week four

Well, it's been a slow week at Chez Monica & Sean. The house hunt continues, and work every day. In between, though, we've been enjoying one of our Christmas gifts: xbox! Even though we've never been big gamers, we're pretty hooked.


dueling controllers

Our current fave is Lego Indiana Jones. It's an adventure and problem-solving game that follows the story of the Indiana Jones trilogy in Lego form. It's great for co-op play, meaning Sean and I can play together. So far, we have completed all stages of the first movie (Raiders of the Lost Ark) once through and have gone through a second time to pick up some of the items you can't get the first time. We've improved a lot already. At first we couldn't figure out how to jump! Ha. Now we actually find we prefer playing xbox to watching random crap on tv.






lego indy!

Since it's a work-together type of game, I've noticed a few interesting things about how we work together, at least when playing this game. First, Sean will always pick Indy, leaving me with the secondary character from the movie (frequently a woman or child -- Marion, Willie, Short Round, etc). He says it's a man thing. I think it's also a former archaeologist thing.

Second, Sean and I have very different approaches to problem-solving. I look for clues and try to make a round of the whole area before deciding what to do. Sean, uh, doesn't. ;)

Third, we get frustrated by different things. Sean gets frustrated when we can't figure out what to do. (Well, we both do, but he usually gets frustrated first.) I get frustrated when he takes over and won't let me do stuff, or when he doesn't listen to my suggestions, or won't come over to help me figure things me out in the game. We both get frustrated when we get blasted repeatedly by random soldiers when trying to complete the missions. Or when there's a part of the stage that we can't complete yet. (As you go through the levels, you earn more characters. Each character has different abilities, and you need lots of different ones to complete every single piece of each stage.)

Fourth, this game really works your ability to work together. We have to communicate with each other, when half the time we don't even know what we are talking about. "Move that thing to the other thing." "No, the thing, not that thing!" "Move, let me do it."

We're getting better though, both at playing the game and at playing together.