Today I left civilization and my daily routine, and set out on an epic adventure for a guy's retreat for the guys in our corporate office, hosted by my bosses. They graciously invited us out to his home out on a gorgeous golf course in the high desert of Oregon, where one of them have one of the most breathtaking houses you will ever see. Currently, I am staying in a villa down near the golf course, and the while we having a shaky WiFi connection here, we have almost ZERO cell phone service anywhere around for miles, so the fact I'm even able to do this blog is an amazing feat, and one I am not taking for granted.

Trust me, after this trip, I am never taking anything for granted ever again.

On the three hour trip up here, I was able to get some good gaming in, thankfully. While I'm not ready to write about a few of the games, there is one I will gladly write about, only because it will be the easiest one to write about, especially since I have been drinking for almost five hours now. So without further adieu...

I played Tetris Blitz on my iPad, and it was fun. Look, I am a huge fan of Tetris, in all forms. I remember playing it over at my friend's house as a kid on the original NES, despite the fact he had a SNES and cool PC games. He had one of those joystick controllers, which wouldn't seem like a big deal for Tetris, but actually made making moves quickly and efficiently far more easier. This was especially helpful as you got in to the far later levels, when the blocks would fall at a screaming pace. 

With Tetris Blitz, each game is played in 2-minute increments, with the idea being to score as many points as possible in that short time frame. Being able to just tap and drop blocks is actually very intuitive and works well, and almost makes me wish that feature was available in any touch-based versions of the regular Tetris. 

If you're not a leader board kind of gamer, though, or you don't have friends who are playing the game - or you don't have an internet connection - then the replay value of this game is diminished quite a bit. It's fun for a while, but since every game is cut short, there is no chance of going on amazing runs like you could in a regular Tetris game. 

There you have it. I will try to make it back tomorrow night with another blog posting, but honestly, it will be far less coherent I'm sure. Wish me luck! 

Let's face it; there are some games that a guy will buy over and over and over again, for may different reasons. These types of games don't come along very often, but when they do, they hit hard and fast, and before you know it, you have bought multiple copies of the same game, either for the same system over and over, or the same game just on many different systems. 

For me, the latest one to trick me into this pitfall is Plants vs. Zombies. Currently, I had owned the game for DS, iPhone, Xbox 360 and PS Vita. Well, today I discovered that it was only $.99 for the iPad, so guess what game I bought again, in all it's glory. 

I have literally done everything there is to do in the game over and over again, yet I continue buy the game and play it over and over again, for no real reason at all. Other than it is a super fun game, of course. 

For those living under a rock, this is a tower defense game, where you plant all different types of plants and flowers in order to stop the zombie hoard of each level from reaching the house. If they reach house, you lose. If you destroy all zombies, level over. Simple stuff indeed.

The charm lies within the characters of the game. Everything from the plants themselves, the zombies and even Crazy Dave, the characters and charm radiate from this game. I guess that's probably why I like playing it so much.

If Plants vs. Zombies 2 is anywhere near as good as this game, my wallet will be hurting severely. 

Last week I bought myself an iPad. It's something I have thought about doing for a while now, but never pulled the trigger on. Well, after saving up $200 in Best Buy reward zone gift certificates, I figured the time was right. Plus, with the all the podcasts and other projects I'm currently involved in, I justified getting it to help out with with everything I'm doing in further establishing my brand in this crazy space known as the Internet.

Also, I'm a tech nerd and love having as many gadgets and toys as possible. I work hard, and I like to play hard. I'm also a gamer, in case you couldn't tell, and why not add another gaming device to my repertoire of systems to play games on? If there is anything this particular blog and project need, it's diversity, right?

So tonight, I'll write about playing a game on my iPad for the first time in this Year of Gaming that I have embarked on. Granted, this isn't the first game I've played on my iPad (Candy Crush may end up being the death of me), but it is the best looking game I've tried out on it thus far. I'm talking about Dead Trigger, and while I think it is usually $.99 in the App Store, it just happened to be free today when I randomly stumbled upon it this morning while browsing. If all awesome games like this were free, my wallet would be really happy by the end of the year, that's for sure.

And yes, this is an awesome game. Well, for the most part that is. The graphics are absolutely stunning, especially on the new retina display of the iPad. Seriously, it's hard to remember that this is an iPad game while playing it, because it looks like it could easily be a console game. There is lighting and shading effects, great textures and rendering - pretty much everything you would expect for a retail game. The zombies themselves look fantastic and realistic as well, except for those glowing eyes of theirs. Unless of course real zombies have glowing yellow eyes, in which case, they nailed it. 

Depth wise, it's pretty shallow and not much to it. Just go level to level, mowing down all zombies in your path until you reach the end or the hoard stops coming at you, using a wide variety of weapons that you can upgrade as you so choose. Some levels are move from point A to point B type of game play, and others are defend your position type, allowing you to set up turrets to assist. The zombies move pretty quickly and efficiently, and remind me a lot of the House of the Dead games in that aspect. Only a few good seconds to get clean shots off, so you better use your time wisely.

One major thing that did bug me - and this might be because I'm not used to gaming on an iPad - is the controls, or lack thereof. It's a FPS, so the left "joystick" on the screen moves you forward and backwards, and the right "joystick" swivels your point of view. But you also have the trigger and zoom-in and reload buttons on the right side as well, which makes looking around and shooting at the same time quite tricky. I've seen those arcade cabinets and peripherals that you can drop your iPad in to in order to add true joysticks to your gaming experiences. A game like this really makes me interested in one of those, to be totally honest. 

Dead Trigger really made me appreciate what the iPad is capable of, and I look forward to finding more diamonds in the rough like this one. But honestly, as much fun as I had with it, all it ultimately did was make me want to play some console games, if only for the controllers.