That's all I need to say.

www.giantbomb.com - If you're stupid and don't know what it is, it's basically Gamespot mixed with Wikipedia and deepfried in pure liquid awesome. It's headed up by Jeff Gerstmann, Ryan Davis, Brad Shoemaker, and Vinny Carravela.

friend me on there - my screen name's Kyle (i made my account within minutes of the site going up : P )

Could it be that Square finally made an FF7 spin-off that didn't make me wanna line up every one of those responsible and systematically knee each one in the face?

So far, Crisis Core says "yes". I went in with no expectations at all and found it actually enjoyable. I was amazed when I found myself away from my PSP, really wishing I was playing it. That really hasn't happened for me with a PSP game yet. 'Cept maybe Jeanne D'arc.

It's not perfect, but I'm still liking it a lot. The visuals and sound are equally amazing. There are sometimes FMVs in the middle of battle! (See: Bahamut's Mega Flare - 1:30). The battle system isn't flawless, but I think I find it much less repetative and uninspired than I was expecting, or at least not as easy.

The real shocker is the fact that not every single moment in the story makes me want to kill myself, unlike in Advent Children. Where I'm at right now, the story doesnt really have much to do yet with the first game, in fact it appears to be blatantly repeating it with different characters, but maybe once Cloud and Aerith become involved (yes, that's right, I said Aerith. I figured I might as well get used to it.) the story might start to go down hill. EDIT:now that I've seen mor, I'd say Aerith is my favorite character, so that's good. Cloud hasn't really done anything yet. It's weird, the story seems to have no predictable direction. I can't really see where it's going at all. Which is crazy, because it's a prequel, I should know exactly wear it's going.

However, there have been, so far, two moments in which something in the story that you think is real turns about to be something happening on a Star Trek-like holodeck. TWO!! It's happened TWICE!! ALREADY!! How does that happen? Who thought that was a good idea?! I encountered the first incident of this while I was trying out the Japanese version and it almost convinced me that Crisis Core would be terrible. AND THEN THEY DID IT AGAIN?! I'm still confused about the whole thing.

But at least I know how the game will end now. The words "500 years later" will appear on the screen, we'll see RedXIII running up a canyon, then midgar will come into view, miles away, he'll look out at it, and then it's all on a holodeck.

Crisis Core - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - A holodeck

So . . . I haven't posted here lately. In fact, I haven't even played a video game lately. Like . . . I don't think I played any in the past week. For me, that is straight up INSANE. That usually only happens when I get grounded, which doesn't happen anymore.

For the past couple of months one of my friends kept occasionally talking about how he lost his damn mind and bought four Magic the Gathering cards called 'Goblin Kings' off of eBay and how excited he was about getting them. To this I would respond with various things about how we're not twelve anymore and Magic was stupid.

Then the cards finally came in and he made some cheap-ass deck of Goblins cause he's a prick (I'm not bitter) and sort of made me play even though Magic is like Pokemon without Pokemon and therefore worthless. But actually it was awesome so basically I've been spending all my time looking at cards, changing my (black/blue faerie/rogue deck!!), playing Magic, and trying not have my ipod stolen as I walk through sketchy neighborhoods to go to card stores. Yeah . . . . I'm not really sure how I filled up two weeks with that, either.

I recently came full circle by going on eBay and buying four cards called "Scion of Oona" which is basically the same as a Goblin King, except it's a faerie instead of a goblin, and therefore not ****ing stupid.

Just thought I'd say why I'm never here anymore.

Faeries!!

PS: In case you're stupid, and don't know yet, go to giantbomb.com! You can say you've been there since day zero!!

I rolled out of bed this morning and found, to my surprise, and by surprise I mean not surprise at all, the XFX GeForce 8800GT graphics card I ordered was waiting for me!

So long, crappy Radeon X1300!!

It's 1,000,000,000 decibel fan sounds like a choir of angels!

The installation was not without its trials. As you can see, this card is ****ing huge and required some rearranging of some things inside my computer. I emerged from the struggle bloodied but unshaken.

That all you got?!? >.O

I could not be more happy with this thing. It's awesome. I wanted to test it on a game I had a lot of experience with, so I tried Half-life 2 Episode 2. Normally in HL2, I have to use about medium settings with a very low resolution. It would run okay on those settings, not even close to 60fps. Now I get a better frame rate than before when I max out all the settings and play at 1680x1050, my monitor's max resolution.

I probably won't be able to play Crysis at anything above single digit frame rates until i upgrade the rest of my pc, which I hope to do before the summer. Who knows, I might even go bat**** crazy and buy a second 8800GT and SLI them. Then again, that might be rather noisy.

And the card came with a free copy of Company of Heroes! Score!

I took the time to run through all the Company of Heroes tutorials today. It seems like a really cool game. I just played Starcraft last night, so comparing the way my marines just run around with their heads up their asses, going right past an enemy that's attacking them with the way my riflemen will not only stop to attack, but intelligently spread out and take cover when enemies come into sight was pretty incredible. That's cause I don't play RTSs. The last one I played before Company of Heroes was Warcraft III. Company of Heroes seems like a game, as with all other RTSs, that I will enjoy for like 5 seconds until the strategy needed for the campaign goes over my head and then I won't be able to continue. Oh wells!

One other game I just went through a tutorial for was Stardock's new "real time 4x" game Sins of a Solar Empire. As a big GalCiv II fan, I can't help but sqeal like a little girl when I look at this game. As you could probably guess, I'm not a huge fan of the "real time" in "real time 4x", but I'm hoping I can deal. It's just soooo huge. The scale is really amazing and the whole thing looks great. But from what I hear this game pretty crazy-complicated. The real-time thing and the super complexity make me think I ought to just stick to GalCiv II, which I barely understand as it is, but this game is just too damn gorgeous and epic to stay away from.

Finally, I must be on some sort of insane RTS kick, because the last game I think I want to try for a little bit is World in Conflict. Partly because it's been getting such great reviews, and partly because system requirements lab said I can so totally play it now.

w00t!

Peace.

PS: I looked into it, and, turns out, Star Wars Episode One Racer is still way awesome! Especially when playing at 1680x1050 using an emulator! I never knew I would get to see such sharp looking N64 games!

EDIT: I tried Crysis. I spent about an hour installing it. I had to run it on the lowest settings, which means it looks worse than even Half-life 2, and yet it still ran ****ty and the audio was studdering like crazy. What a stupid way to make a game. And they're surprised no one bought it. Only ten people can run it well! Even the intro cutscene (showed before the main menu) slowed down in spots to LESS THAN ONE FRAME PER SECOND! Like significantly less! It was probably like 0.05 fps in some spots. How is that possible?! HOW?! It was a cinematic!

On the bright side, Sins of a Solar empire is still fantastic. If anyone has it, let me know and we can play! And by play I mean you horribly murder me and/or i constantly give you cash payouts while begging for mercy/alliance.

So I'm reading up on the latest ways to mod my PSP, as I had been doing for most of my day when i literally stumble across a blog, of which the latest entry was titled "Ryan Davis Leaves Gamespot". What the ****. Seriously. But I knew this would happen. After Jeff leaving and all the other people that had been dropping off as a result, I knew it was just a matter of time until the last person keeping Gamespot Live alive (to me) stepped out. Sure there's Brad, but . . . he don't talk much. That is . . . Brad hasn't left yet, has he?? I better go check on that.

I was basically just waiting for this day. Oh well. I had actually been enjoying the latest Hotspots more than usual, but with Ryan gone, I really doubt I'll have much interest. What made the Hotspot so magical was the dynamic between most of the people on it because they had all been friends for years. It's sad that we won't see that again.

These days, I cruise around the ex-Gamespotters' personal blogs more than I do Gamespot itself.

jeffgerstmann.net

arrowpointingdown.com (Ryan)

doofycrap.com (Rich)

theheadofalfredogarcia.com (Alex)

EDIT: actually, maybe we WILL see that sort of podcast chemistry once again! I speak of the Arrow Pointing Down Podcast! Hopefully They'll make this an ongoing thing.

The day has come! Burnout Paradise hit stores yesterday. I had called one Gamestop that day and they said they were already out of unreserved copies on the 360 so I left school early to make sure I snagged one of the other two Gamestops in my area. Damn. As I'm writing this I remember my last year decision to always go to Gamecrazy and to only support Gamestop when I needed to . . . whatever happened to that?! Anyways, long story short, Burnout Paradise is pretty awesome. It hooked me from the very first time I loaded it up and saw that the Start screen hits you with a wide shot of Paradise and the cool sounds of Guns 'N Roses' "Paradise City" (what else?). This is opposed to the usual Burnout fair of some sort of heavy metal remix of the orignal Burnout theme set over shaky-cam shots of cars driving really fast.

In a way that start screens sets the tone for the whole game. That isn't to say it's laid back or anything, only that it generally feels very different from the usual Burnout games. I feel like this gam's title still kind of keeps me from falling in love with it. That is to say, on it's own merits, this game is amazing, but the fact that it's called "Burnout" makes me feel like it's too much of a change. It's silly of course, because Burnout 3 was already made, and let's face it, that game can't be improved upon. ;)

It hits so many of the things that other open-world driving games have missed - For one, you're never far from the next event. That's important. Everyone knows the worst thing in open world games is having to trudge over to mission start point, But in Paradise, they're litterally everywhere and they never get taken away. The world is actually fun to drive around in and finding hidden routes and billboards give it an actual purpose. Remember NFS Most Wanted? It was a great game, but did you EVER drive around in the world? I sure as hell didn't. Like anyone else who played it, I just used the menus to instantly skip to the next even I wanted to do. But not in Burnout.

Criterion also made some great callbacks in Paradise that give the cars a lot more variety. Not every car uses the same boost mechanic. Some use the normal Paradise model of having one long bar that never changes that you can activate whenever you want, but others follow the Burnout 2 philosophy of needing the boost meter to be filled before you can boost. The game balances this by giving cars that need full bars to boost shorter bars, and more powerful boost jets.I don't know how many different boost methods there are but I've seen about three or four already.

The soundtrack has a mix of liscensed music (as usual for Burnout games since #2), some of it from older Burnouts, but it also includes a lot of the old unliscensed music from Burnout 1 & 2 and the menus in Burnout 3. It's actually a pretty cool, and as long as it has Beautiful Ruin, My Curse, and Block Out The World from Burnout Dominator, I'm happy.

Holy **** I just pretty much wrote enough for a review. It must be this coffee sitting next to me. Maybe I'll just copy and paste this into a user review. I need a new one.

By the way, in case you didn't catch it, the title of this post is a reference to High Fidelity.

On a side note, No More Heroes came out today and I'm overjoyed to see that it got a 9. A combination of SUDA51's craziness and actually compelling gameplay sounds like the reese's cup of video games. I was so worried it would miss the mark! Of course I was always gonna get it anyways. I adore Killer7. hope to go pick it up tonight.

EDIT: Speaking of supporting GameCrazy, they didn't even have No More Heroes. On the day it was released? Wtf?

I lent my copy to a friend to try. He doesn't keep up with games so he just got a PS2 and is working his way through the Square RPGs which is all he really goes for on consoles. But of course talking about it made me want to play it again so I had to bust out my burned copy of Kingdom Hearts Final Mix, which is Japanese only. Definitely adds a new layer of challenge on an old game. I know everything I have to do in the worlds but I don't know what any of the abilities or items are, haha.

I want the new Kingdom Hearts games to come out more than anything. But of course, it'll probably take a couple of years to be released in Japan, forget US translation. Which brings me to a topic that's been bubbling in the back of my head for a while: Square-Enix is a bunch of ****ing douche bags. Okay, maybe not, but they're at least a little annoying. I just don't understand them. Think of how many games they're devloping right now. Count them in your head. Yeah, it's a lot, isn't it? And you want to play them, don't you? Too bad. None of them will be out this century. I can't imagine that their resources aren't stretched to the breaking point. Imagine if they focused their devlopment on less games at once. We might actually get to see some of them in our lifetime. Of course they have no reason to rush. No matter when they put out their games, as long as their company name is on the box, or better yet, (and i know this sounds crazy) the words "final" or "fantasy" somewhere in the title, it'll sell a billion copies in a day. Devlopment cost recouped. Instantly. But I still can't help but hate them a little for making us wait so long.

But then again, maybe I'm just bitter because they won't release the Kingdom Hearts Final Mixes in America. I mean, seriously, what the hell. In case you don't know, the Final Mix games are basically special editions of the American Kingdom Hearts games (which have more content the Japanese versions), translated back to Japanese with even more content added in. The latest one, Kingdom Hearts II: Final Mix + even had a second disc which had a 3D remake of the GBA game, Chain of Memories. Come on! You don't think anyone would buy that? I'd buy two! How much effort would it take to hire a company to translate the game into english? They don't even add any voice work to the Final Mixes. Seriously, it would just need to have the text translated. Why is this game not out?

Square-Enix, I hate you.

After EXACTLY two months, ONLY two months, my 360 has once again died. This time the system stopped recognizing there was a disc in the drive. Instantly. No warning, no signs, no nothing. Just like my last problem, everything was completely fine, and then the system was immediately unusuable. Great. I'm SURE I'll be able to find a Gamestop with a 360 premium! After all, it's only TWO DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS!!!

Okay, Microsoft. You had to rush your console to market, I get it. But you've had two years to shape up your act. Two systems failing in six months is beyond unnacceptable. You're lucky the games are so ****ing great . . .

That title is nothing but cold hard facts!

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Earlier today I got the strangest urge to play Myst again. And oddly enough, I come to find out that Myst was just rereleased in Europe on the DS about a week ago. IsoHunt here I come!

Don't get me wrong, I love it, but can you blame me for not importing Myst?