After being completely dissapointed this weekend over another loss by Essendon, I've turned my sights to watching the World Cup, and indeed I've once again found a game thats made me really cheer.

Australia against all odds beats Japan by a whopping 3 - 1, in quite an amazing display of sportsmanship. Japans first goal in my opinion was nothing short of a horrible mistake on the refs part. Mark Schwarzer (Australia's current goalie) was knocked down a second before the ball went in by a Japanese striker, and through all the confusion the referee gave them the point, despite the fact that it should of easily been a foul. From then on the game seemed to be a disaster for the Aussies as continuely they tried taking shots and missed. The same could be said for the Japanese, however them being infront by a goal really ment that they just had to maintain a good defence to win.
When hope for an Australian win started to fade hope was brought to the Australians within the last 20 minutes of the game when 2 goals were scored by Tim Cahill to bring the Aussies forward by a goal. If that wasnt enough, John Aloisi scored a third which finalised the Australian win.

I'm not the biggest soccer enthusiast you'd find, but i certainly enjoy watching competitive international games, especially when they involve Australia. In an event as big as this, you'd have to give them some support as now they have to take on Brazil.
Carn' the Socceroos!!

I've recently finished reading an article in TIME magazine about the wii, and i've all of a sudden had a huge change of heart. I was originally looking forward to the wii coming out, and was planning to get it eventually but now its become TOP priority. i have to get this console. my original order of preference used to be arranged like this: PS3, Wii, X360.
But now that i've seen and thought about how much fun it could be swinging the controller around and moving instead of just sitting there twiddling your fingers on a couple of joysticks iv decided to get this cheap, little box first. Not only to be more 'in the game' but also be able to play all those really cool games i used to play on my snes before it broke *sniff* ill never get over that. My only issue with the wii right now is the lack of third party support. its such a good idea, and it looks like its really going to help the horror that is befalling the gaming industry. for example - the huge development prices, lack of innovation, the accusations against games making people violent, lazy and so on. Wii looks like it is going to completely change this, and hopefully set new standards for sony, microsoft and possibly a new competitor next gen as well as the many more years to come.

I hope that just because nintendo fell drasticly behind last generation doesnt mean all third party supporters will abandon it and leave it for dead this gen, when they are trying the hardest out of all three companies to save the dying gaming industry. Nintendo has already lost some series it well deserves such as resident evil 5, and is being compensated with something that many speculate as being a horrible resident evil: gun survivor game (dear god no!) instead of getting the next game in the story, despite nintendo practicly brought resident evil to where it is today.
The future however still looks bright for nintendo with the huge numbers of people waiting for its release due to a number of reasons including its price, innovation, fun games and its system that allows us to access old-school nintendo games. i can hardly wait till this is out!:D

I'm just posting this blog to say that today was my second day out in a row. I'm tierd now but it was pretty much worth it. Yesterday (Friday) I went to see The DaVinci Code and today I went and saw X-Men 3 at a friends party. The party was fun. We went LAN gaming (wow) and played Battlefield 2 and 1942. We weren't there for very long as we needed to kill a bit of time before the movie started but I did have fun killing two of my friends, James and Calvin in a plane. Good stuff. I suppose whilst I'm at it I might as well give my opinion or review on X-men. It was a good movie, lots of action but it just wasn't as good as the others. Lets just say I thought it would feature alot more of the main characters. Cool action bits though and tons of cool new mutant powers and stuff. I'm not gonna give this a number cause im not a reviewer. Rating something is stupid because you dont know if that type of movie will appeal to different people who actually like the genre. So I'll say this - I recommend this movie to huge X-Men fans and people who want a good special effects/action movie for about $10. After we left the movie place we went to the arcade. My other mates Pat and Tony played Star Wars: Pod Racer which was funny because we kept screwing them up by hitting the boost button (stupid big blue button right in the middle. How could you NOT hit it?!) Then we left that place to go get Tony's present thing which ended up being Battlefield 2 so now he can play online with me and Pat. Overall interesting day...beats sitting around here doing my english assignment.

Yep, I'm pleased to announce I have finished my School Certificate exams for the mid-year and dare I say, I was right they weren't as hard as everyone made them out to be, all you've gotta do is go on the site of the previous exams and do the questions there. Won't let ya down. Since my exam finished at 11:00 I got to come home earlier - yay which is why I'm here now typing this right now whilst those other suckers at school do there Chinese and Indonesian exam! It also means i have...NO HOMEWORK!! :D So I'm gonna spend some time beating RE2 and RE3 and getting up to Gunnery Sergeant in BF2 so I can rub it in some of my friends faces (including you Pat aka. Cursed_Shadow)

Ok, I may be going to some lengths here by saying this... but has anyone lately noticed some rather annoying technical issues related to moving from page to page, uploading images and movies and updating spaces? Cause lately I've been coming across alot of very annoying little glitches happening around GameSpot such as having to refresh a page to see it cause the page comes up with just script, and trying to update certain parts of my blog and profile, as well as uploading images - don't get me started on that cause that just takes the cake in the 'TOTALLY ANNOYING' factor. Little things also like updating my profile and images coming up with a completely different image even though I put in a diferent URL, I swear its driving me nuts I haven't been able to put anything into that 'About Me' section for the past 2 weeks so I've decided to forget about it, I'm just glad I've uploaded most of my pictures cause enduring what I had to go through last time to get that up would make me go literally insane.

ever since the first games came out in like 1989 or sumthin like that games have always been about fun and innovation, until now thats started to change. graphics are becoming a huge issue, THEY ARE DRAGGING THE INDUSTRY DOWN! as the new consoles come out they get more, and more and more expensive to develop for and far too time constraining to even start making. I like the graphics on the 360 and what i've seen from the PS3, but the graphics are becoming a problem - if the 360 is going to come out in australia for about $600 AUS dollars, imagine how much the PS3, as well as next generation consoles will cost. console companies will HAVE to cut down how powerful they make their consoles before they turn into PCs.

The only company that has managed to sustain the full rights as a true gaming company is nintendo. they have been able to innovate and still have partially good graphics for an affordable price from the NES right up to the GC and from what we've heard and seen about the new one, possibly the REV as well - this is what games were originaly about not cheaper means to sell media devices (i.e dvd players, music players, online capabilities)

Well over these past few weeks I've been doing heaps of research about Blu-Ray and HD-DVD (read my other blog post) and it seems that although in the gaming world it's Sony vs Microsoft, Sony infact doesn't care what Microsoft do, their real beef is with Toshiba the HD-DVD head company. the PS3 in a respect may not be a games console, it's speculated to be a high definition platform hidden under the name of PlayStation merely to get the public to buy it. It may just work....

The PlayStation series is a long line of popular gaming consoles the original selling 100 million units and the PS2 selling around 90 million. What better way to hide and unleash a new high-definition format than in the form of a PlayStation with the cost of one too and the release date before the HD-DVD release. It's quite a risky idea, but its gotten a HELL of alot of support from other companies; Apple Computers, Dell, HP, 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros, Walt Disney, Panasonic, Sony, Pioneer, TDK, Sharp, Mitsubishi, LG, Philips, Samsung, MGM, Sony Pictures, Digital Playground, Hitachi, Thomson, Yamaha.

This is what they're banking on, HD-DVD's only advantage is its early release, but since the PS3 may be coming out earlier than it, it automaticly gives them a huge advantage, and people wont care if PS3 has 5 games upon release - IT'LL BE A $500 DOLLAR BLU-RAY PLAYER and everyone will want it for that alone. This will be a huge jump for the whole company and it wont stop there. For the next 20 years royalties will be paid to use this technology to Sony and all the other contributers and makers of the technology, this will then be a huge boost to the Computer Entertainment Division giving them a 3rd time straight 80-100 million console sellout and put the whole company out of its debts getting them possibly billions more in the process.
Or if the worst comes to worst it could possibly kill Sony forever and they may end up dropping out of the console business and turning their Computer Entertainment Division into what it used to be - developing technology for Nintendo's consoles and producing games.

Even if this does happen, im still highly anticipating the PS3, 360 and Revolution all the same.

I'm now in Year 10 at AISS (Australian International School Singapore) and I can honestly say I hate coming back to school, specially after such a long holiday and having so much fun in the U.S (included in my MSN blog) and doing so much cool stuff like going to Disneyland and Hollywood in California and Times Square in New York. With added bonuses like free breakfast, sleeping in, getting some cool new games at really cheap prices and even having a two day stay in Hong Kong for the return trip.

Now all that is over, and all I can do is sit here and study and do homework for our School Certificate at the end of the year. On the bright side...I get to move back to Australia at the end of the year!

The next generation of multi media war has begun much like the betamax, VHS one during 1980. The big issue arousing on lots of the boards is that this has somehow worked its way into the gaming world with Microsoft and Sony supporting opposite sides (doesnt that surprise me....) by backing each with its new console that have come/coming out. Cause of stuff like this happening its almost changing the face of gaming into some kind of electronics media package with the bonus of game playing capabilities slapped on the side, its stupid. So whilst sony (the official head of blu-ray technology) puts blu-ray players in their PS3s, Microsoft has decided to follow suit and make HD-DVD attachments for the 360. It seems however that if HD-DVD is to flop Microsoft will adopt Sony's blu-ray for its media playing device. I'm confused by this....they're....helping their rival?? I'm not gonna try and figure out why they're doing this so i'll just wait and see what happens.

The good thing about this is that my dad may end up buying one of the consoles cause they both prove good media devices and can connect up to a HDTV and connect wirelessly with the computer and other portable media devices. Meaning that I dont have to buy it with my own money : D

This is really cool. Today in just a few hours we'll be going to the airport to fly to Japan for a week. It's gonna be awesome, we're going to go check out Sony HQ and go to Tokyo Disneyland and even better we're staying a 5 star hotel across the road from the Japanese Prime Ministers house!

Anyway, this is a really quick entry as we're leaving very soon so I'll finish