I suck at playing the Guilty Gear games. Completely. If I put our bunny Petey on the controller, he would beat me.

But -anyways-...

I left the house with my parents and my brother for my grandparents' condo in New Jersey. We rode up in the M3, and I had Rockman (Mega Man I should say, since it -was- the US version) Zero 2 on hand. I ended up starting it while in the car, which is always a bad idea since it always makes me dizzy, but I ended up doing it anyways...

But mostly, I slept for the ride. As usual.

Didn't do much when we got there except eat far too little dinner, watch some TV, and sleep. I ended up staying up much later than everyone else as usual, thanks to my now completely irregular sleeping habits. I mostly watched chibihack and Cyborg 009 on CN, then put in Hanadan DVD5 (only a few months after marathoning DVD2-4), then put on Food Network for me to fall asleep to. Since Iron Chef happened to be on, this didn't happen anytime soon.

Of course, I end up getting woken up at some ungodly hour considering the time I actually fell asleep. Turns out a rough plan had been made considering what I wanted to do - I would get dropped off at the Break, assuming it was under half an hour away (it actually was a bit farther than any of us thought), while everyone else would eat lunch and go shopping, and then I would get picked up for dinner before we leave to go home. (It would have actually been problematic for me to stay with my family over the day, since the M3 only seats 5, and we had a total of 6 people...) Naturally, we end up having the nav avoid highways, which places us in quite a bit of slow-moving traffic, so it takes us almost an hour to get to...

... a still-closed 8 on the Break.

Yeah, I got there before opening. The signage inside said opening time on Saturday was 1pm. It was 10:40am or so.

So we start leaving. Pondering plans, I look through my cell, and find I actually had Aldrich's mobile phone number stored. I called him to see if anyone would be able to pick me up from Manalapan later, and found...

Since it was a tournament day, the Break would open at 11am.

Okay, so we had gotten there 20 minutes too early, and now we were halfway back to my grandparents'. We end up phoning back, mentioning how far behind schedule we now were, and we turn around and head back to the Break, again. This time, I'm actually dropped off, an hour after we arrived the first time (and with the gas consumption to show it). Because we were behind schedule, I was now going to be picked up after dinner to go straight home, so I would have to deal with the food situation myself. Considering where I was, that was hardly a problem.

Making use of my time there, I played some IIDX, some In The Groove (which doesn't seem half bad, if half the steps weren't just plain stupid hard), a tiny bit of Amplitude, and a bunch of fighters. In all my visits, I have to make note of the cabinet marquees and artwork forever not being of the actual game it contained, and this visit found me staring at Guilty Gear Isuka installed in nothing less than a Gauntlet Dark Legacy cabinet. The instructions to block and perform Turbo moves were still mounted along with the large marquee and the character profiles on the control panel itself. That had to be one of the most impressive mismatches since IIDX was put in using the Pump It Up cabinet as its screen.

As for Isuka's gameplay... I didn't think it would work when I first heard of the 4 player concept, and after seeing it in action, I still say it doesn't work. Especially problematic was the fact that you have to turn around manually, even if it's a 1 on 1 match. 2 on 2 matches just make for way too many things going on the screen at once, and more often than not my teammate and I kept attacking each other instead of the opposing AI-controlled team. I think I'll just stick with GGXX...

That, and seeing some of the people up there again were really my only goals in being there. I really need to head up there more often.

I got picked up at around 7:40pm, so I spent about 8 hours there. Once again, I slept for most of the ride back.

On Sunday, I made the decision to go ahead and purchase a PS2 Network Adapter and an HDD from Best Buy to try out HDLoader at Chris's house. So when I finally set out from the house, I picked those up and headed over. I didn't run into much traffic at all, even at the Springfield interchange thanks to the greater separation between the northbound and southbound split. Too bad it didn't work nearly as well as it should have - even after going through the trouble of formatting it in Chris's computer. It appeared to work once, even running Front Mission 4 for us, but then it never worked again. So, it was basically a big waste of money.

Otherwise, it was a pretty good gathering of people, though we were missing Kp, Billy, Dre, and a few others. We ended up eating hamburgers, just shortly before the steak was done, so we were already full by the time we found out they were being cooked. ^^; Most of our time was spent with the emulators on Chris's modded Xbox, and tinkering with my PS2 before we finally gave up and played some IIDX, pop'n, and SF2 on it. As usual, I ended up staying late at Chris's and sleeping there again.

Getting up, I did little more than work more at unlocking Chris's Xbox SC2 save. He's only short a few dungeons and the Edgemaster quest now.

Later, we decided that Pakman, Brice, Chris, and I would go see Spider-man 2 together, even though Chris and I had already seen it. We would be getting better seats at a larger screen, though. We ended up getting some of the worst Wendys' food I've ever gotten beforehand, and this was after they told us to pull forward to wait for one of our orders of chicken nuggets then forgot about it completely. (I think I'm going to stick by the Wendys near here, since I've only had one major problem with the food there so far.) After the movie, we headed back to Chris's, and from there Brice and I drove ourselves home.

Yep, that was the weekend. Thankfully, I sorted out the HDLoader problems today, though I still can't seem to get DDR MAX JP and Party Collection working with it still. >.>

Got another package from DDD today, too... it was the chibihack LE, which I wasn't really expecting them to actually obtain for me. Unfortunately, the disc was loose in the packaging, and thus scratched to all hell. Impressively, the bonus card inserted into the case managed to be under the disc, between it and the hub. I'll have to take the single disc to Suncoast for a replacement.

One more thing - the webcam should now be working again. Not that there's anything interesting on it, except maybe for my calendar image for the next two months...