I-n-j-i-n

Also, if you play online, for some mysterious reason, 360 online play is butter smooth and has much less bugs than PS3 games tends to. Every release, we hear about some fatal bug for a PS3 game. Other than the typical Red Ring, you don't hear too much about that for 360 games as far as online-play goes. And downloadable content is still going pretty strong. Other than VC for the Wii, the community games and XBL (even though they are mostly available for PS3 as well) works really well. It's not so enviable to tangle with the Home fiasco as well. At least not yet. I do hope to get a PS3 for the obscure games + Bluray tho.

One game: Valkyria Chronicles. Why this gem isn't getting any love is beyond me. I absolutely love my 360, but I had to go out of my way in borrowing a PS3 just to play Valkyria Chronicles.

Fixed. Canada sucks for movies.

It was only like that for the first 7 or so episodes. Everything after 8 is just an incremental increase in manliness right down to the final episode.

Ew... e for jumping. That just sounds wrong.

Seed was fine. But Destiny had its writers bail out on themselves in the second half. They admitted as much. And even the revered Gundam shows like Zeta, Tomino admitted that he was just writing on pure, depressive emotions. And it shows. It's not the tropes that are always the problem in Gundam shows, but the quality of writing. The writing is just incredible in 00 since it tends to flow rather nicely and leads to the cliffhanger for the next episode. With Zeta, they talk about women subservience(??), weather in space (???) and Char getting chatty with Amuro about scoring women (?!?!?). The writing, to be kind about it, was bullshit. The thing about Gurren Lagann was that it KNEW that it was using all the big tropes associated with manly-man anime (meaningful, manly deaths) and the robot genre. It pretty much toyed with it fully knowing how ridiculous the tropes really are. In the end, the Lagann was flinging around galaxies and warping the space-time continuum. That is what set it apart from WHY-SO-SERIOUS anime.

I have no idea why they ever designed the Experimental MIRV nuclear cannon into this game because it's so suicidal (half of the time, I'm killing myself alongside EVERYTHING I see) or just overkill. 8 mini-nukes at a time? WHAT WERE THEY THINKING? Oh well. At least with the PC version, I guess you could go around with that thing all the time via code-manipulation. Also fun wiping out civilians or entire enemy mercenary encampment with a single, stupid-powerful shot.

Fifty bucks given, fifty bucks taken. Blaaahhhhhhhh. I need friends.

Nobody ever buys only one games for the 360. They say that then they proceed to buy 20 more. The 8-game ratio for the 360 is THE highest in game consoles, so the numbers seems to support that idea.

I'm going to be in the cool-kids crowd appreciating all the littler things in gaming instead of namedropping the biggest releases of the year. Maybe except for Persona 4, which stuck genuine love, hate, bittersweet moments. Tales of Vesperia is by far the best overall normal JRPG effort of the year, but Persona 4 simply topped everything in terms of its writing. Fallout 3 had some good moments, but P4's characters felt HUMAN and not like static NPCs doing silly/inane crap. Also, I don't even own a PS3 and I can honestly say that Valkyria Chronicles is the best strategy/niche-Japanese title of the year. The music is just beautiful (by Hitoshi Sakimoto of FFT fame), the waterpainting style, the story, the characters. The gameplay actually works so well and it's like a weird Fire Emblem + World War 2 hybrid. I actually care about Valkyria Chronicles more than MGS4 or any other PS3 game at the moment. Oh, and Braid, even with its blowhard artsy-fartsy idiot Jonathan Blow making it, is simply one of the most illustrative moments of experimental game making and just an accomplishment of what games can be even when made by a SINGLE developer. Cave Story was that success story years ago and in 2008, it's all about Braid. Also, the ending of Braid, while somewhat expected, came close to the Aeris-shock for me. Which says a lot.

The new tournament-style match alpha match demo they showed was pretty interesting. I can't wait to see the Star League players get their hands on the game. The kinds of tactics you can pull off with some of the units is frightening since they have enhanced micro-management moves like the Zealot charge.

I don't know why the PC versions takes after what is essentially a console-function in holding down a button. It's as if the game was made as a console game first.

If you want a multi-media, easy-to-play-roms type of system, I think a PSP is a better deal. Also, most PSPs are rather cheap (less than $150 if you can find a deal) and they come with 4Gig SD cards. If you watch a lot of downloaded movies or anime, then PSP is basically the best option IMO. Best screen overall. Game-wise, DS, yadda yadda, blah blah.

I wish there weren't so many loopholes and procedures to get the mods to the 360 version. Because otherwise, it's completely feasible. There's always a less... moral... way to get it on the PC I guess. The kid-killing one and increased-spawns sounds nice. I wish the game had way more places where innocent bystanders are to receive some major collateral damage from. Like with a nuke. Even Deus Ex had some of that and a lot of fun ways to kill bystanders, even by complete flukes.

Wow. So Soulja Boy won in Gears of War 2 and Street Fighter HD Remix? He really might be for real after all. Then again, shotgun in GoW2 can be pretty crazy and I guess you can still button mash to win in Street Fighter.

I wish you can kill the kids like you can in Fallout 1 and 2. Those brats SOOO deserve a beheading. Each bratty one.

Considering how it all revolves around ego, Soulja Boy has already won. Bigtime.

Meh. The iPod as it stands now, is vastly inferior to the PSP or even the DS in some ways. I'm supposed to get excited over inferior versions of Crash, Katamari and Konami games?

I've been ravaged by Rampage so much that I sorta have taken a masochistic liking to it. So powerful.... it's so powerful, people have problems with it in EASY mode. I'm in normal but it's destroying everything. Only way to luck it out is with evade-up. And it's comedic how I always finish boss battles with at least one member down and with almost no spirit points or hp left. Always that last, desperate full-offense push to win, even with the best strategies possible.

I don't know. I just shiver at the the thought of Tartarus. Even some of the purely torturous Phantasy Star 1 and 2 dungeons aren't as scary as Tartarus for me. And PS1/2 ones were absolute death traps near the end. I like the way the random dungeons work in this game because they're so short and simple anyway. With the only real threat being the enemies.

I'm sorry but I VEHEMENTLY disagree. Tartarus was torture on the highest level. Well, some levels this time around can be torturous in some ways since you run out of items and health and soul meter VERY quickly if you don't know enemies' weaknesses. That and the fact that there is a time limit to doing it all since you need to plan everyday-life to find ways to get supplies and Personas and other tricks to beating each dungeons. But it all seems to have a cohesive purpose this time around. And yeah, the battles are definitely tougher but it doesn't feel cheap most of the time unless enemies get that critical-hit in and kills everyone in one go. Also, bosses are MAJOR struggles in this game. It's like some of the battles in Lost Odyssey or something. It's turn-based RPG at its very best. Most real time RPGs can't really replicate the strategy that does into it. Especially in P4 where you are almost FORCED to use defense-up and enemy-defense-down techniques. It gets down to the wire a lot. And I love it.

Okay, so there's like 3 or 4 cool Ghouls..... out of a hundred or so.

Yeah, the audience-call votes is really silly, but they just want to drum up the anticipation. It's not a 'real' costume competition in that sense. I only saw a few kids (well, they're kids compared to me nowadays) with costumes. Not exactly the hardcore cosplaying stuff you might see in California.

I'm really bewildered as to when Soulja Boy became a chief representative of asshole gamers everywhere. Also, I envy his super-gaming-crib with two huge HDTVs next to eachother, one with a 360 and the other with the PS3..

Depends if you played Myst and Civ4 for like 100+ hours like I probably have. But yeah, they could've put more popular music in there. And I don't mean the token Mario, Sonic and Metal Gear either. There's still more. I'm surprised they didn't do a Street Fighter one yet. Like the one show they did Contra music or the Red Alert March. They were only one-shot specials though. StarCraft 2 and Warcraft ones are nice even if they are a bit short. And I never can guess why Dragon's Lair gets a sizable piece. It's as if nobody really played that silly game anyhow.