We had a mostly lazy weekend. We got caught up on the new season of Psych, we watched several episodes of Boston Legal (season 4), we got caught up with the show Fear Itself, the missus did some knitting and sewing of baby blankets, and I picked up the XBLA game Ticket to Ride.
We’ve been watching Psych since it first started. We still enjoy it, but it has gotten progressively sillier and more Scooby-Do-esque – I am always waiting for the bad guy to say “and I would’ve have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling kids,” but we keep watching it because it has good characters and is generally well written.
I won’t say anything more about Boston Legal. You know we love it.
Fear Itself is NBC’s attempt to make a weekly “horror” show. It’s a bit Outer Limits. It consists of stand-alone episodes, no recurring characters – each week is its own short story. At this point, though, comparing it to Outer Limits is being a bit generous – it is not terribly well crafted, acted, etc. The show really should be right down my alley, but I think they need to get better writers, or ?? Something. I’ll probably stick with it for the rest of the season as it does seem to be getting better, but I can’t imagine it will make it to a second season if it doesn’t improve. In its favor, the premise of the episode New Year’s Day was a really interesting new twist on the zombie story.
Finally, the missus and I played several games of Facebook’s Wordscraper (an online Scrabble clone) and XBLA’s Ticket to Ride. Ticket to Ride is an Xbox 360 version of the board game of the same name. It is strategy board game where you buy train routes between cities across the United States. We had a good time with it, although we haven’t mastered the strategy elements of the game, yet. If you have an Xbox 360, it is worth trying the demo, otherwise it would undoubtedly be fun to play the board game. It is similar to games like The Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne, but I think it is somewhat simpler. The real benefits to playing games like these on the 360 is that the scoring (which can be tedious) is done automatically and the rules are enforced by the game making the games easier to play.