Fa-la-la-la-laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

First off, I hope everyone had a great Christmas.  It seems kind of anti-climactic now, but soon it will be New Year's and then...nothing.  Second, whoever the douchebag(s) is/are that keep zapping negative votes on my blogs, I hope you're enjoying yourselves.

Ok, now to business.  Because of the distance my son lives from me we don't do the traditional (in the divorce sense) Christmas Eve/Christmas day split.  I came up with the idea of alternating between Christmas and New Year's ever year, with Christmas visitation being defined as from his last day of school until December 28th at noon, and then New Year's is from noon on the 28th until the Sunday before he goes back to school.  That way its easier on my son; he doesn't have to run all over the place and can stay in one spot and enjoy the holidays for a few days at least before having to pick up and go elsewhere. 

So this year I have New Year's visitation.  It sucks on one hand since I don't have any family besides my son, but on the plus side New Year's visitation usually gets you an extra paycheck in there to get gifts with.  Plus you have the day after Christmas sales which are nice too.  So I go out yesterday and see Gamestop has their "Buy 2 Used, Get 1 Free" sale going.  Nice.  I go check it out, and immediately score used copies of Mercs 2 and GH:WT for the boy along with a used copy of Lost Odyssey for me.  Nice haul, plus they had a used copy of CoD:WaW but my son didn't care for it too much so I passed.

So I check out the discs and wasn't particularly thrilled with the condition of any of them except for Mercs 2.  And LO is a 4 disc game, and disc 3 was suspect while disc 4 just screamed trouble.  So the kid went through all the disc 3s and 4s they had, and all were worse than the last one.  I even had to ask the manager (who was standing there) wtf man, don't you guys even check these anymore before you take them in?  Seriously.  So I figured I would take a chance and bought them anyway.

I get home and fired up my sliver account, since that way my son couldn't see my PP2 profile on his FL and see what I was playing.  First up was Mercs 2, since that one looked ok.  And...nope.  3 straight DREs.  My console was just replaced in October and has had really no trouble with other games, so I knew it was the disc.  There didn't seem to be any scratches of note, but upon closer inspection a good portion of the disc was discolored along the edge.  Not sure if that meant anything, but it would boot up to the main title then DRE 3 times, so that was it.  At that point I looked at the other games again and realized I was gonna be screwed here.  Disc 4 of LO had what could almost be described as gouges in it, and I wasn't even going to bother with the GH since that was 2 of 3 looking bad.

I had also purchased Civ:Rev used for my son back when I got us both copies of Left 4 Dead, so I figured I should check that one out too.  I played a full game of it with no problems, so thats a break there.  But now I had to return those 3 games I had just bought, which really sucked because that was a nice haul for the price.

So I did some thinking and decided to return those and get both the Scene-It games.  I got a refund at Gamestop but they didn't have the Scene-It titles, so I went next door to Toys'R'Us and they had both games, but only as kits with the controllers.  Obviously I didn't need 8 controllers, so I went with the first one which was only $40 and took a quick drive to Best Buy and found the newest Scene-It game on its own and got that.  So those games will be "family" presents, basically for both of us.  It should be a good time I think.