Seeing as how I haven't posted anything for over a month, I thought I'd let you know that I haven't died! I'm still alive and kicking. Just recently got Mega Man X Maverick Hunter for my PSP and it is awesome. It's Old School Mega Man with a facelift! They gave fans for once what they wanted. Instead of making it some sloppy 3D Platformer, they stuck to their 2D roots and gave it a whopping dose of steroids. I also am going to get Street Fighter Alpha 3 for PSP. Street Fighter Alpha 3 is my favorite version of Street Fighter ever, and now I can take it anywhere! Capcom is coming on pretty strong on the PSP. It's about time someone did. There for a while PSP was getting thrashed by Nintendo DS, but now they are STARTING to level out the playing field. I was always disappointed by Sony. They created this marvelous handheld tech, but then don't deliver with the games. But that seems to be changing a bit now, so we shall see if this trend continues. In other news, I'm highly looking forward to Mortal Kombat: Armageddon. Yes, I've been a Mortal Kombat freak since MK1 in the arcade. And I've survived the transition to 3D. But Armageddon looks like it's set to deliver the best MK fighting game in current gen consoles. I'd LOVE to see what they could do with 360 or PS3, but I guess I'll have to wait a long time for that. In the meantime I'll be kicking ass with MK: Armageddon. Another bonus, is Samurai Shodown V. I loved the Samurai Shodown series almost as much as Street Fighter, and now I can FINALLY have a halfway decent home conversion. I've heard people nitpick about it, but really, coming from a Samurai Shodown fan, I'm just glad they didn't screw it up. Worth at least renting if you're a 2D fighting fan. I bought it though because I'm a Fight Game fanatic. Lately I've been spending a lot of time with MMORPG's which has cut my console gaming time a little "short". Primarily World of Warcraft, but Everquest 2 has COMPLETELY overhauled the way it plays. They gave it a massive facelift, similar to what SOE did to SWG. And I must say, I'm liking both games about equally. I just hate how time consuming they can be. I've also tried the betas of Rising Forces Online, and Dungeons & Dragons Online. Both good games. If you like anime and sci-fi then definitely check out RF Online. I had mixed feelings about DDO, it starts out a tad on the slow side IMHO but picks up some as you go, so I'll probably try it out. What MMORPG's will I end up playing full time? God only knows, but thats a lot of money lol. And I'm not talking about purchases I'm talking about monthly fees. $14.99 x 4 if I play WoW, RF Online, DDO, and EQ2. All this money when I could be buying BRAND NEW games for my consoles....hmm. The catch 22 of playing way too many MMORPG's lol. I'm sure I'm going to cut something out somewhere.....I can't imagine I'd TRY to play all those MMORPG's at once. I'd have time for nothing else lol. A little time to devote to a SINGLE one of em. I'd be hopping around getting nowhere. So, we'll see I guess. Recently got Dead or Alive 4 for my 360. Pretty awesome fighting game. I mean, nothing fantastically new that blew me away. But still a good fighter I don't regret owning. I also bought some stuff on the Xbox Live Marketplace. I got Robotron 2084, Gauntlet, and Geometry Wars: Evolved, or whatever it's called. I'm a huge Robotron fan. That game is really addictive if you don't mind super simplistic old school games. Geometry Wars plays a lot like Robotron. Well I believe that about wraps up this edition of my blog. Peace. -Shawn

Well 2006 arrives without much hoopla. Not that I can complain, I don't really give a rat's ass about the new year. What I DO give a rat's ass about is the following upcoming games: Company of Heroes' Warhammer Mark of Chaos RF Online D&D Online Now, I shall discuss these in order. Company of heroes is an AMAZING looking WW2 RTS made by Relic, the brains behind Warhamer 40K: Dawn of War. This game looks freakin amazing. If you haven't heard of it you're missing out. Speaking of RTS, the next one up is Warhammer: Mark of Chaos. This will be an awesome RTS, because it will be top notch like WH40K only its set in the classic medieval Warhammer universe. Highly looking forward to this game. As for RF Online, it is a MMORPG that mixes fantasy with sci fi. It looks really fantastic, and I'm an MMORPG freak, so this will be right down my alley. Also, speaking of MMORPG's, DDO is on my list of things to get. Yes, I'm going to be paying insane monthly sub fees lol, but I'm an addict, what can I say? I wasn't really that amazed with the DDO beta, but I could see the potential it presented. So therefore, I'll give it a spin. If I don't like it I'll just quit. But those are my highlights of what I'm most looking forward to in 2006. As of this writing that is.

Well, for Christmas I got King Kong for Xbox360. It was lower on my list but I wanted 1). Samurai Shodown 5 but it got pushed back to January, 2). Animal Crossing: WW for Nintendo DS, but it was sold out, then next came King Kong. But overall I'm satisfied with the stuffs I got. In other news I yanked the forums off my website because it was a waste of space. Nobody posted there and I tried as hard as I could to start a UT2004 clan, Warcraft TFT clan, and a Nintendo DS Wi Fi league. But that all failed, so I give up. In other news I cancelled like all my other game projects I was working on for a brand new one. Or two. We shall see how many I try. The one I want to do will remain shrouded in mystery until I actually have something concrete to show for it, but it will be awesome. The problem is it will be a TON of work to do to get it right. It's possible to do, but holy crap is it going to take every effort I have to make. But the end product will most definitely be worth it. So, my website, http://www.buzzgaming.com/ is rather shall we say vacant of real content for now. There's the online vitalize games, but there's not many of them and they are pretty primitive. But that about sums up what's been going on with me lately.

SOE just added a second character slot per server! Wookiee Commando here I come! lol.

Everybody is complaining up a storm about the new total revamp of SWG. With ANY new change in an MMORPG there is ALWAYS whiners, and boy, are they whining a LOT about this. I guess to a certain extent I can see their point of view. The game THEY liked playing is now gone. However, the game THEY liked playing is a game that neither I nor thousands of others liked playing. SOE had to save SWG or cancel it. So they changed a lot of things. The biggest changes is the character classes based on Star Wars archetype characters, such as Han Solo / Smuggler, Boba Fett / Bounty Hunter, etc. But MOST IMPORTANTLY out of this new list is LUKE SKYWALKER / JEDI. Yes, you read that right. You can now start out as a Jedi in SWG. Previously, becoming a Jedi was a task that only the hard core gamers who played all day long could accomplish. It was a ridiculously hard feat to complete. And I'm glad they changed it. This is STAR WARS folks. I don't care if in the ACTUAL timeline of the Star Wars Universe there weren't Jedi running around all over during this current timeline. What good is a Star Wars game if you can't even pick to play a Jedi?! Anybody who has a problem with this has some serious issues. If you're some average casual gaming Joe with no clue and buy a Star Wars game and find out you can't play as a Jedi, I'd wager you'd be pretty pissed you bought that Star Wars game. And that's exactly what the old SWG was...you had no chance of ever becoming a Jedi unless you quit your day job to play SWG. But lets move on from the Jedi. The game has been seriously sped up. And I mean everything! You now actually RUN instead of walk like an 80 year old man with a cane. That always bugged the hell out of me, how slow you ran, but that's all fixed now. And combat now requires at least a CERTAIN degree of skill. Gone are the days of clicking attack then going to the kitchen to make yourself a sandwich. Combat is interactive. You have to actually fight instead of watching the computer fight for you. And the combat is now a LOT faster. I just don't get why people think this game is totally destroyed. But that's all you hear about in the user reviews and on the boards which I won't even visit because I know I'll just get pissed off if I keep reading idiotic comments about how great the old SWG was and how the new SWG is crap. I quit World of Warcraft, and was about to give up on MMORPG's altogether, but I'm certainly sticking around for the NEW and IMPROVED SWG. And man, if SOE rolls back the Game Enhancements like they did the Combat Upgrade I'll be pissed off. IF they are even considering bringing back the old SWG they need to designate new servers for Classic SWG, and servers for the New SWG. This is not hard to do. Mythic did this exact same thing for Dark Age of Camelot. And, to be honest, I think it's probably fair that people are given a classic SWG server and the option to transfer their character there. One thing that pisses me off that they DIDN'T change was the "One Character Per Server" rule. Right now I'm playing a Jedi, but if I want to make a Bounty Hunter or something else, they have to reside on a separate server, which is just plain stupid. I was surprised to find out they haven't changed that rule yet. I can't think of a single other MMORPG that has this sort of limitation. If you join a PA (Player Association, basically a Guild), you're not going to want to play on a different server. So you're stuck playing one character forever. Another noteworthy feature is LOOT. Granted, starting out, all I get is vendor trash and some credits, but at least you can finally make a LITTLE money from running around killing NPC's and monsters, aside from the mission terminal. Now I don't know if they have some super awesome loot system in place where you have a chance of finding some uber item or not, but that would be cool if they did. But the bottom line; I'm enjoying the new SWG and I think I'll be playing it for quite some time. Definitely was worth checking out the Game Enhancements.

Which is why I haven't posted here for a while. So far I'm liking Project Gotham Racing 3 the most. It is really cool. Took me a while to figure out how to powerslide around corners but I'm doing better now that I figured it out lol. Haven't tried Kameo yet. Think that's next on my list of things to do. Played Perfect Dark Zero online. Still up in the air about that game. It seems to be slower paced, or at least the games that I joined. I'm used to ultra fast Quake Deathmatch on the PC lol. So that might have something to do with it. But I'm reserving judgement on PDZ until I get more gametime. Plus I jumped online immediately without trying the single player. I do that with most FPS games I play. I generally have no interest in a single player FPS. I'm more of a death match monkey, personally.

Well, according to the shipping rate/time, I should receive my Xbox 360 Premium Bundle today that I won off of Ebay! And man did I have to fight tooth and claw to win that auction. I looked at my auction count on Ebay. I actually lost 12 auctions in a row before I won this one. People were willing to pay higher than me, so I lost a lot. Even though I STILL was paying an outrageous amount extra. All said and done, I believe I paid like $350 extra. The Premium Bundle normally retails for $399 I believe, and I won the auction for $750. Actually, if you factor in the $30 for shipping I actually paid $780. But the guy who is shipping it is real nice. He has emailed me the tracking number and a picture of the receipts for insurance and everything so if something goes wrong, I'll get my $780 back. But I HOPE nobody in the Postal Service steals my package lol. But with as crazy as people have been over the 360 launch, it wouldn't surprise me, actually. But, if everything plays out accordingly, I shall be playing my 360 at some point later today! Or at least I hope so!

Well, since Microsoft couldn't deliver, I went to Ebay. It was a mad house. Those things were going like crazy. I must have lost like ten auctions in a row before I finally beat out someone. My goal was to stay under 800 bucks for the Premium bundle lol. So, I ended up winning a factory sealed Premium bundle for $750 dinero plus an extra $30 for 3 day insured shipping. It comes with a full warranty too. But, I'm not sure what good that'll do me unless they bought it from Best Buy or something. And even then it wouldn't be in my name, so I have no idea what that means. I know that at least Microsoft is standing behind their product and shipping out new units to owners who have defective ones. And if mine is defective I'm gonna be SOOOO ticked off. Oh well, at least I'll HAVE ONE, and have confidence that Microsoft will replace it if it does screw up. But at least I finally got a damn 360! Well, not quite yet, but it should show up early next week! Yay!

Well, judging from my sizeable collection of games one can come to the conclusion that I'm totally into games. But it goes beyond just playing them. I also dabble in making them! I've made several little games or remakes of old classics like Asteroids, Breakout, etc. Those were all easy to do. But I'm making a bold attempt to try something ambitious. The game is entitled "Elf Lands" and is sort of like Zelda combined with Final Fantasy. I don't like comparing it to other games because it makes it seem so unoriginal, but that's the best way to describe it. I have many things in store for this game. I plan on making the game world huge and packing as many "zones" into it as I can. And I also want to pack it with a ton of secrets. So, how far along am I? Well, I have the engine built pretty much. I got the intro movie sequence completed. I have an inventory system in place and even a secret code entry, but you'll have to figure out the secret codes on your own ;) I may have contests where I give out hints to the secret codes. But anyway, the game is being made in an easy to use application called Multimedia Fusion 1.5 made by Clickteam. This is a powerful and flexible tool and you can basically recreate any 2D game you can think of with it. It is truly an amazing little program. It uses a drag 'n drop interface and an event system to tell the game how to behave. It takes some time to learn the ins and outs. I've been using it for years and I'm still learning new techniques I never thought of before. But going back to Elf Lands, I'm truly excited about this project and I hope I can complete it to my own satisfaction. I'm afraid maybe I'm a bit too ambitious but so far everything is working out. Here are some screenshots for it: Screenshot 1 Screenshot 2 Screenshot 3 You may be wondering how I managed to do the graphics. I did most of the work in 3D Studio Max and imported them as .bmp images to make the graphics. If you are interested in view the first Cinematic Trailer for the game simply download the following files: cncs232.dll Place cncs232.dll in the same folder as the Elf Lands trailer .exe file. The cncs232.dll is the runtime file for the game engine, so it won't play unless it's in the same directory as the Elf Lands trailer. The Trailer can be downloaded here: Cinematic Trailer 1 Anyway, I'm having a blast making the game, and I hope you find this to be interesting. I still have a lot of work to do on it but I hope it goes quickly because I really want to finish this product. I will be distributing it as freeware. Yep, absolutely free of charge. Anybody who wants a copy just needs to email me their mailing address and I'll burn the game to disc and mail it to them. I imagine the final product will be too big to put on my website for download. So I'll just burn it to CD and use snail mail. So that's my little secret passion and hobby.

I kind of figured I wouldn't get one yesterday, but I was hoping I would. Now, there is still a chance I might get one. If they SHIPPED yesterday, they won't ARRIVE until today....but I'm probably grasping at straws here hoping to get one lol. I just want to get my darn 360! I already own 3 games for it and they are just sitting on my shelf collecting dust waiting for me to finally get one. It's so frustrating to not be able to play them. Oh well, I got other things to keep me busy so it's not the end of the world or anything. But it sure would be nice to finally get my 360 and play it.