You are no longer allowed to invent new food. Seriously. Stop.

Your friend,
AirGuitarist87

Inspired (re: blatantly stolen) from yokofox's blog, I decided to do my own list.

10. Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-revis

I must warn you that my top ten usually changes from time to time. Anyway, Mana Khemia is a fantastic PS2 RPG from the people who did Atelier Iris. The characters are lovable, the story...takes a long time to get off the ground, and the gameplay is superb. It's a traditional RPG that does everything right. I think the only copy you can get over here is the Special Edition which comes with fantastic music.

9. Team Fortress 2

I'm going to be honest - I'm not comfortable with this game being in my top ten. It's an odd thing to do, put something you don't want to put in your top ten in your top ten, but I felt that it had to be just on principle. See: I got TF2 on launch and since then I have clocked 482.7 hours on this game. That's just over 20 days of straight playing. It's an awesome game, don't get me wrong, but it is entirely defined by it's community as is any other multiplayer. The characters are nicely balanced and it took long enough to have levels that weren't A) completely symmetrical and B) not set in the desert, but without the awesome people who play it it wouldn't be the same.

8. Broken Sword I & II

My point n click addiction wouldn't have been complete without the first two Broken Swords. George Stobbart, a more eloquently spoken MacGuyver, slueths his way across the globe uncovering mysteries and conspiracies that would have any 9/11 conspiracists tin-foil hats spin. Beautifully presented and more logical puzzles (as far as point n clicks usually go) made this game a must have.

7. Grandia

Originally released on the Saturn but later ported to PSone, Grandia is another fantastic RPG (I know this list is dominated by them). The story, characters and a battle system similar to Skies of Arcadia made this game an absolute gem to play. Justin and Feena make a very cute couple, and I almost never say that about a game. It's out on the PSN in Japan, so I'm hoping they'll do the same here too.

6. Pokemon Ruby

Yup, I a Pokemon fan. When I first got a GameBoy the first game I got was Pokemon Yellow, but I feel that Ruby & Sapphire were perfect followers from the old GameBoy games. The graphics were upped and the number of Pokemon increased 3-fold. I think Pokemon really primed me for a life of learning and memorising. I used to be able to remember all 386 Pokemon, where they were most prominant and what moves were best for their strengths/weaknesses. Once you do something like that, learning 208 kanas for Japanese seems like a breeze.

5. Valkyria Chronicles

Most, if not all, games released on the next-gen consoles have felt rather...soulless to me. The focus is more on fancy whizbangs and shafting the single player in favour of cookie-cutter multiplayer mode. Valkyria Chronicles waded in like a Trekkie at a chav convention - completed unafraid to be different. With nary a multiplayer mode in sight, VC effortlessly combined the turn-based strategy of Advance Wars with third person shooting and stuck in a fantastic storyline along with some fantastic characters. Oh, and did I mention it looks absolutely stunning?

4. Sonic 3 & Knuckles

How do you make the greatest platformers of all time better? Why, you shove it on top of the second best, of course!

3. Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge

The Monkey Island series is without a doubt the most successful series in my eyes. I really don't count the new episodic ones (yet) as I haven't played them (yet) and they weren't made by LucasArts Funny-Clever Department. The series barrage of jokes don't feel forced and come across like the funny guy you know at the pub - laid back and just has a good time making people laugh their socks off.

2. Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 & 4

I couldn't decide which Persona I loved the most, so I went with both. I feel that they both balance each other out. Whereas Persona 4 has more charm and better characters, I feel that Persona 3 had a huge leap on the storyline. Both games play out in similar ways - during the day you're at school in a semi-dating sim where you make and progress friendships and during the night (or after school in general) you're exploring an alternate reality infested with monsters. Perhaps one thing that made the game closer to my heart was it's connections with Jungian Psychology.

1. Final Fantasy VII

Possibly one of the most cliched number 1's but it certainly deserves it. FFVII was the game that got me through high school. Until I discovered what "format memory card" meant, I had about 4-5 separate game saves each with around 300 hours invested. I would have different teams and ensure everyone had at least one of the Master Materia's. This game is the pinnacle of gaming, in all honesty. It crammed in more in those three CD-ROMs than any BluRay has shown me. Let's put it this way - the downloaded copy of FFVII I got off the PSN Store is 1.4GBs...the Batman: Arkham Asylum demo is around 1.7GBs and is finished in less than an hour. Nothing has come close to RPG perfection than FFVII has, in my opinion.

I'm watching Young, Dumb and Living Off Mum on BBC 3. It's like a slo-mo train wreck. Intelligence has packed it's bags and given the pre-conscious the middle finger.

Moron (teaching a cIass of kids): "How did Princess Diana die?"
Kid: "...her husband crashed her car into the Eiffel Tower?"
Moron: "...correct!"
Teacher: "SHENANIGANS!"

And then she let 9-10 year olds perform a play on how she died. In front of the whole school. And their parents.

I'm watching the News at Ten on ITV and there's something bothering me. The news presenter is bringing up all these graphs and operating a video using her hands and this transparent hologram thing, like how they operate Zion in The Matrix.

Have I missed a massive leap in technology or is amateur mime a part of being a news presenter now?

Weaboos, or Japanophiles as I'll call them, are almost inevitably linked to people who watch anime. It's a negative connotation that suggests the person lives in a fantasy world where anime is real (to a certain degree) and that living in another country will somehow solve all their problems.

So where does this all stem from?

Well, to begin with; the simplest answer is proximity. The majority of anime's target audience is Japanese people and therefore will have Japanese life reflected within it, which is why you don't see one of the kids on Coronation Street worrying about which Hummer to take to the prom. Therefore people who watch a moderate amount of anime will inevitably notice various Japanese quirks here and there. People who don't watch anime or other Japanese media probably won't see these anywhere else. Whether or not they choose to investigate further is down to personal preference.

The second point of being obsessed with Japan isn't without some truth. Take a look at the poll results in this article on working in Japan and this article on learning Japanese. 91% of readers would love to work in Japan, whereas 37% would like to learn Japanese. The trend that I'm noticing is "I would like to live in Japan" or "I'm going to live in Japan" but not "I do live in Japan". Let me put it this way: 99.4% of Japan is Japanese and of the 0.6% other, nearly half of that is Korean. Surely with the number of people claiming to going to move there that number, particularly of white British/Americans, would be significantly higher?

Why is this so?

Well, in my opinion, this is just simply something that everybody does, regardless of hobbies or lifestyIe The car enthusiast will believe that owning a Ferrari or Porsche would be the most awesome thing ever, the guitarist who thinks being able to play like Michael Angelo Batio would give him instant stardom, or even the virgin who wants to become a porn star. We all have that one dream that we wish to fulfill, but the problem with having a dream job/possession/whatever is that it is fragile: if it doesn't live up to expectations it can easily be shattered. So we then make up excuses to distance ourselves from accomplishing that dream (can't afford it, don't have the time, etc.) in order to maintain those wishes. We have wishes to give us goals and we have goals to give us direction in life.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that the misconception that Japanophiles live in a fantasy is the same as any other person's dream or desire. The fact that it's directed at a country or it was instigated by anime doesn't make it any more or less worthy than anyone else's.

tl;dr - Don't be a ****, treat others dreams as you would treat your own.

So this summer I graduated from university. Awesome. So why am I feeling so sick?

In my mindset I still have this idea that I'm going to be doing something in September. I've been in full time education for the past 18 years of my life and getting out of this habit is strange an unnerving. It's signifying that I'm grown up and it's time to move on. There is no teacher waiting for me to finish work, no new year of projects and revision needed - in other words: everything I do from here on out is on my own accord.

And this terrifies me.

I find myself using pathetic excuses for not doing anything. I end up putting the most basic of tasks off for days simply because I'm too lazy or have an odd "worst case scenario" unfolding in my mind. So instead of doing the things I said I would do if I had more time, I end up festering; sitting inside all day doing nothing which is what's making me feel ill.

So: new rule.

Anything that can be put off until tomorrow gets done today.

I found this great website called OverClocked ReMix.org who are dedicated to bringing you covers, original homages and remixes to classic video-game soundtracks. You can download any you wish by searching or you can download the entire library through their torrent section.

My favourite has to be the cover of Outride a Crisis from Super Hang-On which I think was in the arcade in Shenmue, but I have the original on the MegaDrive. :P

I have to stress that this is legal. >_>

This is just a blog to help people having a certain problem with the new Ubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope".

I have an MSI GX610 laptop, that uses an ATi Mobility Radeon 2600. When using the live disc and immediately after installation everything on Ubuntu works fine, but after the Update Manager asks to restart I get a blank screen, sometimes with the Ubuntu loading screen in this odd multi-coloured pattern.

I found the problem lies in the horrific support of the ATi drivers (not the Linux drivers, per se as I still have a load of issues with the drivers for XP and Vista). Anyway, whatever the problem is with them can be sorted with this:

When you boot up your computer go into Ubuntu Safe Mode, then Drop Down into Prompt or Terminal (I forget which it's called), then type:

sudo apt-get remove --purge xorg-driver-fglrx

and then:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

Then continue boot as normal. This should fix the issue. I worked around by going into Admin then Hardware Drivers and installing the drivers from there. No problems since then.

Hope this helps whoever needs it.

I've been playing Battlefield Heroes a lot lately. It's completely free in a twisted EA kind of sense, but I think it's still worth a look into. Quick review of the pros & cons.

Pros:

• Very nice graphics, even if very similar to TF2. Runs nicely on little hardware.
• Good number of players allowed in servers.
• Easy controls, as with any FPS, simply point and click on people until they fall down.
• Simple, old fashioned fun.
• Fantastic music.
• Free...ish.

Cons:

• You cannot choose the servers you join, so you can end up in a very laggy server or with people way above your skill level.
• You can't change characters mid-game. This can end up with an entire team made up of Commandos (re: Spies with sniper rifles).
• I still can't work out how you win. Flags have multipliers underneath whilst there are points on either side that go up and down how they please.
• Weapon damage is sporadic. A sticky dynamite can take down a tank in 1-2 hits, but will only do a tiny amount of damage to infantry. Running people down will often just result in them flying with no damage taken. The pistol I have for my soldier has been known to take down snipers at great distances.
• You need to pay real money to buy points in order to buy the good weapons and clothes.
• Unless you pay real money, you never actual own anything. You rent it for a week or a month.

I'm sure EA will sort some of the issues out, but even so it's still fun. And free.

Try it out.

The entire industry are exactly who you'd expect - a bunch of nerds just having fun.

With the exception of Peter Molyneux, of course.

Case in point.

I think the right call was made. :D