I have mixed feelings about Colleen McCullough. On one hand, she wrote the well-researched and racy Caesar’s Women and other novels set in ancient Rome. On the other hand, I haven’t quite forgiven her for Thorn Birds.

Now, I love Pride and Prejudice.The story is an understated comedy of formal manners and romantic expectations, plus nerdy girls everywhere agree that Mr Darcy is a catch. I love it because it also shows that the clever use of sarcasm can make any difficult situation better.

I was excited for some more brilliant Elizabeth / Darcy banter, and I was interested in seeing how the relationship matured. Would seventeen years of marriage to Elizabeth get Darcy laughing and lighthearted, or would she find that the dark, sarcastic, brooding type can be hard to live with? Are Jane and Bingley cheated by every servant, as Mr. Bennett predicted at the end of Pride and Prejudice?

I was hoping that bookish Mary would have some bluestocking friends and perhaps meet a nice professor or author for her love interest. Instead, she is kidnapped first by highwaymen, then by Darcy’s brutish secret half-brother, and finally spends most of the book held hostage by, um, a human-sacrifice cult living in the huge underground caves near Pemberley! (The Darcys just have endless skeletons in their closets, don’t they?). I had to check a couple times to make sure I was reading an actual novel and not internet fanfic.

The understated comedy was gone. Instead, characters with the same names as my beloved Bennett sisters had emotional blowup after emotional blowup. A blunt and uncontrolled Elizabeth Bennett Darcy shouting mediocre insults? Huh? Antisocial Darcy — who goes by the cutesy nickname Fitz — is networking with the house of lords as part of his campaign for prime minister, and trying to keep both his thuggish half-brother and mad, alcoholic Lydia Bennett Wickham a secret. One clever moment, when Caroline Bingley is dispatched to deal with pushover Jane and Bigley’s unruly children, is canceled out by bizarre actions by characters we know and love.

Writing a sequel to such a well-loved story would be difficult no matter what, and subject to readers insisting that that’s not what Jane / Elizabeth / Darcy / Mary would really have done. But, come on, a human sacrifice cult? In Derbyshire?

For some reason, we’ve been having a problem in the apartment where we can’t both use wireless internet at the same time. Maybe there’s not enough room in the tubes for both of us? This is a crisis in a nerd household, so Stick got on his laptop to fix it.

“Meg, pick a number between 1 and 100 for the last digit of your dedicated IP,” he said, almost finished.

I told him.

He looked up from his laptop and rolled his eyes at me.

“What?” I asked. “You didn’t say integer.”

Although I was super excited to get my review copy of the Princess Bride game, I wasn’t sure whether I would automatically like this game because it’s based on the Princess Bride, or hate it because it’s based on the Princess Bride but different. (see also: why I dislike movies based on books I liked)

The Princess Bride Game is divided into 5 games, separated by the grandfather’s narration and animated cutscenes from the movie. The first one, As You Wish, is absolutely brilliant. You play as Wesley, doing farm chores. Your time management objectives are interrupted when Buttercup shows up and wants you to do something for her. I’ve always though Buttercup was kind of a pain with her imperious requests, so the game was true to the spirit of the movie and fun to play.

In the second part, players match wits with Vizzini. The difficulty level reminded me that I’m playing a kids’ game. While you play, Vizzini shout funny insults at you. Wallace Shawn — the actor who made “Inconceivable!” famous — is actually the voice actor here, which makes it really better. I was really impressed with the voice talent that Worldwide Biggies got, including Mandy Patinkin and Robin Wright (Penn).

The third part was the Fireswamp, which was my least favorite part of the movie and, coincidentally, my least favorite minigame. I’m not really into the whole genre of jumping and hitting gems for points. Arcade-style Wesley and Buttercup were cute, but not cute enough to make this part fun. I also don’t like that Wesley gets the sword and Buttercup can, um, jump high. I tried to use it as a combat jump but an ROUS bit me.

The fourth part is a visit to Miracle Max, a hidden objects game (of the good secret-clues variety) and a potion-mixing minigame. On the first level, this was so unchallenging that it was almost boring, but later on I started to feel like I was brewing in Snape’s class. Miracle Max and As You Wish are both worth playing long after you’ve completed the objectives, even if Miracle Max did sound like someone attempting a Billy Crystal impression.

The final game, Storming the Castle was a letdown. The challenge is to re-watch the intro and outro movies and look for specific items to build a Rube Goldberg seige engine. You’re given the outline of the item, and you need to add it to your inventory. Maybe if I hadn’t played the game in one sitting (and if I hadn’t seen the movie a billion times), I’d have liked the story recap, but instead I felt like I was being forced to watch cutscenes in a mode that’s least conductive to enjoying their art.

Overall, As You Wish is the strongest section in this casual adventure game. Without the Princess Bride connection, some parts of the game would be average casual games (the Fireswamp being a particularly weak spot), but the playing as dear Princess Bride characters kept me entertained.  The Princess Bride Game keeps all the charm and appeal of the fantasy romance we loved in the book and the movie.

Stick and I went to my parents’ for the traditional ham and latkes Christmas dinner, which I’d missed last year in favor of our Jenny Lou’s Christmas feast.  My cousins gave us an electric kettle, with the part about “automatic shutoff” circled and underlined. Stick also got a teakettle from my aunt, with the instructions that he may let me use it, if he wants to. Because in my family? Almost burning down the house is funny.

Stick is on the phone with his stepmom Char, telling her his pre-Christmas plans. “Tomorrow I’m going to bring Meg to work, and then I’m going to take the car to finish shopping and get her Christmas present.” He pauses while Char says something. “You mean, am I getting her a disco ball?” Another pause. “What? Disco balls are sparkly and round too, you know!”

I recently heard about Ancient Secrets over on GameHouse. You play as Kate, a young archeologist, who is following her father’s footsteps in the search for the lost key of the Tekka. Kate needs to gather solves puzzles to gather clues to find pieces of the key. I kind of wish my dad would get some ancient artifacts and leave an worldwide treasure hunt, but, Dad, you probably shouldn’t rely on my Latin skills.

Lots of Ancient Secrets was, annoyingly, the kind of hidden object game that I don’t like. The good kind is the cluttered room sort of hidden objects, where the edge of a dagger might be visible where the area rug meets the hardwood floor, or a piece of a treasure map between two books.

The annoying kind is the same search only you’ll find the outline of some unrelated object, in beige in the sand or in green in the jungle. I don’t know the terminology for the difference, or even if there is terminology. Maybe other people don’t differenciate between searching for clues in a cluttered room, and the annoying Highlights For Children object find.

This was even more of a letdown because some of the settings would have been perfect for clue-finding hidden objects, and some of the puzzles even had a few clues in with the Highlights ones. I was excited every time Kate traveled to a new location because the settings were just so pretty. And I was even more of a kleptomaniac that usual because the stylized inventory icons were so cute.

The various minigames kept me entertained without ever frustrating me. They tended towards too easy, instead of too hard, fortunately the variety of game types kept it from becoming repetitive.

The story is engaging, but once I was pulled into the story of young Kate trying to complete her father’s life work, the collection missions and searches seemed a bit anti-climactic.

The NPCs were all good characters, with interesting accents or speech patterns or personality quirks. The conversations were forced, as Kate never gets to choose what to say. Talking to NPCs, where the conversational choice has some sort of effect on the outcome, really makes a good game to me.  I think I’ve mentioned it before, but I don’t like where there is only one option possible in order for the game to progress, and I liked Ancient Secrets even less because Kate didn’t get any choices. I’m not interested in clicking OK and going on with the missions, I even read the quest test in World Of WarCraft. Probably a holdover from years of text-based games.

Ancient Secrets was the Applebee’s of casual games. Applebee’s is solid, there’s nothing wrong with it, but there’s nothing to make it stand out amid all the competition. I was left a bit disappointed, because I thought the backstory could have lent itself to something even better.

Guess what I got in the mail today? A review copy of a new game! It’s an actual hard copy, on a CD, in a case with a picture on it and everything! It’s a game you can buy in stores, and you may even have heard of it! Especially if you’re into PC games or the Princess Bride! I’m going to play it just as soon as I stop staring at the box.

I wasn’t going to post about this — actually, I was just going to clean up, throw away all the evidence and pretend that we’d never had a kettle, but I couldn’t get the fumes out of the house before Stick got home. Just a little whiff of noxious gas in our home, and that boy starts asking awkward questions.

It all started when I tried to boil water. Apparently, if you don’t close the whistle on a tea kettle, it never whistles, and all the water boils away and you can actually burn a hole though the metal. To add insult to injury, the useless plastic whistle melted down the side of the kettle, and  started smoking and bubbling on the burner, sending licks of odd-colored flames up the side of my poor kettle. That part set off the smoke alarm, which works a bit like a whistling kettle in the attention-getting department.  Good thing I wasn’t trying anything really difficult, like toast.

Water, metal, fire… now I just need to stupidly destroy something with earth and wood, and all my life elements will be in balance.

Coupons depress me. If you summed up everything I loved about our expat adventures, clipping supermarket coupons would be the opposite. It seems to sum up the repetitive mundane side of life in the US, which is of course made worse by how I’m constantly thwarted by my attempts to use coupons and promos.

Stick and I aren’t coupon people. Buy one, get one often turns into buy one, throw away the other when it goes bad. Sometimes we miss coupons because the fine print catches us up. Oh, it’s not fifty cents off, it’s 50 cents off when you buy 2 gallons of Gatorade, a loaf of pumpernickel bread and a pineapple. And still more often, coupons languish on the mail board, or in my other purse, or in the reusable grocery bag I remember to bring about half the time.

We also ought to be banned from buying avocados, as I can never catch that minute between green, alligator-skinned rocks and smooshy mess, and I feel ridiculously wasteful every time I throw them away. We were better off in China, when we would carry our avocados and gouda back from Jenny Lou’s, and then wait, checking the avocados for that perfect sandwich ripeness each time before we went out for dumplings.

But the local grocery store finally had a promotion we could use. Buy 6 gallons of milk, get the 7th one free. This is a particularly good promo because all we had to do was not lose the milk tickets, plus, we had a couple months to go through 6 gallons. I always drank milk but that year in Yantai without any really made me appreciate cold skim milk. I was so pleased to see milk in the Vanguard in Beijing (um, before we knew about melamine, obviously). Anyway, going through six gallons in a couple months isn’t hard.

The other night, mere hours before the promotion expired, we got our seventh free gallon, and since then, Stick has been inordinately proud of our free milk. He might have even done a little dance of success in the supermarket.  When I’m cooking, he wants to know if my recipe requires any Victory Milk. He can’t walk past the kitchen without asking if I’d like a glass of Victory Milk.

I would rather be traveling again, but life with Stick is good everywhere.

MyTribe, by Grubby Games, is a happy Lost-ish sim, with all the mysteries and none of that annoying Others soap opera. I downloaded the game mostly because Casualicious.com’s recent post made it sound like civilization-advancement sim without that annoying war and bloodshed part.

Your people, survivors of a shipwrecked colonizing vessel, must find a way to survive on their island. They start out without any resources, and begin to fish, gather wood, build huts, and so forth. The tribespeople are happy to work, they love their island and enjoy what they’ve built, but they suffer from Age of Empires-style autonomy. You may find a hungry person looking at a fish or a farm, waiting to be told what to do next.

The interface is an intuitive, grab-and-drag sandbox style (with the odd side effect that your tribespeople reproduce when you drop a man on a woman). Selected tribespeople share a one-line thought, whether it’s something useful like a hint about coming weather, a clue to their mood or just a random thought about enjoying island life. Unlike Lost, they aren’t all thinking about double-crossing each other.

MyTribe had a perfect level of difficulty. Tribespeople stay alive and content with very little effort, and when you want a challenge, you can experiment with mixing potions, try to win achievement trophies or unlock your island’s mysteries. There are three different “mysteries” on each island, and your tribespeople have to figure out what they are and how to use them. Once solved, they each give your island a little boost in something, like more stardust falling. I enjoyed having tribespeople will different skills investigate the mysteries, although I’m sure a little googling would yield instructions to solve.

I was very pleased that little girls could go grow up to be rock-smashers or legendary researchers or any other profession track.

The graphics are cartoon sweet without a lot of flashy effects. All the menus and sidebars follow the tiki theme, too, Kind of makes me want a fruity drink. My major problem was being frustrated by the lack of zoom. I wanted to zoom in because the tribespeople all have cute facial expressions, and zoom out to see how the island as a whole was doing, but I couldn’t do either. There is a stats screen to keep overall tabs on your tribepeople’s progress, but I still found myself useless scrolling the mousewheel, trying to get in or out.

When you aren’t playing MyTribe, your tribespeople are still going about their island lives. They’ll build, research new advances, improve their skills and grow older while your computer is turned off. Without a player, they’ll miss any random events, like gathering fallen stardust (a magical substance for potion and, um, magic) or salvage, though. And if you haven’t assigned someone to get food, you’ll find a tribe of hungry people standing around thinking about eating! It’s like an island Tamagotchi, which makes it a perfect game to play on short breaks.