I lived in Philadelphia county my entire life prior to moving to Los Angeles in 2009, and I consider myself a frequent traveler – 28 states and 17 foreign countries and counting. But I never made it a few hours north to visit Canada. Well, my back-to-back trips to Montreal occurred this past month – a year after I began living in the much-more-distant LA. No matter, I got to check out two games two weeks apart and, in between, visit my family in the Philly area and Penn State during Halloween to boot.

Reporting in Montreal on Homefront, I stayed in Le Westin and met up with fellow video game journalist friends to tour the new city. I came prepared with jokes like “Hey, let’s catch a Montreal Expos game” and arrived with the goal of trying everything “Canadian” in Canada. This included eating “Canadian Bacon” and drinking a “Canada Dry.” Both definitely tasted more Canadian. I’m pretty sure of it. You can check out my coverage of Homefront’s single-player campaign on Gaming Target. I really like the backstory and, if the gameplay comes together, think it’ll resonate with players.

Of course, THQ Studio Montreal is a big, brand-new and expensive studio, so the food was tiny (either that, or I’m really getting big in this photo), and WiFi wasn’t working despite my best efforts to get a signal.

I didn’t tell my family I was dropping in – I flew from from the Montreal airport, connected in Toronto and made my way to Philadelphia. From there, I caught a van to where I live and simply rang the doorbell. I made sure the van dropped me at the start of the block to make sure my mom and dad were surprised – and they were. My dad said, “I saw you had something under your arms [my suitcase], so I thought you were selling something and I wasn’t going to open the door.” Almost backfired on me, but it went off without a hitch.

In addition to catching up with my folks and my sister and her family, I got to visit Penn State with friends for the first time since moving to LA. It was Halloween weekend and I know I won’t make it up here as often as I did when I lived just three-and-a-half hours away, so this time the visit meant a lot. It’s probably also the last time I can crash in an apartment building with people I know. The sad truth of having to book a hotel room in a city I called “home” throughout college is finally upon me.

Here are two amazing panoramic Penn State photos that I took, one at noon and the other at night:

Back to Montreal, this time to write about Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I stayed at the Delta Montreal hotel – three blocks from where I was put up two weeks ago. In that time, it got much colder in Canada… lucky we were indoors except for the very short walk to the Eidos Montreal studio. There, I got to interview lead writer Mary DeMarle.

Now to spend some time back in Los Angeles…