THEY DID WHAT TO JEFF?! What the **** is going on up in here? Something's very wrong with the multiverse right now. Very wrong.

Holy crap. Can he do that? Can he really do that? This is terrible.... I think I'm going to cough up the fried calamari I just ate.

Holy crap. Can he do that? Can he really do that? This is terrible.... I think I'm going to cough up the fried calamari I just ate.

Just finished Final Fantasy XII. All 100+ hours of it. Staggeringly mediocre. Superbly average. Magnificently meh. The gameplay I found odd and off-putting--keep your MMO out of my Final Fantasy, please. It was a mess to play when your character macros were switched off because of the insane amount of micromanagement you have to deal with (what with all the status effects that enemies love to cast) and when you have the macros ON there's absolutely nothing for you to do except watch. The most exciting thing that would happen was my level 80 party would fall into chaos and misery and try to kill itself when Vaan got drunk off of confusion with the Masamune and Genji Glove equipped. I wanted to put my foot through Square-Enix's collective teeth after that. On another note, I have no idea what people are saying on the forums about the plot because I've been wanting to avoid spoilers, but if anyone tells you how great the story is, kick them in the face. This game has no plot, and its characters are plastic representations of character archetypes. (Well, maybe Balthier and Basche were pretty cool.) I kept playing just to see more of Larsa (who's like the best Final Fantasy character ever). He reminds me of the adoring fan from Elder Scrolls: Oblivion if you've ever met him. Great, great character. Ha ha ha. Is that Pit Fighter under the table cloth there? Yeah. I think it is. I've gotta go.

I've taken a couple of months off from Pit Fighter to recompose myself. My sessions were absorbing, and satisfying, and gave me a strong sense of agency--simply delightful. Unfortunately, my grades began to slip and I suddenly found that I had become ostracized from many of my fellows. Pit Fighter was taking up too much of my time. So, I packed up my SNES and all its peripherals, dropped them into a plain white sack and shelved them. Instead of bowing into Southside Jim's deadly front kick and punching Executives, I started hitting the books. It was satisfying for a while, as I suddenly found several hours added to my every day. You see, to play Pit Fighter well (on the Super Nintendo, not the crap arcade or Genesis versions), a supreme level of technique and ample amounts of practice are required. Time passed, and my grades steadily improved. Then, eight months later, and Thanksgiving had gone by, and I just hit the equivalent of a Booker T scissors kick on my mid-terms. This was a good thing. I felt that I deserved a little relaxation time, so I busted out the SNES and Pit Fighter, the only console and game I have with me here at university and played for about two hours. And I have never felt so alive. No game before or since has been able to capture the pacing, depth, and sheer fun of the gameplay. As the martial arts master, Kato, I bowed to Southside Jim as our match began and he kicked me in the face. It was like being born again. And the music. Oh, my friend, the music. There's only one song on the soundtrack, but it's a good one. During my two hours with it, it only got better. It runs for about one minute and fifty seconds and then repeats itself. I know because it's in my playlist right now, and it's every bit as good, to me, as the songs on the new Audioslave album. And I love Audioslave. I think my SNES is going to remain plugged in for a long time to come. I have my hand on its AC adapter bulging out of the wall. It's very warm. Burning, actually. Burning with anticipation.

Why can't I stop? OH YEAH. Because it's AWESOME.

Made it halfway through in one sitting because this game is too awesome for a continue system. It takes a very fine balance between tossing people and kicking them to get that far. People need to find this game and play it.

Oh man. I took a couple months away from this game because it was taking up too much of my time and my grades were starting to slip. I've got a pretty firm foothold in all of my classes now, so I think it's time to start delivering 1-frame Buzz piledrivers again. On the SNES, of course. People should be playing Pit Fighter on the 360. It should be available for the Xbox Live Arcade. I mean, the arcade version of Pit Fighter isn't quite as sweet as the SNES version, but at least it's Pit Fighter. They don't make games like these any more.

The people on the news come up with the best stories ever. They must have writing teams from like Harvard or somewhere important like that.

Well, not really. I'm lying. I don't watch very much TV. I get all my nutrition from the sun.