Mostly just posting this for the sake of posting a blogpost here again for the first time in forever. Returning "home" with the Giant Bomb crew and logging into this here profile is indeed very nostalgic. I doubt I will be caring much about this profilepage but I just felt I needed to write something here, if only for my own sake.

Yea from now on i´ll be doing my blogging solely on Giant bomb.com. If you have an account there and havent added me yet, do it!

My profile can be found @ http://www.giantbomb.com/profile/Jimbo_N/ . Im not gonna go as far as to say im totally leavin gamespot but ill be focusing my blogging over there for now. So to the three readers of my blog, update your bookmarks!

If you wanna skip right to the Blog section of the profile its: http://www.giantbomb.com/profile/Jimbo_N/blog/

Is it jut me or did the redesign erase all of the ratings to games except the last 10. When I click on "See All" I only see my 10 latest ratings. Now that would truly suck since I think I had around 800 games rated.....

After spending a day with ReArmed I felt I needed to go back and see this just to compare everything from music to color schemes and its really stunning how accurate the remake it yet so completely fresh. Check it out and refresh your memories![video=JnRnkGSs5b0JvTXe]

Both of them are absolutely fantastic and probably, together with Doom, the 2 best Live Arcade games yet to be released. And released on the same day!! Lets start with Bionic Commando. You all know the story of this game by now. All the hype, the bionic commando podcasts, Ben Judd, all the delay, the fantastic development studio Grin. It was hard to believe it was actually lying there on Live Arcade today, finally released. Well..it was well worth the wait.

Its a super feaithful remix of the original where all the fun is preserved and all the challenge is preserved but where all the frustration is gone. I had totally forgotten how fun it is to not being able to jump. The grapple mechanic is fantastic. Art direction is fantastic aswell. Writing is superfunny and alot of small touches has been implemented to make it feel nostalgic yet superfresh. The soundtrack, which I bought months ago from iTunes is still, when I have already listened to it for months, one of the best ever and since you get all this for 800 MS points...its the bargain of a lifetime. I payed more for the soundtrack alone...Add to that, fantastic multiplayer modes AND Co-Op. Do NOT miss out on this one, tho my guess is you are already playing it. The only downside here is that the achievements are mad hard. I will probably never go above 3 or 4 out of 12. I like my XBLA achievements to be about 10 easy and 2 hard, not the other way around.

Fable II Pub Games are, if you didnt know already, small gamble based pub games that remind you of things like roulette and blackjack but made super interesting by making unique rules for everything. The thing with the pubgames is that the money you win here can then later be imported into Fable II when you start playing that in October. This means I will spend a ridiculous amount of time with these games because I really want to be rich when I jump into Fable. Its good then, that all of the games are superinteresting and really addicting. Simple, yes, but very fun. Another thing worth noticing here is the atmosphere. Sure its just some simple pub games but in the background you can hear glasses, people talking and laughing in cla$$ic fantasty tavern fashion and on top of that you have this fantastic fable-like, fairytale tavern music that can only come from Lionhead Studios. You pick a temporary hero to store gold (and items which will also be included in the full game when you win them here!) and start gambling away.

Both of these games needs to be downloaded right now ! Actually, even if you dont plan to play Fable II, you need to download the Pub games because they are still fun even if you cant use the gold.

Wow, I know I am waaay late with these news but Ive been sick over the weekend and havent kept up with the news at all. But wow, what a tragedy. I might not have been the biggest fan of his acting but Ive seen a great deal of movies with him and he was both witty and funny and like it or not, he was a very memorable actor. And as a big moviegeek I mourn his loss. Rest in peace man.

When you thought videogame characters could not get any prettier. And when you thought Heavy Rain was just a dream you had..new pictures are released!. Holy shiet. And I have no doubts this looks scary realistic in motion, just like that old "dream" we all had of this game a while back.

Makes you wonder if theres really a game wrapped around this technology.

The later levels in todays XBLA super duper artsy, super mario homage release, Braid, is melting my brain. The time twisting puzzles here are awesomely mindbending and I gotta go get some food before attempting to solve them again.

I was just gonna go to bed but I ran into this incredible intreview with John Carmack from QuakeCon and it was such a long time since I heard an interview of this lenght with this man that I had almost forgotten how a huuuge huuuuuge genious he is. Well I guess not forgotten but safely locked away in my brain how big of a genious he is ( I think I started to listen to Carmack when I was just a kid). Well I am now officially reminded, I watched this 15 minute video in awe of everything he had to say.

He speaks about stuff in ways nobody else dares, about the industry and about technology, like he has always done and he does it like only he can. He can almost be compared to Will Wright in some sense. They are both such huge genious minds that when they talk during interviews its with 10 times more depth than the average person and I cannot stress enough how much I admire what this man has done. I have always claimed and will always continue to claim that the gaming industry would still be uncivilized and underdeveloped if it wasnt for John Carmack and I can still rant on about why to anyone who dares to speak against me on that matter.

So i decided I needed to share this with you all before turning the computer off for the night. I guess it wasnt my intention to start ranting on about my deep respect for the man, but hey, I cant help it. And yes, the video has REALLY low sound volume. I had to turn my volume all the way up and still I could barely hear anything. But despite that this interview gave me so much interesting insight I recommend it from the bottom of my gaming heart. I honestly want to find some of his old speeches or interviews on DVD. It has to be out there somewhere!

*EDIT* Found this awesome archive. I guess ill start there by loading some of them onto my iPod. Im not sure but I think I might actually have missed his 2007 Keynote.

And for anyone not knowing exacly who this man is (SHAME ON YOU, GO FIND ANOTHER HOBBY!), heres his page on Giant Bomb. And it troubles me that someone was faster than me with filling in his description.

Soul Calibur 4 (x360) arrived today and Ive spent a good 4 or so hours playing it. So far its been a terrific experience..at least offline. Offline its probably hands down one of the best fighters Ive played. All the expectations Ive had are fulfilled. Arcade, story and the Tower battles are all challenging and very rewarding. The fighting engine itself is truly a very refined version of the SC fighting engine. One could say its finally been perfected.

The game looks drop dead gorgeous (I am totally in AWE at the characterdesigns and the polycount on the models, simply insane) and music feels very "Soul Cailbur". One could argue that the charactermodels in this game can be compared to those in Metal Gear Solid 4 in terms of visual fidelity and design but I wont make that comparison since the games are so different ;) . The character cuztomisation is very deep and the possibilites when it comes to physical looks and clothing seems pretty much limitless. Overall there is so much to unlock and so much to level that you constantly feel like you are accomplishing something even if you get your ass handed to you by The Dark Apprentice (he IS overpowered when the CPU is playing him).

Online is a different story tho. The first game I got into lagged so bad the game was jumping forward and I instantly racked up my first ranked loss. After that I kept hitting quick play with the response "Could no longer be joined, game full" every time for at least 5 minutes. The same message over and over and over everytime I hit ranked quickplay (pretty much the Street Fighter II Turbo HF problem that it had in the beginning but 10 times worse). If I tried to create a game of my own nobody joined for that same amount of time and it was back to hitting quick play over and over again. When I finally get into another game I get matched up with someone whos probably been playing SC every day for his entire life and I get my ass handed to me again. After that its back to hitting quick play over and over again. Online seems very choppy and the matchmaking seems a bit unstable. But I will be presistent and keep trying because I do want to take my custom made characters online, because when it worked and when I won my first games it was soo much fun.

I will spend alot of time playing SC4. I consider myself a big enough Soul Calibur purist to feel I both want and have to play this game to completion and get some online rankings going. I realized my Taki has been seriously degrading since I played SC2 back in the day and Ive been playing around with both custom and other characters to find an alternative. I just hope the online experience will improve over time because this is the first game since the release of Gears of War that I feel I want to spend some serious Xbox Live time on.