I bought a Nintendo DS Lite (in black, or 'onyx' as it's marketed) at Costco today (well, yesterday technically) on a whim, which is how I buy most things I own. I saw a stack of DS Lites and I said, 'to hell with it' and picked one up. I like the black, but boy, does it attract finger prints all over its nice shiny surface, which quickly makes it look like crap. Maybe I shoulda gone for the white. I paid $162.99 for the DS Lite itself; a copy of Yoshi's Island DS; and an extras pack consisting of a folding carrying case which holds six games and a spare stylus (very nifty), a glow-in-the-dark stylus (isn't this redundant, doesn't the screen glow?), a Space Invaders stick-on skin, a lanyard with attached cleaning pad, and a touch screen protector made of a clear thin film. I also bought a copy of Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day ($17.99) to play because I keep hearing about it. I played both games for a short time. The DS Lite is a little small, I think I'll develop cramps in my hands and fingers if I play it too long. The buttons are downright tiny and the stylus is a bit short and thin as well. Then again, I thought the original Xbox controller was about the right size for me, so that should give you an indication how large my hands are. While I was at Costco, I also picked up a few DVDs; - Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, $17.99 - Citizen Kane - Two-Disc Special Edition, $8.99 - Curb Your Enthusiasm - The Complete Second Season, $15.99 - Curb Your Enthusiasm - The Complete Third Season, $15.99 Now I have to buy some DS and GBA games to play on my new portable system. Not that I go anywhere, but good games are worth playing on any platform.

I took The Old Spice Experience Challenge, and I completed it today. Not the hardest thing to do by any means. Just rent a few old sports games and you'll rack up 1500 achievement points in no time. Only took me a few hours. I signed up for a GameZnFlix account, and I received three games today. They were College Hoops 2K6, NBA Live 06, and NHL 2K6. I got 795 points out of NBA Live 06 just by simulating entire seasons. Then 500 points out of NHL 2K6 scoring under one minute into a game and for scoring with a defenseman. Finally, 600 points in College Hoops 2K6 for stealing, three-pointers and rebounding in a single game. Easiest 1900 points ever. So yeah, that's done. The prizes suck, but I'll take a free copy of Contra. I'm glad I don't play sports games, if I need to quickly raise my gamerscore, they're the way to do it. And while I'm here... hello, my name is Lord_Satorious, and I'm an anime DVD junkie. The Right Stuf just happened to get a few copies of Nadesico volume two in stock, so I had to buy it to complete my collection. And I bought a couple of other things, of course. - El-Hazard: The Alternative World - Complete Box Set, $48.99 - Kimagure Orange Road - Movie/OVA Box Set, $34.99 - Martian Successor Nadesico - Vol. 2 (Essential Anime Collection), $13.39 Now if I can score a copy of Gunsmith Cats I'd be pretty happy. I really need to buy 'regular' DVDs, of non-anime movies and television shows. I have waaaay too much anime, and I'm running out of space to store all of it. Six hundred DVDs will cause that problem. I really must buy thinpaks in bulk, it'll reduce the space they take up by 50% if I thinpak all my DVDs. Of course I can't thinpak everything, some collections come in nice art boxes, and what am I supposed to do with empty art boxes? Oh the addiction of DVDs, it's a curse I tell you, a curse of owning a big media collection. As far as curses go, that's not too bad actually.

Remember I mentioned 'out of production' titles in my last blog post? Well, I managed to find a couple of those titles yesterday. The Right Stuf International specializes in anime DVDs, manga and other merchandise, and they just happened to have a few things I was looking for (and some impulse buys as well); - 70 Japanese Gestures by Hamiru-aqui, $5.99 - Cardcaptor Sakura: The Movie, $17.99 - Daimajin - Vol. 3: Return of Daimajin, $17.98 - Martian Successor Nadesico - Vol. 1 (Essential Anime Collection), $17.98 - Martian Successor Nadesico - Vol. 3 (Essential Anime Collection), $17.98 - Martian Successor Nadesico: The Motion Picture - Prince of Darkness, $26.98 - Overman King Gainer - Exodus 1, $4.99 - Overman King Gainer - Exodus 2, $4.99 - Overman King Gainer - Exodus 3, $4.99 $12 shipping brings the total to $131.87. I still need volume two of the "Essential Anime Collection" of Martian Successor Nadesico, and that may be tough to get ahold of if Right Stuf has none left in stock, but it's only a single volume and surely I can find a copy somewhere. In other news, my nephew did receive WarioWare: Smooth Moves for his Nintendo Wii. His mother's aunt bought it for him, and he really likes it (of course).

I believed I mentioned before I'm somewhat compulsive when it comes to a sale. ADV Films was having yet another sale, and I cannot resist a cheap price tag. - Neon Genesis Evangelion - Platinum Complete Collection, $54 - Noir - Complete Collection, $50 - The Samurai, $7 - Slayers: Book of Spells, $8 - Slayers Excellent, $9 And I get a free gift with my purchase, which will more than likely be an anime DVD I either own or don't want, but hey, free is free. With $9 shipping, the total came to $137. On a positive note, I think I'm running out of anime to buy, from ADV Films anyway. I look at their list of licensed titles and I see less and less I actually want to own with each subsequent order. Eventually, I hope that there will be nothing left I want to own, but with some title licenses that have expired it's unlikely I will ever be able to own some things, because they're simply out of production. Anyway, it was my nephew's birthday yesterday, and he got the Nintendo Wii along with four games; Cars, Ice Age 2: The Meltdown, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, and Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz. I got it set up for him and I played for a short while, and it's pretty fun. I know I still need to get one, but at least my nephew has one that I can play. I'm urging his mother to exchange Ice Age 2 for WarioWare: Smooth Moves, but I don't think she will. I'm sure the game has been opened and played by now, so I'll buy WarioWare myself for myself.

I finally got a full one thousand achievement points out of a retail game today, that game being Viva Piñata. Not the hardest game to get 1000 points out of, but I completed the task all the same. Out of fifty separate achievements, I got the other forty-nine before Day 180, so I had to leave the game running for seventy more days (in-game time), which is something like fourteen hours real time. I wasn't going to watch the game clock for that long, so I watched television instead, occasionally popping back in to the game to cancel Factory requests. If I knew how to keep the game from making Factory requests (thus pausing the clock), that would have made things a lot easier. Still, achievement-wise the game is completed, but I may go back and try to acquire all the Piñata I hadn't in my initial playthrough, filling in those blank boxes with player awards. I should really focus on other games however, I own too many that are essentially unplayed. At the time of writing, my gamerscore is 5705. I also received the Xbox games I ordered from DVD Empire today, and I tried them all out. I'm really bad at Mega Man, but games of the past are arguably more difficult than games of today, so some persistence is required. I really must buy a Nintendo Wii, if only to play all the GameCube games I own. Maybe I should just buy a GameCube, it'd be cheaper and they're certainly available.

I read the news on GameSpot that DVD Empire was clearing out its stock of video games, so I took advantage of the sale. I put my order in for three Xbox games; - Mega Man Anniversary Collection, $15.99 - Mortal Kombat: Deception, $15.99 - Raze's Hell, $15.99 I even got free shipping for buying three games, which is always a plus. I haven't played a Mega Man game in years, the only one I actually owned was the original for the NES. I haven't really gotten much into the previous bunch of Xbox games I bought, with exception of Dead or Alive Ultimate. Fighting games are very easy to get into, play for a while, and quit without worry of forgetting where you left off. I like that, but I've never considered fighting games to be my 'primary' genre. Actually, I don't know what my expertise lies in anymore, my tastes are certainly more scattered than they used to.

I stand by that Costco is the best place to buy movies. While I there today, I picked up a number of movies on a whim. - A Beautiful Mind, $7.99 - Before Sunset (bundled with How to Deal), $9.49 - Closer, $8.79 - Driving Miss Daisy, $6.99 - Edward Scissorhands, $8.49 - Full Metal Jacket, $9.99 - Glory, $8.99 - The Iron Giant, $6.99 - Malcolm X, $9.99 - Moulin Rouge! (bundled with Down with Love), $8.49 - The Pianist, $7.99 - Pride & Prejudice (2005), $9.79 Total = $103.89 There's a number of 'chick flicks' in there, but I consider them all to be good movies. OK, so I didn't want How to Deal or Down with Love, but you can't really choose what you want to get with a bundle deal. I'll take Down with Love because it stars Ewan McGregor and Renée Zellweger, but I'll have to watch it to make any final decision to keep it or give it to my sister. How to Deal I won't be keeping. Here's my complete collection of DVDs. There's far too much anime, more than I'd care to admit, but I'm working on expanding my 'regular movie' collection. The dozen new titles should aid in that. DVD Aficionado - Lord_Satorious's DVD Collection The Costco I went to had nothing in the way of new games; I was looking for Tony Hawk's Project 8 for the Xbox 360, but all they had was the Xbox version. They had a number of Wii games as well, but no The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess or Trauma Center: Second Opinion, and certainly no consoles themselves. Unless I call every day, it's unlikely I will find one soon.

Last night I ordered several older Xbox games from Walmart.com, because they're backwards-compatible with my Xbox 360, and because they're cheap. - Dead or Alive Ultimate, $14.82 - Max Payne, $9.82 - Soul Calibur II, $9.82 - The Thing, $12.82 - Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4, $12.82 Five games; more than the number of Xbox games I had for the majority of the time I still played my Xbox. I bought Dead or Alive 3 first, but I never had a human opponent to play against, so that's no fun. I never did pick up the bonus disc which contained all the extra costumes of the Japanese and European versions of the game. I bought Panzer Dragoon Orta when I bought the component cables for my Xbox, around the same time I bought my Hitachi 57SWX20B. That was around March of 2003. I bought Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee some time later, then Gunvalkyrie for cheap on eBay. Before I bought my Xbox 360, I bought MechAssault, but never got far into it because I bought my Xbox 360 shortly thereafter, disconnected my Xbox, and was unable to play MechAssault anymore. I did buy Halo 2 for my Xbox 360, so my total Xbox game count will be eleven, or less than the number of Xbox 360 games I own. If I had to have one more, it would be Psychonauts. I saw it in a bargain bin once, but didn't buy it because it wasn't backwards-compatible at the time, but it's been added recently and now I want it. The only other games I wish were backwards-compatible are basically the ones I own, especially Panzer Dragoon Orta. Having to start all over again sucks, but it's a great game that I never really tired of. I also bought an Xbox Quick Charge Kit for my Xbox 360 for $29.82, which is useful to have; and a Nintendo GameCube WaveBird controller for $27.82 (why is everything a certain dollar amount and 82 cents?), which isn't useful at all at the moment because I own neither a GameCube or a Wii, but I intend to buy a Wii when they become readily available.

All I got for Christmas was Viva Piñata, which was more than I asked for because I didn't ask for anything. Well, Viva Piñata and $500 cash. I didn't want money either, but because I didn't get anything for my birthday either--again, because I didn't ask for nor did I want anything--my parents figured the cash would make up for it. I spent part of it today, err, yesterday since it's the early morning as I type this. My father and I went to Costco, and I bought Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy for my Xbox 360 for $42.99. I also picked up a few cheap DVDs: a 'Special Edition' of Platoon for $8.49; and two double features of The Gods Must Be Crazy, I & II (I'd already seen the first one and it's rather funny, I've never seen the sequel); and Richard Pryor Here and Now and Live on the Sunset Strip; for $9.79 each. I've I haven't said it before I'll say it now: Costco is the best for DVDs, you can even get new ones for prices you'll find at the cheapest of websites. The only problem is you have somewhat of a limited selection to choose from, but it changes frequently because I imagine their stock just sells out. Anyway, I'm loving Viva Piñata, it's a ton of fun. I think it will be my first game I get all the achievement points out of. I try to get a few every day. I've been playing a lot of Chromehounds too, which is great because I bought the game when it came out and it's been sitting on the shelf basically unplayed. I've got to play through Gears of War on Hardcore difficulty, and I'll even be able to focus solely on the combat since I collected all the COG Tags on my first play-through (OK, I used a guide to locate them all). I've too many Xbox 360 games to play, and it's probably a good thing I didn't get a PlayStation 3 or a Wii for Christmas because then I'll only have even _more_ games to play.

I finally returned Super Monkey Ball Adventure to Toys 'R Us, and picked up Super Monkey Ball 2, the Monkey Ball game I wanted from the beginning. While there, my father and I bought some Christmas presents for my four-year-old nephew. I myself picked out several Star Wars figures, my nephew picks crap ones like General Veers and Death Star Gunner, whereas I picked good ones like Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine; the Nerf N-Strike Maverick, which looks kinda like the Boltok pistol from Gears of War; and this big Transformers Cybertron Starscream, which I thought was awesome, so I had to buy it, even if it's for my nephew. He's also getting the RoboSapien V2, which I think is a little too much for him to handle. He'll get more Christmas presents than what we bought today for sure. My sister is looking for a Nintendo Wii for him, and should I not be able to secure one for myself, well... pissed doesn't quite fully express my feelings about that. Afterwards, we went to Circuit City to look at televisions, and I bought Pikmin 2 while I was there. I don't know why I'm still buying GameCube games that I can't play, if I can't get a Wii I may be forced to buy a GameCube just to play the stack of unplayed GameCube games I own. I fear the Wii's gimmickyness, although there are a few Wii games I want to play.