Christmas Entertainment roundup

Back in work this week after a two week break, which seemed a lot longer than it actually was. Our Christmas break was comprised of long stretches of indolence, punctuated by short busts of intense activity, with excessive amounts of eating in between.  A very restful, rejuvenating, enjoyable break.

In between all the scrabble, ice-skating, small amounts of hiking and eating, we also found the time to see several movies, including:

• Slumdog Millionaire: Transcendent, fantastic.
  
• Vicky Cristina Barcelona: Also fantastic
• Marley and Me: Ehm..Ok for a Christmas puppy movie.  This was cut mercifully short by Conor bolting to the theater bathroom to throw up, not because of the saccharine content of the movie - stomach bug
• The Tale of Despereaux: Insanely complicated for an animated film, but very beautiful to look at
• Quantum of Solace: A third rate Bourne knockoff, a major disappointment after Casino Royale, also had the weakest, most boring, least threatening Bond villain in the history of the franchise -  Was Pee-Wee Herman unavailable? 

Played plenty of video games, all Xbox360:

• Prince Of Persia: The best game I played this year, I absolutely loved it.  Beautiful art, fun, deceptively simple gameplay.  Definitely surprised me.  Only drawback was that Conor won't let me have a turn and he is way better at it than me (a topic worthy of it's own post some time is how depressing it is to play video games against a 10 year old..no activity is more certain to confirm that you are on the downward slope of the curve and that entropy is taking hold)
• Assassin's Creed: Took me a long time to get round to this one, but it was worth the wait.  What a gorgeous looking game, which holds up admirably despite being over a year old.  There are small problems with it; The combat is less stealthy and interesting than the title and subject matter might lead you to believe and the sci-fi story angle feels unnecessary and slows the action down a lot. Still, love this one.
  
• Call Of Duty World At War:  This also took a while to warm up to. I like COD4 a lot, but COD-WaW initially felt a bit...samey.  It is the same old thing as COD4, set in the late stages of the Allied campaign in WWII, a series of battles and missions strung together by little story vignettes.  Once I got into it though, the tactile authenticity of the terrain and the hardware really started to add up to something:  COD4 is all ultra-modern, night-vision goggles and laser guided warfare, World At War has more grit and rust, a bit more bolt-action and bayonets.  The look and feel reminds me of the Commando comics my Granddad used to buy me when I was a kid:
  

Needless to say, the multiplayer is great.  We had a Stephens' Day tournament on Xbox Live, where Marie played against Christine.  It was a bit like watching two blind people in a maze, trying to kill each other with  pick-axes (see pic below):

• Fallout 3: I really wanted to love this game and was excited about playing it, but haven't been able to get into it yet.  So many people have recommended it to me, but I just haven't been that charmed by it.  I like the open world and the game looks great, but I think I have a deep seated loathing for games where you interact with characters by picking your response from a multiple choice list, grrr.  Still, I have barely scratched the surface on FO3 and plan to give it a chance.

Also got some great books, but maybe later for those..