Whether they are tears of glee or of abject misery is beyond my level of comprehension. The bottom line?

I gained far too many games unto my possession this Christmas season.

This (hopefully comprehensive) list includes both gifts and things I've purchased for myself during the Steam/GOG/HumbleBundle/going-to-Half-Price-Books-and-seeing-something-awesome sales. So. Take a deep breath, children. You may need it.

• Baldur's Gate Complete
• Baldur's Gate II Complete
• Far Cry
• Knights of the Old Republic II
• Serious Sam The First Encounter
• Serious Sam The Second Encounter
• Serious Sam HD
• Serious Sam The Second Encounter HD
• Neverwinter Nights 2 Platinum
• Star Wars Dark Forces
• Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II
• Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith
• Jedi Outcast
• Jedi Academy
• Borderlands Game of the Year Edition
• Braid
• World of Goo
• Lugaru HD
• Machinarium
• Cortex Command
• Revenge of the Titans
• Samorost2
• Osmos
• Penumbra Overture
• Gish
• Aquaria
• Pokemon HeartGold
• Pokemon SoulSilver
• Shin Megami Tensei Persona 3 Portable

Holy overkill, batman!

To clarify: The last three and Borderlands were gifts; everything else was me having fun with a limit of $70. $10 for indie bundle, $14 for Baldur's Gate titles, $7 for Far Cry, $4 for Serious Sam pack, $10 for KOTOR 2, $10 for Jedi Knight pack, $10 for NWN2.

All for the price of a new game plus tax. Dear lord, but I will be busy. I believe this terrifying shopping spree was brought about for sheer compensation for all those years of owning a PC so terrible that it would experience fits of lag and crash spontaneously due to stress during heated combat in StarCraft.

This is largly because said old PC, being 7 years old at the time, utilized a single-core CPU with a crack in it where it was dropped during a bout of hardware upgrades. The details may be left to your extrapolation.

But now I have a respectable beast. Not exactly up to 'enthusiast' standards, but it gets the job done more than well; my only gripe would be that some quirk of the GTX 260 in it prevents memory from being run at maximum speed, thereby impairing the function of some games (Jagged Alliance! No! You can't leave me!) and causing fatal video driver errors.

So I'm making up for lost time, I guess.

I've been good and not begun any of these new games yet - Diablo and LeafGreen and Opposing Force and KOTOR must be finished first. It's bizarre, though, knowing that games I've wanted to play for ages are actually in my possession and capable of being run at max'd specs on a machine that does not overheat when looked in a suspicious manner. There are a few I may never invest time in (I really only got the HumbleBundle for Braid and World of Goo), but overall, they are all something I have wanted.

I intend to ramble about two of these games in later posts, unless I manage to get Borderlands' multiplayer functioning at a state in which a mate and I can co-op, whereupon I will will probably ramble about three.

For now, I'll just mention the two:

Dark Forces and HeartGold.

Actually, make that just Dark Forces. Suffice to say that HeartGold is a remake of one of the most perfect games in existence which stole a whopping 314 hours of my childhood/prepubescence. Then again, I was nine when I got it, and eleven when the battery died, so it remains to be seen if the damn thing holds up.

So, Dark Forces. Interesting story around that one, which involves Mix at age 4, a sunny day (California does not have any other kinds of days unless you live here) and some dude named Jordan. Doesn't it just sound fascinating?

No. No, it doesn't. Must make a note to spruce it up for the next blag.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everybody. I hope your backlog is less distraught than mine. I may have to give it Xanax.

Life is busy. I am taking a break until October 11. This blog exists solely to remind myself of that fact so I don't compulsively log in again.

Cheers,

~Mix

So today, my amazon order arrived. By truck, unfortunately, not by subspace ninja delivery girl on roller blades. Thankfully, this sadness is amended by the fact that the order contained the Diablo battle chest among other entertaining things.

I played through the demo of D1 three times a week ago, but today was the first time I really, properly played Diablo. My first action RPG was Titan Quest, which I finished yesterday, I heard over and over about how TQ was a 'diablo clone'.

Is it? Well, nobody cares about TQ anymore, but with Diablo III coming out within the foreseeable future, I decided to take it upon myself to play the original, 14 years after its release.

In order to make sure the new patch let it run correctly, I booted up a Warrior named Test Dummy and kicked him into the dungeons with the Kill The Butcher quest. All seemed well and good (except for none of the enemies dropping anything but Charged Bolt and Daggers >_>) until I foolishly opened a door to a freakish-looking red room, and a bellow of "FRESH MEAT!" heralded Test Dummy's untimely demise on level 2 of the dungeon.

Seriously. Is it normal for Diablo to spawn bosses when you are level 4 and flailing about in rags and a short sword, looking for the cash to buy a large axe? Damn, and I thought the life fountain thing was only there to be nice. Just occured to me that it probably only existed for me to lap at pitifully while being bludgeoned by a ghoulish monstrosity in a blood-soaked apron.

At least I've learned not to charge blindly through doors I've just opened. Once I have some free time, I will begin a proper Warrior and take my time learning the ropes. I'm just happy the dated presentation hasn't turned me off; the gameplay is rock solid. Must tip my hat to Blizzard for making a game that both codified a genre and aged well.

Ok, I'll admit right off that the title of this thing is deceptive. I know exactly why people buy games at full price. You want to be able to boast that you've plowed through before anyone else has. You want to jump right into the multiplayer before everybody else is level 50 and has 13,000,000 kills and 700 dog tags and some brokenly overpowered assault rifle that shoots shuriken, chainsaws, and Playboy logos.

Maybe my being an online-averse gamer is what keeps me from succumbing to the lure. Or it could be the budget mentality I've inherited from my WWII-era German grandparents. Whatever the case, I have only once purchased a game on launch day - Peace Walker - and only because it came in a bundle and was an incredible bargain ($170 for a boring black PSP, or $200 for a badass camouflage one with a case and game and movie and memory stick? HMM WHAT A DECISION).

I buy all my systems five or six years after launch (handhelds more like two or three). Heck, I'm subsisting on PS2 and N64 (My gamecube has been passed on to my brother) and a quad-core PC that runs Crysis at 45 FPS. I certainly would like a 360 Slim and PS3 someday, but right now I don't feel like paying $60 for new games or $30 for used ones.

To put my Scroogey nature in perspective, let us consider an Amazon order I placed this morning. It consisted of the old Diablo Battle Chest (will blog more on that; I love dissecting classics), Mass Effect 1, and Dungeon Siege: Aranna. So that's three new or like new games (six if you count compilations/expansions) for a grand total of...

Forty-five dollars. Including shipping.

Hmm.

Now, what if I were to purchase these at launch day. $50 for Mass Effect. $30 for Dungeon Siege. $40 for the Diablo chest. Counting tax; we're looking at pretty much exactly $130, almost three times the amount I bought them for now.

But that was years ago. Let's look at the cost of them now, at Best Buy. $30 for Mass Effect. $20 for Dungeon Siege. Still $40 for Diablo - except it's the 'new version' which doesn't have D1 in it. What. Anyway, that's almost a Benjamin once tax is included. Still not bad. I ascribe to a "dollar per hour" rule when buying games - for every dollar I spend, I need to get an hour of gameplay. Launch Day prices, even though these three games are RPGs, would probably not meet this rule. I don't tend to replay RPGs, unless they have 'Chrono' and 'Trigger' in the title.

Best Buy/current MSRP would meet my DPH rule. But by this point, at least three years after these games have come out, is there a point to buying them like this anymore? I don't write FAQs. I don't play online (had a bad brush four years ago with an MMO of sorts that had me up at 1:00 AM in a haze of blind addiction. Never again). Hell, I don't even know any people to play with, though my brother is old enough now to make a good teammate in Timesplitters 2 botmatches.

There is something lonely in the way I play, though. When it first came out, I saw a couple of friends raving about Arkham Asylum and had nothing to add. They've long since finished and sold the game. My copy is still sitting in a box somewhere, unopened and unplayed; a free bonus to buying a new graphics card.

So again, I do understand the allure of paying full price for a new game. You're paying for the fellowship aspect of going, "Hey dude, did you beat Custom Cocoon yet?" and going "No, still grinding levels and getting upgrades and stuff. My weapons suck, I haven't been S-ranking enough missions. I did get to the Monster Hunter island though." and feeling all proud of your geeky self when your friend goes "What the hell? How'd you do that? What mission is it in?" and your inability to kill a three-story-tall tank with a chainsaw and 50 machine guns on it is forgiven.

Maybe I'm just horribly anti-social, because spending less than $50 on games up to fourteen years old and then marvelling at what I've missed out this long on sounds fantastic.

Guess I care more for my wallet than for my emotional health. Wally World doesn't sell potions for that anyway.

Yesterday, I did two things. First, I finished Peace Walker properly with the real ending; second, I discovered that I have not actually posted anything which would give anybody more than the slightest indication of what sort of person I am, what games I play, and other such information that tends to act as useful on a gaming-oriented website. So then. Prepare for a somewhat lengthy, self-centered blag. While I'm not keen on writing this sort of thing, it will be important five years from now when I look back and go, "What a self-centered wanker!" and resolve not to do it ever again.

My name is Fusionmix, or Mix if typing the full mess out becomes too tedious. It's a name I have kept consistent over all my accounts for three years. I was 'Fusionmix' back when the name got zero direct results on Google. But two or so years before that, I still browsed the Interwebs under a myriad of other disconnected titles. My first net handle was 'Zon3r', and there are probably a few of those floating about on sites I've forgotten. Next came a few cases of 'Redzion' (occasionally with a few x's or 3's or 7's thrown in for ub3r c00lne55), 'Dark_hunter77', or 'Jase666' (because when you are fourteen, satanic references instantly take you a level in badass).

Things first changed upon the badly-HTML-formatted pages of a now longsty-defunct writming website, where I wrote under the name of 'athenas_ragnarok', a handle whose deeper meaning confounded various angst-ridden teen authors of dreadful Evanescence-imitation poetry on the site. The truth was that it had no meaning; I had simply thought that jamming mythology-related words together sounded cool. At one point when a friend wanted to join, I named the account 'Fusionmix' on a whim, and my admittedly ADD associate never used it. The name itself ended up stuck in my head for weeks.

Since then, Fusionmix has become my official internet name. If you notice a Fusionmix, TheFusionmix, The Fusion Mix, or other such permutation, it's most likely me, unless you discover it writing smutty yaoi porn on some furry fandom forum, whereupon it probably isn't. I'll go ahead and admit I typo'd my age here, as my birthday ended up registered as taking place in 1991, which it was not, and bugs me, because I was actually born in the year Clinton first took up the reins, iD software released a shooter which caused several conservative groups to experience spontaneous combustion, Brandon Teena met a sorry endo, and Spielberg made a movie responsible for countless cases of velociraptor phobias. In short, I was born in the year of democrats, demons, dogmatists and dinosaurs; the answer to all of which is circle-strafing and a shotgun. :P

My birthday itself is February 3rd, making me 100% Aquarius. Anyhoo, I'm bored talking about me, so let's talk more about me, except this time relating to my gaming history, shall we? Yes we shall.

As a kiddo growing up in Santa Monica, I had no television or other such media in the house. I'll be eternally grateful to my parents for this, because it made me spend my time climbing trees outside, 'operating' on stuffed animals, and building bizarre laser guns out of TinkerToys instead of watching Power Rangers and Pokemon with friends. My incredible grandparents, however, owned a TV with cable for the sole purpose of spoiling their exuberant little grandchild silly, and when Mom's USC studies and Dad's codemonkey work schedules collided, I got to stay with said epic grandparents.

I remember the first Super Nintendo commercial I saw in between trying to avoid poorly-dubbed anime (it was the age of Sailor Moon S, if this gives any perspective). More clearly I can recall the first Genesis commercial, and wanting one of those machines quite badly (the controller looked cooler for the Genesis than the SNES, besides, 'genesis' was a cool word). Strangely, a few weeks later at a church friend's house (at age three), I encountered Sonic the Hedgehog. When my friend's brother got up to go to the restroom, I shanghaied his controller and began dumping Sonic into pits in a fit of fascination.

And thus it began. When I expressed this interest to my parents, my father began allowing me to act as 'gunner' when we played Descent (and later Descent II and the '98 Combat Flight Sim). After a couple years of this the notion of Descent perhaps being too violent for my innocent mind occurred to him. It probably was, actually, given that when you're five or six years old it's fun to run around, flying and imaginary spacecraft, and making finger guns worthy of 4Kids censorship at passing individuals through car windows while shouting, "Fusion Cannon! RRAWAWRRRARRZZZZZZZZZJJJJJJJFFFHGGGHHT!" and other unnerving approximations of laser cannon noises. Yes, in fact I WAS that special child who sat in the corner drawing pictures of giant robots, being made fun of (and not realizing it!), and generally acting like a socially-inept ****

The allowance of video gaming ended in my house, and remained ended until I was about seven or eight, which was when I met a girl who owned an N64, and by attachment, Super Mario 64, which utterly blew my preconcieved notions of video games out of the water in between my awed murmurs of how amazing the graphics were.

This is taking too long.

Parents got the first TV in the house when I was 9, my brother was 2. Still a ban on consoles as well as non-educational PC games, until at a garage sale one day I discovered a GBC for fifteen dollars, a garish shade of purple with that godawful turquoise Pikachu case. It had no games with it, so after a chat with parental units I bought a used copy of Pokemon Gold from Gamestop for twelve dollars and ninety-nine cents, and went on to clock 57 hours in one file and 214 in another. Burned out the battery while battling a friend, so at least my 'mons went out with quite the bang (lvl 100 Feraligatr sweep against my opponent). Eventually the GBC was forgotten in favor of a red GBASP.

This is taking even longer.

Stuff happened. The girl with the N64 gave it to me when she moved, so while everyone else played 'next-gen' systems, I still rocked me some Star Fox and Donkey Kong. A bad case of die-hard Nintendo fanboyism stuck around for years as I got a Gamecube and then DS, until I realized the only reason I hated the PS2 was because there were no more games on the GC I wanted to play. My first PS2 game was Ratchet & Clank.

The close-minded video game dogmatism has left me, as I recently gave up my fierce devotion to the DS Lite as the greatest handheld EVAR and purchased a PSP for the main purpose of playing Peace Walker, though there are quite a few other titles which pique my interest. I also deeply enjoy older games (providing the gameplay holds up), and own absolutely zero current-gen home consoles unless a gaming rig that runs the Crysis demo beautifully counts. I intend to play the full game someday, but only when I can buy such a derivative, devoid-of-art-direction game for something less than $20.

Meh. What else.

Oh, I have two dogs. And a kid brother. And in the real world I enjoy Tae-Kwon-Do, reading, writing, working my scrawny physique into some semblance of fitness, various scribbly attempts at art, long walks on the beach, and candlelit dinners.

I'm sure there's more, but this is introduction enough. Hello Gamespot, meet Fusionmix. Fusionmix, say hi to Gamespot.

Y HALO THAR.

First blog. Also seven days late.

You see, I originally intended to post my opinion of Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker on the day it came out. I had obtained the GameStop Big Boss pack, which contains a dead-sexy camo-pattern PSP-3000, the game itself, a voucher for 2012 (why? WHY?), some free DLC, and other such nice accessories. Oh, and a case.

I wished to share my progress on this title with the world. Not that anybody would really care, given that this is a blog written by a relative newbie, but after 7 days of Gamespot flipping out and refusing to let me post hours after I should have been able to, I finally cleared my cache, deleted cookies, logged out, logged in, and found that it suddenly works.

Aweek later. How useful. Hopefully this is not a sign of things to come?

To anybody on the fence about purchasing this game, I will at least point out some facets of the game from the perspective of a player who is near the beginning of Chapter 2 (of five).

1. The controls are not nearly as bad as some people make them out to be. They are light-years ahead of the nightmarishly fiddly mess that is Metal Gear Solid on the PS1. They are a few brackets short of the versatile brilliance of MGS3. I have not played MGS4, so I would not know about that. What I do know is that the controls go back to the basics, and then build from the ground up. They can be a pain in close fire-fights, but the game is much more fun when you're not in a close fire-fight.

2. I wholeheartedly recommend nonlethal play, and not only because your ability to attract new playable soldiers or gain better ranks increases more rapidly when you play nonlethal. I recommend NL because it's fun. This coming from the individual who found it fun to chuck guys off the cliffs during MGS3's horribly mistitled Virtuous Mission. Then again, I've never actually killed one of MGS3's bosses. CQC-ing Volgin on anything above Normal, though...oh the temptation -_-.

3. So far the bosses are a piece of cake if you play lethal. I seriously am not sure what the reviewers were smoking. I've managed everyone so far in at most two tries, and that's playing NL, which means you have to knock out around 20 soldiers before the commander sticks his head out of the vehicle and lets you tranq him in the head. It's a bleedin' pain, especially on the helicopter which just wasted me a few seconds ago. If I don't get him this try, it will have made 3 tries, which will be humiliating. But don't be scared away from this game by the boss fights. They all have big weaknesses once you figure them out. If you've ever played and beaten any of the Contra titles (I recommend 4, by the way), you have nothing to be afraid of.

Anyway, if either the controls or difficulty are scaring you off...they're nowhere near the magnitude of terror some reviews I've read make them out to be. I'm sure some of the later bosses will be right buggers to take down without killing anything, but everything has a pattern. Monster Hunter players will probably be right at home.