so I can use it at an ATM if I need to, and exchanged some Korean Won for U.S. Dollars so I can eat when my plane lands in Houston. After I got home I wired most of the remaining money in my bank account back home so I could pay bills and know what my budget for the month at home will be.

I'm really excited to go home. I can't wait to see my family, of course, but I also just can't wait to be somewhere where I understand everything for a little while. I like Korea, but there's no place like home, right? Hopefully by the end of the trip I'll be ready to come back to Korea and feel like I have another year of expat living in my gas tank. I think I probably will.

Bon voyage!

The Art of Storytelling

I haven't written much about video games lately, mainly because I've been in Korea and not playing a whole lot of video games for a while. I think I mentioned Uncharted 3 in my last post, but I have to tell you that this is the only game I managed to get on the day it came out since I left home. Mom helped, of course, by preordering and picking up Uncharted 3 on the day it came out, November 1st. It arrived here in Korea on November 11th and I managed to start playing it on November 12. I finished the story mode at 2am on November 20th. I'm not nearly done with this game because it has a great multiplayer component, but the story of the campaign mode doesn't have any more surprises, so I can talk about it now.

The story is titled "Drake's Deception" and focuses around the relationship between Nate Drake and his father figure and partner in crime, Victor Sullivan. I thought it was really interesting that the game started with a flashback to "20 years ago" when Nate was in his early teens. The game did something I didn't think it could do, and that's improve on the last iteration. Uncharted 2 received perfect ratings and Game of the Year awards from just about every major publication. The technical stuff was better than Uncharted 2, the graphics, gameplay, everything was better. The story was far better, even going so far as to have some real downer moments where you see Nate looking pathetic and beaten down. In the last game the lowest point we saw Nate was with a bullet in his stomach hanging off of the edge of a cliff in the Himalayas. In this one we see him dead tired, laying his head down on Elena's lap saying "I'm sorry." Ann Hennig is an amazing story teller, I wish she'd write a novel with these characters.

Now speaking of storytellers, I think there's a divide between someone who can come up with a good story, and someone who can write the dialogue and wield the pen the write way to make a story truly great. Case in point: Dan Brown. He's gotta be really rich after his success with The Davinci Code and Angels and Demons. I've seen the movies, and I thought the stories were great, complex, and well suited for film. I've recently been reading The Davinci Code, and I think it's a great story, but something about the writing just doesn't work for me. Somehow its believable on film, but in the book I'm finding something about the sentence structure or dialogue to be a bit disingenuous. I think he's created a great story, but that somehow it falls flatter than it should. Now, I don't think Dan Brown is a bad story teller at all, he certainly writes better than I do and has some huge feathers in his cap. I just think that there is a difference between a good storyteller and a great one. That's not even a fair statement, there's a difference between a great storyteller and a stellar storyteller.

I would love to be a novelist. I think I have the basics of writing and grammar down pretty well. I can speak two languages. I can be creative. My problem is on follow through. Somehow I missed the beginning of NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, which would have been a great way to get started. Maybe I'll check it out and see if there's any deadline goals or anything that I can just impose on the month of December or something.

Anyhow, the whole point of this ramble is that I think Uncharted 3 was quite inspiring in the sense that it was just a great story, told well, and produced perfectly. It's even got me wanting to read a nonfiction book. Thanks to the kindle store, I'll be reading The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence because he was a significant figure in Uncharted 3. I think it's funny how an intelligently made video game wants me to do something more intelligent like brushing up on history.

Date Night in Daegu, and a note on perspectives.

Last night Babehoney and I had a bit of a date night in the urban paradise of Daegu. Maybe "paradise" is overstating it a bit, but there's nothing wrong with liking where you're at, eh? Now I will regale you with tales from our night out. We get off of work at 4:30pm. We met back at the apartment building, changed into non-work clothes, and headed down to the subway station. We took the train down to Jungangno station and without even leaving the confines of climate control worked our way to the top of the Lotte Young Plaza where the CGV cinema is. We got tickets for the next showing of Battle: Los Angeles and realized that we had 2 hours to find dinner, do some banking, and shop around a bit.

We had dinner at Mi Buono, an "Italian" restaurant next to the movie theater. They serve spaghetti of various varieties and pizzas. We had a tandoori chicken pizza and a honey gorgonzola pizza. They were both really good, but there wasn't much gorgonzola flavor in the honey-gorg. We were happy to find a pizza place that doesn't suck and isn't too expensive. Yay!

After dinner we headed over to the Korea Exchange Bank because I needed to wire about a thousand bucks back to the US. The amazing thing about KEB is that I can make my international wire cheaply and either from home or the ATM. I didn't have my online bank account set up with them yet, so I did it at the ATM. A few button presses and 1,500,000 wons made their way to the USA. It didn't happen instantly though and I was a bit worried, so I went back to the bank today and double checked everything and set up my online banking. Sweet. I also found out that there was a favorable change in the exchange rate and instead of sending about $1,200 home I sent more like $1,325. That's cool.

We explored the downtown shopping options a bit. Babehoney got some new converse hi-tops, and I mainly watched as there are really no clothes or shoes that would fit me here. Downtown really lights up at night with tons of neon. We stumbled by either a church service or a protest of some sort. Everybody was singing along with someone on a stage and holding candles in front of a banner that was all in Hangul. Interesting site, if nothing else.

We made our way back to the theater and I THOROUGHLY enjoyed Battlefield: Los Angeles. What a great flick. It wasn't the standard formula of build tension, alien attack, amazing comeback by humanity. It started straight in on the action. Yes, it was cheesy. Yes it was cliche. Yes I loved it. I'll definitely be buying the Blu-Ray combo pack for this one when it comes out in the US. Well, when I move back to the US and have a TV that makes it worth buying the Blu-Ray again.

We had a little bit of a rush to get to the subway station (just below the movie theater about 9 floors) before the last train, but we made it on and had an uneventful ride home. What a nice evening.

In unrelated events, I bought my first video game since moving to Korea. I got Bulletstorm for the PS3. I had read a lot about the game and thought it would be fun, and the decision was extra easy to make because it was only 40,000W and the only game in the store in English. Decision made. It's a really fun game filled with profanity, dirty double entendre, and remote controlled dinosaurs complemented by over the top gore. There's not much to not like about it.

Ah, my note about perspectives. Living in Korea has done this amazing thing for me. It made me realize that my own country is kinda cool. Sure, the US is cutting corners on some really important things like education, the economy is horrible, and people who spent big money to get degrees are kinda screwed because there's no jobs in many fields and they're graduating with a fair amount of school debt. But, there's a lot about our country that's good. Special education in schools is a big one. That's not offered in every school here and parents can opt out. I like the inclusivity and diversity of the US too. Korea is not bad by any means, but everyone here is Korean less a few foreigners. This doesn't bother me as I'd usually just watch society pass me by, but sometimes I wish people didn't look at me like I have a giraffe crawling out of one of my ears on the subway :). I know I won't eyeball foreigners in my hometown anymore after my experience here.

It's very interesting as an ex-pat to get the outside view of your own country. You can definitely see things that are embarassing or could possibly make life more difficult for you when you live overseas. You definitely want the government's foreign policy to not be unilateral and offensive on a global scale, and you're definitely proud when your country handles things right, and when they're on the scene immediately to provide aid when something horrible happens in a third country like Japan.

Anyway, that's the note on my perspective, and I told you all about date night in Daegu. I'm sorry that there's no fun pictures for this post, maybe I'll do something more picture worthy this weekend :).

Battlefield: Bad Company (Video Game Review)

I like to do a short review of all of the games I play, so today I'm writing about Battlefield: Bad Company. No, not Battlefield: Bad Company 2, but rather the original. This game is really one of my favorite first person shooters, and it's the first one that really grabbed me and sucked me into the single player campaign. It's also the game that piqued my interest in online multiplayer as a feature. You can get it used at gamestop for about $15 or so right now, and I think that the value is definitely there.

I wasn't super into first person shooters because I found them to be somewhat hard to approach. It takes a bit of    getting used-to for me to not be able to see what's on the sides of my character, but Battlefield: Bad Company for some reason made the gameplay experience much more approachable. The story, writing, and voice acting was great. I really enjoyed the hell out of the single player campaign. It had humor, which I've found is often absent from this genre of game. The characters were likeable, and most importantly perhaps, the environment was VERY DESTRUCTIBLE! That's a great thing when your enemy is hiding behind stupid cover that shouldn't be able to stop a bullet.

The Battlefield series is famous for its vehicular combat options as well, and Bad Company doesn't disappoint. Helicopter? No problem. Jeep? No problem. Tank? No problem. It's all there, and it all plays well.

The multiplayer modes are super easy to get into and out of, and it's never difficult to find a game. I hope they keep supporting this title online, because the multiplayer mode is hilariously fun! I don't think people like it when I'm on their team though, because I suck.

The end.