gole iz4 in2008. w00t ! :) :( epic fail ? mebe pwn...

On what was thought to be the la st day of his life after supposedly eat ing the poisonous par t of a Fugu blowfish sushi, Homer Simpson attempted to complete a Battl estar Galactica jigsaw puzzle. Turns out he lived. But does anyone re member if he completed the puzzle? Did we ever see the puzzle's Design? All I remember is Marge coming in, touching his (ew!) drool, and saying, "It's warm!" And then he lived .

Yes? No? Maybe?

So, unfortunately the dynamic duo wasn't able to get together on Sunday to provide you folks with an episode of podcastitude. No matter - we will be back in full force on Sunday, as I recover from a 24 marathon. I don't know yet whether or not my friend is planning for it to be Season 3 or Season 6 (I personally hope it's 3, but it's better if it's 6 since it's newer and we've done season 3 twice already). So I may be falling asleep during the cast, which will be almost as funny as when Al snored during our ShenlongBo episode.

Random fun fact: we had Snow Pong in New York yesterday. While the_antipode was at work in Long Island, I was home during the afternoon in Manhattan (which is west of Long Island). It snowed fiercely where he was for about 15 minutes, while it was sunny by me. It then snowed insanely loudly by me, with the thundercrack and everything, for about 15 minutes too - while it was sunny by him. This repeated once more, so we had a score of 4 volleys. Alas, the snow left us both alone so there was no more Snow pong.

Anyway, there are some things I'd like to say about Etrian Odyssey after I've cleared the first five floors of the labyrinth (maybe 6 - 8 hours or so?):

- If you don't like not seeing your party / avatar wander about a 2D map, don't get it.

- If you like wandering about a maze in the first person view, a la the original Phantasy Star (NOT a fully-realized world like Oblivion), get it.

- If you like grinding, get it. If you don't, don't.

- If you like the idea of being able to unlock and upgrade up to 21 abilities per c1ass (of which there are nine), get it.

- If you don't like the idea of gaining only one skill point per level-up with which to upgrade said abilities, knowing that your level cap is 70, don't get it.

- If you like or don't mind a battle system that, at its core, is Dragon Quest, get it.

- If you're sick of Dragon Quest battles, don't get it.

- If you like the idea of selling off items and remains left by slain monsters so that the shopkeeper can make new, more powerful items for you to buy, get it.

- If you must be thrown headfirst into an epic tale with lots of NPCs and dialog, don't get it.

- If you like the idea of a bare-bones RPG experience that's based on accepting quests and missions, get it.

- If you're the type who has a compulsive need to chart out a map perfectly because they let you add important points on the touch screen, get it.

- If you would rather have a game that automatically track doors, stairs, item-harvesting locations and healing points, instead of just charting where you've been and mandating that you do the rest of the charting yourself, don't get it.

- If the idea of "dungeon crawl" piques your interest, i.e. going down deeper and deeper into a labyrinth and returning to the same town and people to rest, heal and buy stuff, get it. If that idea makes you wretch, don't get it. (Don't worry - there are warp points every few floors. Duh.)

- If you want it because you want rare games, well, get it. Quickly. I had to scour eBay from mine, and fortunately I got it for the standard retail price.

Inspired by the_pantipode's blog post about his backlog, I went ahead and took photographs of the majority of my standing collection. Note that this is not all of my collection, and this was a one-time inspired thing meaning I'll probably not go and whip out all my GBA, Saturn, N64, Dreamcast and other PSX games, and all the rest. I.e. it was one moment of clarity; one moment of un-laziness.

I then started charting all of this in Excel, along with status for each game (i.e. "Finished", "Beginning", "Midway", et cetera... oh and for Fighting Games, I just put: "It's a Fighting Game..."). Out of the 200+ games in the list 26 are "Finished" and 56 are "Never Opened". :( ("Never Opened" is figurative; I've unwrapped a lot of these games and took out the disc, but I just never played them in earnest. Some of my games were bought used, which means they've technically been opened.)

The pictures are too numerous and large to post here, so I'll just kindly direct you to the image album I made for them. I'm betting that there are some typos in the game listings there (I was in a hurry) so please pardon the haste. And, at the last minute, I realized that the CD key # for Halo (I have it on PC as opposed to Xbox) was exposed, so I smudged it in The Photoshops. Not so fast, key grabbers!

As I'm rendering episode 80 of the Trigames.NET podcast, I'm listening to Gamespot's own Mechberg solo podcast called Voices in the Box. If you've already listened to it, great. If you haven't, well, you'll feel foolish like me for not having listened to it when it first came out back last April. Listen and laugh. It's well done and clever and funny and tongue-in-cheek and just listen to it. NOW. That is all.

UPDATE: Podcast now available!

The title has nothing to do with the episode, save for the fact that it was recorded a few hours before the Superbowl. But 'nuff about that. Join Austin and Tony as they ramble on about Etrian Odyssey, Dark Wizard, Burnout Paradise, and some random news nibblings here and there. Jack Thompson not having a problem with the uber-sexy Mass Effect? Schlocking!!!111one.

Download here.

File size: 52.5MB

Run time: 1:49:21

Now, I realize that charging $5 for Urban Champion is pretty lame. At the same time, who said you should be buying that game anyway? I've always felt that maybe I'm paying a bit much for a non-physical copy of a game that I can't resell, but I felt comfortable in knowing what exactly to expect - with errant deviations here and there. Yet, there is still the untested argument from people around saying that they could probably get their favorite game for far cheaper (even though they never even say that they went and actually did it; so what are you waiting for, champ?).

But then, ahoy!

http://kotaku.com/350940/whats-cheaper-used-copies-or-the-virtual-console

Looks like on the whole, you pay more for used physical games than the Virtual Console version. That doesn't include the hassle of potentially buying a rotten cartridge, getting your crusty old console to work, et cetera. Anyone who wants to whine that it's a travesty to pay $5 for Bubble Bobble in this day and age should look at the average price of the real cart ($20+).

If you're a collector, physical games are still the way to go. If you, like me, just wanna play some old games... make sure you can consistently find cheaper physical copies if you're going to whine about pricing; otherwise it's all for naught.

On the other hand, if we're talking about why PSone games can be $6 when compared to a $5 NES game... yeah, PSN Store is pretty sweet. If only it'd release more games that I cared about. Right now this is like when all we got on VC was 1080 Snowboarding - oh wait, that was this week. Step up your respective games, downloadable stores!

Rumor, w00t, and all that whatnot. Quite a few people wanted to bash into my head that Q1 2008 was the golden "date" for Too Human (though Q-anything isn't a date, but a vague range). Just as many others were skeptical of it releasing AT ALL. I really just want it all to come together nicely so I can play it, but right now the rumor mongers are spitting this little ditty out:

http://kotaku.com/350343/too-human-finally-arriving-in-may-says-gamestop

May 6th. Now, of course Gamestop release lists - just like "placeholder" pricing - aren't official guarantees. But maybe this one will stick...? I hope? Note that May 6th, 2008 is not a Q1 2008 date. I was never confident that it would hit Q1 2008 (hence the peeps sneering at me :P), and actually, I was kind of hoping that maybe a little delay would help the game be better.

With regards to our podcast, you can get Episode 79 here (as well as a tasty video of the_antipode singing Timmy & The Lords of the Underworld in Rock Band). But I want to know how the RSS is working out. A few people, most recently UnlivedPhalanx, have noted that the RSS hasn't udpated for them. Yet, my iTunes says quite clearly that Episode 78 is the newest episode (why no 79? Not sure - I think it may take a day or two to update, and I just uploaded the RSS this afternoon). Sort the episode list by the left-most column, which should sort it in publishing order. If that doesn't work, sort it by Name so that at least it'll be easier for you to scroll through and find 78. If it's still not working...... blame Apple I guess.