As you all know, today a number of sites on the Internet have gone black in protest of the Stop Online Privacy Act(SOPA) and the Protect IP Act(PIPA). While not a huge number of sites have gone down all of the ones I have been on today that are still live have something related to the act.

What makes me mad though is the way people are reacting. This is supposed to be something to get people to look at the issue at hand. What the American government has done is write a bill that is so vague it could apply to almost anything posted on image boards, websites, YouTube and even blogs. This is something that is infiltrating peoples rightful freedoms. This affects everyone because if one country does it who is to say that others won’t quickly follow suit.

What pissed me off today is that I did not hear one single word about these bills. What I heard was a bunch of selfish, whiny children who feel like these site owners are self-righteous dicks for taking a stand. It goes to show you how ignorant some people are that, when they go to these sites and see that they went down, instead of going to the information that is plainly given on the front page they get pissed off and automatically sign off or go play on Facebook. If you enjoy a site, if you use it everyday, than you should respect the owner and maybe check out why he would take down their site for an entire day because it was obviously important enough for him to do it.

This is a subject that I feel strongly about, but also one that I don’t feel the unprofessional ramblings on this blog could do justice. If you want to know more go to any of your favorite websites and I am sure you will find a link to some proper information, videos, opinions and ways to get a hold of your senators and congressmen.

Thanks for your time.

What’s happening Internet? So, it’s been a while since I have made a post and there are a lot of reasons for that. First off, university has been keeping me busy with papers and exams so I haven’t had much time for anything other than that. Also my old laptop died on me leading to me getting a shiny new laptop which I am writing this on right now! It’s better than my old one meaning I should be able to play some new games on here instead of just doing retro and indie reviews.

I have had little time(or money)for gaming lately but I have been playing tons of Borderlands and Scott Pilgrim as well as emulated SNES games. What has taken up most of my free time though is Dr. Who. I have friends who have been telling me I need to watch it and it seemed to be really popular. I downloaded the original series and started watching and, honestly, it was pretty brutal. It was slow, boring and the acting and stories were pretty lame. So when a university buddy told me he watched the new series I was pretty sceptical that I would like it, and I was drastically wrong. I ended up getting really into it and one of the things I am most excited for this holiday season is the fact that I get a new Christmas special on the 25th that I am making my family watch with me. This entire thing got me thinking and looking back at the things I love and trying to figure out why some of the things I love just don’t resonate with people, not unlike how I felt about Dr. Who.

When I look back nostalgically at the games I loved most as a kid I don’t understand how other people could find games now a days as engaging as the stuff I used to play. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy games now, a lot of the games on my top 10 are from the last decade. This question has bothered me for a while because lately games seem to be getting easier and easier. Back in the day my mom used to let me rent one game a week and that’s it. I would play that game all week and most of the time I wouldn’t beat it and have to rent it again. These weren’t games like final fantasy that have 40-60 hours of gameplay, they were games with maybe 20 levels. The difference was that the difficulty was way higher than the games you play now and I used to believe that it was because storage space on a cartridge was much less than a CD or DVD and they needed to get the most out of it. Watching Dr. Who I found that it was probably part of it, but it is probably a matter of the way generations think as well that influenced how games have developed. When Dr. Who came out people were much more patient and willing to wait for things to happen, but as time goes on people have become more and more restless. They don’t like to wait for things to happen and they want the gratification right away. People used to work hard for the things they wanted where as now we put more reliance on credit cards and loans to get what we want not that has led to a huge deficit and has put us into a recession, our impatience can be seen in video games as well as in other media. The first story of Dr. Who lasted 7 episodes, 7 episodes to tell one story. Now a Dr. Who season lasts about 12 episodes and, though it has an over arching story, each episode is essentially it’s own story. This means that you sit down for an hour and get the gratification of having the mystery solved and than the Dr. is off to another time to save another world and sometimes even time itself.

When I started playing video games it all had to do with timing and memorization. There were some RPGs and adventure games but the games I played the most were platformers. It would be hard to explain to a kid now the experience of renting games each week where you essentially walk to the right over and over again and still not being able to beat most of the games you rented. This is because when you play old platformers you succeed by having quick reflexes but mainly by memorizing where all the baddies were, so most of the playtime was spent replaying levels and dodging the same enemies. This gave me more fulfillment than any game I have played in the last 10 years. When I got to the end of Actraiser for the first time I felt great, I felt like I earned the victory and I am still excited when I play it now and can beat it in a few hours. When I beat Final Fantasy X-2 I felt happy, I enjoyed the story and I had fun, but I didn’t feel fulfilled, I felt like I did what I was supposed to do.

In this age things are just given to kids. I know people are gonna think it’s silly that I am getting frustrated about the difficulty in video games but people should think about what this is doing to kids. Now kids are taught that everyone is special and the world is just given to them with little work. If you start making even the games they play easier so that everyone beats it just by playing the kids aren’t learning anything. I spent hours playing, I was dedicated and the problem solving skills I learned playing games like Super Mario World and Metroid have helped me be a functioning adult. If we start dumbing down the media then we will eventually start dumbing down the people who pay attention to it. I am not saying that it isn’t fun to shut your brain off(I enjoy my Jersey Shore and TMZ when I want to stop thinking for a bit) or that there are no games and shows these days that challenge a persons mind. What I am saying is that we should be making a lot more shows, movies and games that push a persons mind to a higher level and help to mold a persons cognitive thinking. The media is a great way to help a persons mind grow and if it’s used correctly we could use it to help people become  better and more clever, maybe even more clever than The Doctor.

Hello everyone! As of right now I am in my first week of university and will unfortunately have little time for any hardcore gaming. What this means is you are probably gonna get some talk about tiny indie games I play or my thoughts on gaming or something of the like, this post falls into the latter.

I have been gaming for a long time, longer than I care to remember. When I got my first 3D Console I was psyched. All these new series and all the new things they could do with the horsepower of the systems amazed me. But as I got older I started to become much more jaded about the hobby I love so much. In the length of time I have been gaming I have seen a lot. So much that not much excites me anymore. A lot of what I play are just rehashed ideas that I have played time and time again. Every now and than though I play a game. A game that is like a lot of other games but has that one little extra thing that makes it unique. This could be a story point, the atmosphere, game play element, anything really that makes me stop and relies that games are still an art worth defending. Lucky for me, these games usually become franchises, But unfortunately we live in a capitalist society which means they usually go on one game to long.

I did not have a PS1 when Metal Gear Solid came out. But from screen shots in Game Pro I knew I wanted one. But I was a Nintendo fanboy back then and asked for a N64 for Christmas when that came out and I’d like to see you try to explain to your parents the difference between them when you’re 7. So I had to wait, a whole year in fact, to even physically see the game played. When I finally found a PS1 under my tree I had a copy of Monster Rancher(Mom saw me watching it on TV), Final Fantasy 7(Dad saw me playing 3 when I was younger) And The game whose ads I had glued to my fridge MGS. I played this game hardcore, I loved sneaking and shooting. The story was something I had never seen before, it was so deep, complex an thought provoking(I was like 10 guys!). Everything about this game was awesome. so years later when MGS2 game out I basically shit my pants. I went out and bought it, From the opening cinematic I knew I held gold. I played that game over and over, I wrote a small paper on the story later for high school, I got all the dog tags, found all the secrets. I never got why people were so mad about it. The character switch to me was a great story line change and at that age I had no clue what any of it actually meant, I just knew it was the most intriguing story I had ever played. Than came 3, so much excitement and so much let down. Everything about 3 screamed of trying to hard, It wasn’t a bad game by far, just nowhere close to 2. And this is what I find always happens to my favorite franchises.

I cannot honestly remember a time where a game after the second one stood out in my mind as a pure gem. Usually a second game is amazing, they take what I loved from the first one and add a couple elements to make it stand out. Games like Resident Evil 2, Silent Hill 2, F.E.A.R. 2, Assassins Creed 2. All these games took what I loved and made it that much greater. Unless a game completely changes styles every time like Final Fantasy it’s hard to continue past a second try. What do you do when you reach perfection? In my opinion you should give up. If people like the story they will buy novels and comics. Either that or keep the same game formula and just add a little bit, but that’s never what happens. For a third game they usually take a lot of the great away or add way to much. In San Andreas(Because I count GTA3 as the start of a new series of GTA games) they made the world so massive that it took 15 minutes to drive from one side of the map to the other. They added more flying parts, and even a stupid RC plane mission that wound up costing me the use of my desk. They tried to hard and wound up losing all the goofy fun I had in Vice City. This is something I have come to accept as a fact and, as a gamer, a curse. I know I am going to buy a game because it has a favored franchise’s name on it. I do this because in my heart I have this deep hope that maybe this one will be the best even though my head is telling me to look at history and accept that it won’t. I do the same with movies, with novels, pretty much everything. I am a nerd, and my fandoms consume my life and my money. Companies know this and leach off it.

But what can I do. I am a gamer, I am a pop culture geek, I am an anime nerd. This is the lifestyle I have chosen and this is the oppression we must deal with. Here is hoping that the new Metal Gear game will be the best thing I ever play!

Something that I will always love is big RPG’s. I like to feel like I am in a large world where I can spend hours doing nothing but killing thousands of smaller things to make me stronger. One company that does this for me is Bethesda and having spent months doing everything in Oblivion I moved on to Fallout 3 which is surprisingly where I found a little hole to curl up and die happily in. Wandering around a post apocalyptic environment was one of the most entertaining and immersive experiences I have had in gaming in a long time. I thought the other 2 fallout games were fine and all, the one on the PS3 was shit and I am told there is another not that I care that much. Everything had improved from oblivion and it made it seem like it was a harder to cheat.What made it fun was the open world feel of it. I could wander around killing off anyone who looked at me funny and I had fuckloads of fun doing it. I have told lots of people about my love for this game and what I have gotten back was that I needed to play Borderlands, like right now. It came on sale a couple weeks ago so I decided to pick it up and finally give it a go.

First off besides the fact that it takes place in a desert there is no real correlation between the games. You fight on a planet looking for a place called the Vault(Ooooh I see what you did there gearbox). This place apparently has untold riches and everyone wants it. You are guided by a weird girl in a video that basically warns you when bosses come and congratulates you when you win. You get to choose between 4 classes at the start of the game basically coming out to Scout, Psychic, Tank and Bigger Tank. You get experience point to level up. Each level gives you a skill point to use on one of three skill trees per class. This coupled with finding artifacts that adjust a characters specializations. That is pretty much the jist of it.

I started the game as the hunter as I do most games. I am not the most agile person in real life so I always wind up picking the rouge/hunter character. After a mildly entertaining opening video and tutorial I was sort of pushed into my first few missions. I sniped some wolfs that look like there heads came straight out of the movie Teeth and shot a bunch of cliched bandits that ran around the wasteland. The first thing I wanna point out is the characters. Basically you fight the same type of monsters only getting slowly bigger, essentially they all look the same though. some are on fire, some spit at you but it’s all the same guy. After killing the same dogs over and over I was finally able to fight a slightly bigger dog that looked exactly the same. The next point is the humor. In Fallout the humor was in your face but at the same time subtle. It wasn’t thrown in your face, things were said and you chuckled to yourself and that was it. In Borderlands it’s shoved down your throat. There is a character named Dr. Zed who helps you at the start of the game. In the zombie DLC the character Dr. Ned always states in a nervous voice that he is NOT his brother Zed. It’s like the creators are sitting there going “LOOK HOW FUNNY WE ARE ISN’T THIS GREAT”. All this does is make me feel bad for the writers. The world is a problem as well.You get kind of large chunks that are separated by wapoints where the game has to load the next area. It gets tedious and ruins your immersion into the game. The whole point of role playing is to put yourself in the characters shoes and take on all the baddies while feeling like a bad ass. This doesn’t happen when you have to wait 2 minutes to continue a quest then another two so you can return to the guy who gave you the quest and receive your spoils. The last point I want to make is the level of customization. While you can sort of make your dude unique you can’t really do anything with him. In Oblivion you could do whatever the hell you wanted. If you wanted to be a cat rouge who shot lightning and run around in your underwear scratching people, you could do that. In Fallout you could be a tank who pick pockets and hacks computers. In this you have to pigeon hole yourself as a character. By picking the hunter I could either power up my bird companion, be a sniper or a gun slinger and that’s pretty much it. You can’t be whatever you want and honestly when I play these types of “Force you into a little box” style RPG’s I get bored easily.

You may think from reading this that I dislike Borderlands, this is very untrue because I found it’s shining point. I enjoyed playing it at first, the humor was blatant but chuckle worthy and the difficulty ramped up pretty smoothly with a lot more strategy than Fallout or Oblivion. The problem I have with games though is I can be having as much fun as I possibly could but if you don’t draw me in I lose interest fast. If I don’t care why I am doing something I will go find something to do which I give a shit about. With RPG’s this usually means I go play something else, try to come back and forget what I was doing with a character in the first place meaning I will restart and try again from the beginning(Ex.Xenosaga) Borderlands doesn’t have this problem. I literally stopped playing for 4 days and played a bunch of other things, had my brake and jumped back in and am having just as much fun as when I started. I find it to be a casual RPG. One that’s not meant to waste entire nights on, but one to sit, do a few missions and than go fiddle around with other things. There are things I haven’t touched on(IE. Driving, Co-Op)but that is mainly because I don’t have anything to say about it. I had some quips about the game so far and felt like writing it down as those of you who read this find I do quite sparatically. I am sure with a little more playing I will have some thoughts on it but who can really say. Maybe you will hear about this game again or maybe you will get a retro review of Link to the Past instead.

Until next time peoples. Peace Out!

Hey there, I have been playing a cornucopia of retro games for that last few days. because of the steam sale I have been able to get a whole whack of games for almost nothing, so yay me. This has led me to be quite depressed actually but that rant is gonna have to come at another time. While I have been wading my way through my pool of nostalgia I got a couple of indie titles a friend told me about, collectively they cost me almost 10 bucks and were worth every penny.

First off is Beat Hazard. For those of you who still don’t know Beat Hazard is an asteroid-esque shooter where you are basically stuck on one screen and shit flies at you, it’s then your job to destroy it and get power ups to beat bigger things. Very simple concept except that all the levels are somehow designed by your music. I am still trying to figure out how it does it because it works so well. This means that I have over 12000 levels of play if I include stand up comedy tracks(Which I do because Christopher Titus makes such a great level). All in all I couldn’t sit there for an hour or two and play this but it’s a great “I’m frustrated so I’m gonna do something else game”, which I have found I need with some of the other games just to keep me going and probably could have helped me get through Xenosaga a lot easier.

The second game I got is where I feel my money was best spent. Recettear is a weird, hybrid of dungeon crawling and shopkeeping that speaks to the very core of why I play alot of games. the reason I like a lot of old rpg’s is cause I like to dive into a dungeon, get treasure and than sell it to amass a large fortune for no other reason than for my own bloated ego. In Recettear YOU are the shop owner, townspeople and adventurers stop in to buy and sell and it’s your job to gouge the fuck out of them. You feel good when you sell a piece of candy to a little girl for 2000 dollars and you feel better when you buy a 12000 dollar vase from an old man for 3000 bucks. That isn’t to say the game is without flaws. The easiest way to make money is to go on dungeon excursions to collect items to sell in your shop. You wind up meeting adventurers along the way that you can use. You got a knight, rouge, wizard and apparently you get an archer later. This is all pointless cause so far the only useful character is my knight and I have him so jacked that I just run low level dungeons till my eyes fall out, and that’s the problem, the plot isn’t in dungeon crawling it’s in the shopkeeping.  

The story is that you are Recette Lemongrass an adorable girl who’s adventuring father dissapeared before the start of the game. In comes Tear an agent for a collection agency who tells Recette that her father has an enormous debt that she must now pay off or lose her house. Tear comes up with the idea to turn the little house into an item shop and make the money back, to which Recette reluctantly agrees. And so the item shop Recettear is born(Yay bad puns!). 

The comedy is where this game stands out the most, through all the flaws it’s really charming and cute. The game over you get when you can’t make your weekly debt payments(which you get to see alot) has our heroine living on the streets in a cardboard box only to wake up and relies it was all a dream and she is actually on the second day again, except with all her items and with the shop decorated exactly the same. Nothing is taken seriously and when you relies that the whole dungeon crawling aspect isn’t for any higher purpose other than to risk the witless heroes lives to make a buck it just makes it that much more fun.

All in all both these games are great purchases and are a great add to your collection, I can see me still playing both for years to come and never really getting bored. Hopefully more games like this are allowed to come out because the industry needs more innovative ideas to keep it going and not just let developers rehash the same concepts over and over again.

Anyway, until next time friends. CAPITALISM, HO!

Hey guys, it’s been a while. So to the few people who follow this sorry, I am sure you have gone and found other people to listen to in the 2 months I’ve been gone. See, once again I broke another charge cable and so my laptop was out of commission for a long time, then for the last few weeks it’s been a mess of school stuff and work that’s been keeping me from posting something, but I have finally found time to sit down and get some stuff out of me, so here we go.

In the time that I’ve been gone PSN finally came back online and the welcome back games have taken up most of my free time, mainly Infamous. This is a game that when it originally came out I had no intrest in. I am kinda iffy about sandbox games like this. I have never been the kind of guy who wanted to run through alleyways and climb up poles to find obscure objects for the sole purpose of extending the life of a game. When I was a kid I loved GTA, but that’s because I was 14 and the thought of prostitutes and mobsters was such a great idea. So because this was technically a free game, I went for it and was shocked but what I found.

You play as Cole, I guy who for some reason was at the epicenter of a large explosion, you then go through a small tutorial where it tells you to jump across a bridge, go here, go there, the basic stuff. Then it is your typical open world game, sure you got super powers but that’s pretty much it. I was bummed, but it was free so I kept going. Than I went for another hour, and another, and another. I got more powers, found blast shards and did side quests. I found I was having fun. people were cheering for me and taking pictures of me. That’s where this game gets great, it makes you feel like you are accomplishing something. When you do good in GTA you don’t really get anything, you continue the story, get to the next island and it’s all pretty much the same. In Infamous when you do the side quests you are saving small portions of each island and baddies don’t appear anymore people start to like you and appreciate you so you feel you should keep going. This is also the first time I cared about characters in a game. For a long time I have played games and enjoyed the stories, but it’s been years since I have been so drawn in, and I am not sure why. Maybe the fact that the karma system makes me feel like I am more in control? Maybe because the twists make sense AND are surprising? In all honesty I am not really sure. All I know is that I loved the shit out of this game and will probably replay it over and over until I 100% every single thing.

I have also bought a couple games, one for my sister(Flower, which she beat! It’s her first time beating a game so she deserves some congrats!) and one for my girlfriend(Outland, which she is actually really great at.) and than a bunch for me. The one that’s got me hooked is Dungeon Hunter. It’s a classic go into dungeons, beat monsters, get items, beat stronger monsters, get stronger items game. Kinda like a Diablo clone with less story tacked on. The best part is the multiplayer though. If you can find a good party to play with to suit you character this game can consume most of your free time as it has mine lately.

Anyway guys, that’s all I have for you today. Tune in later when you get a very long rant about my Post-Infamous gaming experiences.

Peace yall!

I’ve had to do open shifts at work recently. What this means is that I am alone in the store to serve these silly people their wings. What this also means at my place of work is that I have no formal training in how to do it.My manager comes to open the door and gave me a vague concept of how to clean the fryers than leaves me to my own devices. These are the most boring shifts of my life. I honestly worked a 7 hours shift and got maybe 6 orders. I managed to read the entirety of the days newspaper(including advertisements) And listen to two chapters of a scanner darkly. This was after every prep task was done and the entire open list was signed off. I have another one tomorrow so if I shoot myself my girlfriend can probably figure out my password so that she can tell you all.

In other news I have given up. I have a bunch of friends telling me that Dr. Who is one of the greatest shows on tv, and that if I don’t watch it bad things will happen to me. I also know that the last few seasons are not all the Dr. Who there is, so me being me I can’t start over halfway through the series and continue to live with myself. So after a large 208 GB download I now have all the episodes of the classic Dr. Who, excluding the ones that were lost. This has taken away all the time I have for gaming at the moment, but as I am focusing on fully compleating a fighting game it won’t be that hard to jump back in.

It’s a short post today as I have some 20+ seasons of science fiction to watch and I am only 4 episodes in. I can’t really give any sort of analysis on how I feel yet, cause I am not entirely sure. I understand that this was made in the 60’s but there is a lot of things that are really poorly done. That being said I am so intrigued by the concept of an old man riding through time in a police box that I can’t stop watching it. More thoughts as I continue through!

Last time I posted I said I was going to be playing Shadow of the Colossus, and I did. I made it too the Sixth one and collected half the white tailed lizards when I decided I had enough. Sometimes the nostalgia of something is a great reason to return to it. When that nostalgia is based off of how great something looked 6 years ago than sometimes it’s great to leave it in the past. The reason this game was great was because of how amazing everything looked, not just the gameplay. Sure the gameplay is just as fun as ever and I doubt it will ever get boring, and for some reason scouring a humongous empty landscape for lizards is surprisingly engrossing even today. However the more I played the sadder I became, it really isn’t comparable to what it once was visually and it was just bumming me out. So I decided to move on and leave the game for when the HD remake comes out for my PS3 which is getting me way more excited than it probably should.

I made the move on to my favorite game of all time, ACTRAISER! This however lasted all of a night because you never really get how short the game is until you know the pattern of every boss and exactly how to traverse the platforming stages. I really don’t want to get into the greatness of the game right now but I will probably dedicated an entire post to how amazing it is later on. I honestly can’t fit it with everything else I am writing.

So in honor of Mortal Kombat making a return I decided to play through Deadly Alliance, there isn’t really much to say about this other than just that. It’s hard to make a long winded blog post about a fighting game. Mortal Kombat does in fact have a story and if you followed it this is the game that had the first real WTF moment for me. It starts with Liu Kang, the winner of the last 4 tournaments dying, like in the opening cinematic. Then it is pretty much the same as any other fighting game, except for the Konquest mode. It is a very thinly veiled tutorial that you run through with all the characters. It teaches you all their moves and by completing these missions you get Koins, these Koins can be spent at the Krypt to buy things like art, video, stages and characters. It’s a feature I always liked about this game considering that the rest is pretty mediocre. You fight, you have different fighting styles, you bleed more blood in 20 seconds of fighting than any human has in their entire body(There is one Konquest mission where you have to make your opponent bleed 50 pints of blood). All in all it’s a fighting game that has intense violence for the sake of intense violence, which is what the series has always been known for. I will probably get bored and move to something more engaging soon but for now I will frivolously make a fat man puke on the floor and watch people slip in it, softly giggling to myself.

I have been asked recently why I am not doing anything on new games. Saddly my PS3 is on the verge of yellow lighting and any time I try to play a blu ray it freezes and dosn’t wanna do anything(sadly this happened the day New Vegas came out and I bought the collectors editions). So what this means is I am stuck going through all my classic game consoles and trying to find little gems in the stacks of crap to entertain me until after anime north(Where I will once again have disposable income). What this means for anyone who decides to read this thing is that you will constantly be bombarded with looks back on games and movies the entertained me in the past. You are all so lucky!

Anyway I must get back to beating up girls in tight clouting so peace out everybody!

So since the last time I posted I have some brief webcomic news. Our artist has dropped out which means that we are kinda at a loss for the moment but we are looking for an new artist to take up the project. We are looking for someone who can do 1-2 strips a week, this means that I would send you a script and you would illustrate the hell out of it. So if anyone is interested in taking up this project with me feel free to drop me a line.

In other news, with pockie ninja consuming my life for the last 2 weeks it has become apparent that I am not going to complete Xenosaga 2. I tried to get back into it today and I just lost the feel for the game, I just can’t get into it again. So for now it will sit back in my cabinet and I will enjoy a game that is actually good. What this means for those of you who follow this blog is that you are going to get to hear thoughts on a game I haven’t played in a good long while, Shadow of the Colossus. It’s been literally years since I have played this. I sold it back when I had no money and wanted fresh games in my collection and I regretted selling it even back than. But I found it in the bargain bin at Zellers for half of what I sold it for so I guess you could say I made a profit.

For those of you who don’t know, the concept behind Shadow of the Colossus(I’m just gonna call it SotC) is that you are a nameless man who wants to revive this girl. To do so you have to kill 16 enormous monsters as a means to get this girl’s soul back in her body. It’s hard to really clasify this as anything, it’s sorta like a Prince of Persia kind of game where you jump around and hang off things. The only difference is you are hanging off enourmus creatures fur for the purpose of killing them. It’s hard to call it an action game because the only things you fight are the colossi. It’s more like a puzzle game than anything. You have to find the best way up the colossus, find all it’s weak points and then take it down. It was loads of fun then and it is just as fun now.

Back when I played this, most of the friends I had didn’t really get it. I described it to them as playable art because back then it looked incredible. This game along side Ico was what I thought gaming really could be. Not just your average Zelda or Mario, they took the power of the system and made something truly beautiful. However this was 2005, looking at this now it’s kinda sad how poorly it’s aged. The pixels are massive, the land is undetailed, the sound cuts out every now and than to restart the battle music. I am not saying that the game isn’t still good looking, I mean traveling around on a horse is about 90 percent of what your doing and the other 10 is fighting these beasts, both of which still look amazing. But when you take this and put it beside a game like Flower where each individual blade of grass is rendered in and of itself it kinda lowers your thoughts of this game that you once thought was jaw dropping. I hear though that they are coming out with a high def version of both Ico and SotC for the PS3 so here is hoping that I can once again sit in wonder as I watch the beautifully rendered worlds go by.

Anyway I have been playing for an hour and got the first 2 colossi down and am planning on getting at least the 4th dead before I stop for today, but who’s to say I won’t get farther. It’s hard for me to stop when I am playing a really great game. An hour feels like a minute, than another minute goes by and I relies I didn’t sleep all night. This has been a problem for me since my SNES days and I don’t see it ever really stopping. The best part is that it’s been so long since I played this that I kinda forget how to actually kill these things(Took me 15 minutes for the second one) so even though I know them well I kinda get to figure things out all over again. So for the next week or so you are probably going to get some new posts about my feelings looking back on this game so I hope you can all be entertained by this and forgive me for giving up on Xenosaga.

And hey, if you keep following me maybe I will still be doing this during my second run and you will get to hear me bitch about GS quests all over again. Man, you guys are lucky!

So today my mom came home. For those who don’t know she is a professional organizer. If you want to know what that means, watch hoarders, she is the one who fixes the people and makes the mess go away. What this means is that I get old game consoles and classic games for free while these parents kids are off at collage(yay me!). But today I got something better. The laptop charger I bought has been working fine, the problem comes when I move. The adapter is attached very loosely and will fall out A LOT, and when that happens I have to unplug and plug it back in from the wall. Sometimes though(Most of the time actually) it doesn’t register so I have to do this over and over, sometimes for 5 minutes or more. Today however my mom brought me a wonderful birthday gift, a new Kingston laptop charger. Thing has obviously never been used, the connector fits AMAZING and it dosn’t tweak out on me at all. The day is going great and knowing that my buddy’s show is tonight I feel it’s just going to get better.

Sadly I have made no progress in the last leg of Xenosaga. Pockie Ninja has completely consumed my life and I am not sure why. Nothing about this game is amazing but it’s so casual that I just shut off and do other things while it does stuff for me. It’s a real lazy man’s MMO and that was exactly what I was looking for I suppose. I actually spent money on it this week to get VIP access for a while, more arena bouts, more XP from everything and I even had enough gold to power up my pet by a little bit. I am sorta spending way to much time play it, so much so that the game is telling me that video game addiction is a growing problem and I should start playing responsibly. I really want to finish but I am having too much fun with a game that’s enjoyable that it’s become really hard to go back to playing xenosaga. Plus no one is really pushing me anymore(In fact Ptar has been harassing me to stop playing it) so maybe if I get a outward push I will sit down for the last 4 hours and power through but I doubt it’s gonna happen anytime soon.