Check your RSS / iTunes feeds. A potential solution to the fact that it's been taking me a long time to upload episodes. Go on -- check it. And if you don't subscribe to the feed, maybe you should!

Brought the PS2 to work this week. Hopefully I'll be able to get in an hour or two of Final Fantasy X. Yeah, my backlog's like that.

Quick note -- I dropped by Stitch before heading to my sister's belated Chinese New Year Drink To Get Drunk-fest and shared some words with Tina Sanchez and Garnett Lee from 1up.com (and a young, bright-eyed gamer named Ben). If you ever see the two holding court, don't be one of those shy people who hangs back and records video of them talking to fellow fans -- they're extremely friendly and will appreciate your openness. (Don't be an ass either, though.) Also, if you're going to buy Garnett a shot, you'd better know your stuff. I bought them shots of Repisado, which Garnett emphatically recommended over Patron (it was a good decision, trust me), but unfortunately I lost Ben in the crowd and so Garnett found a lucky fourth chair to down the shot with us. I don't know who you were, but thanks for taking the shot with us! (ohyeahalsodownloadepisode121kthxbye)

First thing's first. Obey your thirst. Sprite, a'ight.

I mean, uh, first thing's first -- the podcast is up. Check your RSS feeds, or you can download it here. I just realized that Al's voice is on the left channel, so I'm re-rendering it now -- but if you just can't wait, go 'head and grab it.

Second thing: Circuit City, your service has been invaluable. I stopped in today after my haircut and saw that ALL games were going for 30% off. That's a pretty good deal, and far better than the 10% from three weeks ago. I snagged The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass ($25 after discount; Amazon still selling for $31), Banjo Kazooie NutsAndBoltslthxbye ($40, $28 after discount), and Left4Dead ($50, $35 after discount -- sorry Steam, I still like boxes if they're cheaper) for under a hundred total after tax. The best part is that I had a gift card from HSBC for being a "valued customer" so I technically got all of this free. Normally I would have just waited until the games' prices went down normally, but Phantom Hourglass is a long time coming, and I knew the instant I heard about L4D and BK:NaB that I wanted to play both of them. I was just too cheap to do it.

Godspeed to all the employees getting laid off, though. Hope you land on your feetses.

I have left the office later than 4AM in the morning exactly twice in my career with this company.

The first was on May 6th, 2005, when Kingdom of Heaven debuted in the States. I remember this because when I flew home that night I met up with my friend Cris to see that movie. I had pulled an all-nighter to finish writing test scripts and pool together defect metrics and milestones for our project, and left the building at 5:36AM. I took a picture with my old cell phone to commemorate the moment; if I ever leave this company and start to have doubts before calling it quits, I'll always have this picture to remind me that it's probably ok to bounce.

The second was today, February 5th, 2009. With our deadline not having been met before yesterday (February 4th), two coworkers and I poured in 20 hours spanning from 8AM on yesterday to 4:30 AM this morning (30 minutes for lunch). We claimed 5 hours of sleep, rolled into the office at 11:30, and sleepwalked through the day. This, after working until 10PM both on Monday and Tuesday beforehand.

The subtext of this is that of course the podcast has not been finished -- deal with it -- but the most significant thing about this in the context of this, a blog about my videogame misadventures, is that I did not have a spare moment to even touch a videogame except for the 10 minute gap during which I played some Dragon Quest IV as I waited for my train out of Harrisburg into New York. (I slept on the train instead of continuing to level-up. Like a baby.) What sucked is that when I turned on Dragon Quest IV, I realized that I was at a point in the game where I had to grind in order to earn money to buy decent equipment. That 10-minute span of playing DQIV saw me thinking of it as work because, well, at that point it was.

I really wish there existed another solution to grinding. I don't mind it when battle systems are interesting, but as nostalgic as Dragon Quest IV is, its battle system is really just old and archaic. It's for that same reason that I'm taking so long to get through Final Fantasy III on DS. At the risk of sounding snooty, I'm finding myself getting impatient with any RPG that either doesn't have a gimmick to the battle system or forces you to play in a truly turn-based manner, i.e. no Active Time Battle as found in Final Fantasy IV and beyond. Is DQIV a good game? Hell yeah, when I don't have to grind extensively. But I have way too little time and way too much of a desire to actually play through varied gameplay these days to be satisfied with grinding. Note to those making remakes: Find a way to update grind-happy games. NOW. Nostalgia be damned.

I'm going to bed.

...NOT met! That's what happens when you push a deadline up three times, hmm?

On the plus side, at least most of everyone's work is done... I hope. We all pulled what amount to 14-hour days Monday and Tuesday, so we better have yielded something of use...

If you want to win a Final Fantasy Dissidia potion, you must submit to the podcast mailbag (mailbag AT trigames DOT net) a short story -- maximum 500 words -- about a Final Fantasy Dissidia potion. It can be any type of short story as long as it's about a Dissidia potion. Want to make the potion an actual character? Great. Want to make it about the quest for, and greatness of, a Dissidia potion? Be our guest. Just make sure the driving force behind this story is this awful-tasting Japanese import. Oh, and no double entries. You must provide to us your mailing address the instant you submit, so don't try any funny stuff! We don't have a deadline yet. We'll try to announce one this week though.

P.S. Don't leave a short story in the comments. That's an automatic way for you to NOT win.

Not if you're me, at least. Allow me to ramble on about nothing and at no one in particular.

I've made much about my insanely lengthy backlog. Every year, I manage to scoop up some of the top games for that particular year. Every year, I manage to barely finish any of them. In fact, the games I do end up finishing are from years past.

Example? The only games I finished from 2008 are as follows:

Final Fantasy IV (DS)

Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney (DS)

Too Human (X360)

The Too Human "completion" is debatable, because I've only played a few hours of multiplayer with Al. I haven't played as two of the c|asses yet, either. Come to think of it, the Final Fantasy IV "completion" is debatable as well -- I haven't yet completed a New Game + yet. Also, I'm not counting the fifteen or so 2008 games I've completed for Gamespot reviews. Technically that's "work" and I'm keeping it to games that I play for leisure.

This is the sad truth about growing up and taking on a career path that doesn't benefit from you playing games until your head explodes. Though nowhere near as brutal as a job in finance, consulting can often keep you in the office for 12 hours a day, potentially including weekends, with a normal work day's worth of time on the road. Worse, most of the clients in my assigned industries are far away from New York. This is why I'm always traveling -- out of the 65 months I've been with the company, only 20 of them have been spent commuting between my apartment and the client site on a daily basis. The rest of the time I've been living out of a suitcase Monday through Thursday, and taking my 360 or PS3 with me isn't exactly the easiest thing to do.

Outside of that, I spent the last two years studying for my GMATs and preparing applications for Business School. It's not that I definitely know that I want to go, but it'd be nice to have that option should the economy finally knock me on my butt.

Then there's the fact that I have a lot of non-gaming friends. Rarely do I ever play games with any friends -- Al is almost the only one, and even then I can count the number of times I've played non-Rock Band with him in the last year on a single hand -- and instead I'm taking in dinners, movies, or improv shows.

Here's the scary part: I have no idea how a lot of you manage to do it. I'm talking about the ones with families, more intense jobs, or both. People like kellymae, MsCortana, Bozanimal (financial guru AND the father of triplets!?), and even Al who works really insane night hours instead of being at work during the day like a human. These are just a few -- I'm sure there are more of you out there whom I've forgotten.

Perhaps it's simply time that I discipline myself to playing recent games. Here's the problem: I've spent a lot of time and money on the older games I own, and I have to make good on that investment before I spend even MORE money. Things in my life have happened (good things, don't worry) that require me to penny-pinch.

So, if you want to ask me what my true 2008 Game of the Year is, right now I'm going to say Half-Life 2. That's right -- Half-freaking-Life 2. On the next episode of the podcast (120 is up right now if you know where to look), we're going to spend a few minutes on our 2008 GOTY with Ryvvn and Leiden (Pete and Charlie of Gameslaves Radio fame) and my answer might change (to something else from an earlier year, no doubt), but for now, you can put that in your pipe and smoke it.

The instant Barack Obama was elected Preseident, I told Al that I was going to play 3 hours straight of this:

Alas, I never got around to it. With President-Elect Obama's inauguration 40 minutes away, me in Pittsburgh, and my Wii resting quietly at home in New York under a layer of dust (I blame Steam and the excellence that is Half-Life 2), I will have missed my deadline. It just won't be the same after the fact.

Oh, if you were wondering, yes -- I am very bad with stupid puns.

I'm not one to be political or anything, so I'll just say: "Here's to a new era. Let's hope it goes well."

I took a trek to Circuit City today in order to see what the chaos would be like. Lucky -- or unlucky -- for me, I got there at precisely 6:45 PM, which was 15 minutes before the store was closing for the night. Go me, right?

In any case, I whipped out my digital camera and took a few clips of what I was seeing. Unlike what I had heard from other blogs and such, and perhaps it's because people were watching the Cardinals beat the Eagles or because the store was about to close already anyway, there were only handfuls of people in the store. The discounts, while substantial, weren't exactly huge, either -- the liquidators had set discounts for 23"-and-under flatscreens, "new" videogames, PC games, Flash memory, and hard drives at 10%. I imagine some people hear, "Liquidation!" and think that they're going to get upwards of 30% off on everything in the store, so maybe throngs of people came and left, hoping to see decreasing prices throughout the week.

For Circuit City's sake, and for the sake of its employees, I hope it can successfully sell off everything without having to mark down prices even more (though of course, as a consumer, lowered prices are exactly what I'm waiting for). It must stink to see people just kind of come in to your place of business, which you know is about to die, sniff around, and just jet.

As for me, I saw that they were selling Rock Band and Rock Band accessories for 20% off. I saw me my Rock Band 2 guitar, and I remembered me my broken Rock Band 1 wired guitar (due to a nameless friend who accidentally sat on it when he fell back onto my couch after beating another friend at Through The Fire And Flames), and so I got me that Rock Band 2 guitar for $56.

To wrap things up, I went in there with the intent of recording chaos, but came out with nothing but normalcy amidst discount signs. Video to be posted soon, though it's not terribly interesting.