First of all, I would like to apologize for all my friends and Union-mates for not being very active on Gamespot recently. As stated in the title, school recently started and I'm busy as all hell. I'm trying to balance spending time with my Heather, homework, school itself, extracurriculars, and playing a bit of WoW when I get the chance. Along with all this, I've been having some family problems, which take up even more of my time. So, as you can see, things have been pretty hectic for me for the past few weeks.

Now that that's out of the way, I'd like to tell you about about how school is going for me. So far, I'm not struggling in any classes, as far as grades go. Some things in Chemistry are hard for me to understand, and Precal is sometimes pretty ridiculous, but I think I'll be okay (or at least I hope so!). My English teacher hates me because I'm smarter than she is, as she does with a lot of people. It's pretty annoying -.- *shrug* I don't really care :P My AP US History class is really awesome, as is my We The People class, because they're both about government and history and things, and I'm a huge history nerd ^_^ The AP class isn't as difficult as I thought it would be, considering it's a college credit class. My Spanish class is going really well, especially because I have a somewhat new-found love for languages. Great fun ^_^ I usually have a couple hours of homework each night, taking two college classes (Precal and AP US History), which is really lame, but I can handle it. It's going pretty good :P

So anywho, Midterms come out tomorrow, and I think I'm doing pretty well. I may post an update when I get mine, I dunno :P

As you all know, it's that time again. Time for us kids to be back in the classroom, "learning". I'll be a Junior in high school this year; just two more years to go :D I just returned from getting my schedule, and the imminence of the coming year has hit me like a ton of bricks. Before I get ahead of myself, I figure I'll post my schedule for this year, as it is related to my ranting.

1. We The People (Constitution study class, really excited about this one)

2. Psychology (trying to change to Spanish III)

3. AP US History

4. Pre-Calculus

5. Chemistry I (Without a chem. lab; the school tore ours out over the summer, and another one won't be up until NEXT year)

6. Honors English III

7. Humanities (all Juniors are required to take it, it's stupid -.-)

If I manage to get Psychology changed to Spanish III, the entire schedule will probably be different, because I don't think there is a Spanish III class 2nd period.

And yes, I have to take Chemistry without a chem lab. How is that supposed to happen? This is completely ridiculous in my opinion, and more than likely illegal, because the Pre-College Curriculum requires 3 science credits, one of which being a lab class, which is supposed to be Chemistry. This angers me.

Now, on to my main rant: summer school work. I now have two weeks to complete my summer projects for English and History. I have 3 more essays to write, a Story Map to draw out, almost an entire book to read, a chapter to outline from a textbook, and 3 chapters of vocabulary from a textbook to do. I'm going to be busting my butt the next two weeks, and hopefully I'll get it all done. The book I have to read is called "Mayflower"; it's an extremely dry, boring, sleep-inducing book. It is, quite possibly, the worst book I've ever tried to read. I can't stand the thing -.- Two of the three essays I have to write are about the book, so there's no way I can get by not reading it. This is going to suck -.-

That is just the work I have left to do. I've already done an essay, 3 chapters of outlines, 1 chapter of vocabulary, and a Story Map outline, a collage (which Heather mostly did, she's so freaking amazing, I love her :D), and read a novel.

So, that's what's going on in my life. I wrote this mainly to rant a bit, and let all you guys on GS know what's going on with me :P Hope you guys have smaller piles of work than I do!

Finally got my ACT scores in today, I've been stressing about them for weeks xD For those of you who don't know, the ACT is a college admissions test in the United States, and colleges use your scores in the admissions process. Basically, it's supposed to determine how well you will succeed in college. The highest score is a 36 in each category; English, Math, Reading, and Science, and then a 36 composite, which is all your scores averaged. Here's my scores....

Composite: 29

English: 34

Math: 26

Reading: 27

Science: 29

I was aiming for a 31 or higher to beat one of my friends, but I'm pretty satisfied ^_^ Haven't decided if I'm going to take the test again, but I might...Well, I guess I'll be forced to, because our school makes Juniors take the test now...But I dunno if I'll take it again on my own ^_^ Anyway, thought I'd share my excitement with you gamespotters :P Sorry about blogging again so soon, but I had to XD

As a few of you know, I've recently been trying to get the Tagger King Emblem, which requires making 1000 unique tags on Gamespot. Well, after a few weeks of near-obsessed levels of taggage, I got my emblem ^_^It should show whenever Gamespot updates their servers for the levels and such I guess o.O

It took a LONG time to get this emblem, especially with my dial-up. Basically, I searched for threads on the forums that seemed like they were likely to have a lot of different topics covered in them, and tagged EVERYTHING xD

In other news, I'll be getting Guitar Hero: Aerosmith on Sunday ^_^ That is, if I can find it in stores then >.> I'm very excited for it :D

For those of you who don't know, Rock on the Range (which I will now refer to as RotR) is an annual concert held in Columbus, Ohio. RotR features many artists, most of which are from the harder rock genre, which is perfect for me, because I'm a hard rock junkie. This year was RotR's second year, and I had the chance to go.

RotR was two days this year (Saturday May 17, and Sunday May 18), but I only got to go to the first day. There were two stages, one main stage inside the stadium, and one smaller stage outside, with the less popular bands at the event. I ended up watching the main stage the entire time, and as a result got to see Finger Eleven, Shinedown, Killswitch Engage, Serj Tankian, Staind, Disturbed, and Stone Temple Pilots (who had their first concert in 8 years, after breaking up). Basically, it was the perfect event for me.

Disturbed put on the best performance by far, playing Perfect Insanity, Inside The Fire, Stricken, Stupify, Land of Confusion, The Game, Ten Thousand Fists and, of course, Down With The Sickness. I am a HUGE Disturbed fan, and I would have made the drive to Columbus solely to see them. I got major cold chills during some of the songs, namely Ten Thousand Fists and The Game.

Killswitch Engage was really fun to watch, because they involved the audience a lot. I'm not a huge Killswitch fan, but I really enjoyed watching them. They played a few of their more famous songs, including My Last Serenade, My Curse, and Holy Diver. One of their guitarists performed with a blow-up doll wrapped around him the entire time, which was kind of creepy, but amusing xD He also had a really dirty mouth O.o Holy Diver was really awesome, because I love that song, although not as much as the Dio version. All in all, Killswitch had a really good performance.

Shinedown was really good as well. The lead singer of Shinedown was the one who really got the crowd into the show. Finger Eleven performed before Shinedown, but Shinedown got the show going. They played a few really good songs, including 45 and one song from their upcoming album, The Sound of Madness, which was really amazing. This show really made me appreciate Shinedown more than I did before.

Serj's performance was not quite as good as I expected, but still pretty good. I absolutely love Serj, and his voice amazes me. He played nearly all of his solo CD, including Empty Walls, The Unthinking Majority, Beethoven's C***, and Lie Lie Lie. He was pretty funny and random on stage (with a comment about Borat and Romeo and Juliet f****** each other O.o), and was all around amusing.

Stone Temple Pilots put on a really good show. They were the headlining band, and lived up to it to say the least. I'm not a big STP fan, but they were really good live. They didn't engage the audience much, but they let the music make up for it.

Staind was pretty amazing. Their songs were very moving (as you can probably guess) to see live, and it was a pretty interesting performance overall. I really loved getting to see Outside and It's Been Awhile live, because I love both of those songs.

Finger Eleven was better than I thought they were going to be, but still nowhere near the level of some of the other bands. I'm not a big Finger Eleven fan, and this show didn't really entice me to listen to them more. They didn't even play all of Paralyzer, they just split it up into this weird medley of covers, where they played Take Me Out by Franz Ferdinand and Another Brick in the Wall O.o It kind of sucked.

All in all, RotR was amazing. Afterwards, I was hoarse, sunburned, and sore all over, but it was well worth it. I'm pretty sure I got a contact high too from all the weed being smoked around me, but whatever. I got to spend an entire day listening to amazing music with my favorite person (love ya baby :P). The only thing I regret is not getting to stay for Day 2, with 3 Doors Down, Papa Roach, Seether, and Flyleaf. Oh well, there's always next year!

Ok, so I am a bit into FFVII, and I'm putting Lost Odyssey on hold for now. I haven't gotten very far into the game yet, as I've been swamped with schoolwork what with finals coming up trying to save my grades, but I digress.

Anywho, my first impression of the game is that it is amazing (of course, it's FFVII), but I really HATE Cloud. Cloud is the most pompous, annoying, jerkish protagonist I've seen in any game, ever. He's all "I don't care about you guys, I just care about the money." I've been told his attitude improves later on, and I sure hope it's true, because he's about to drive me up a wall.

Barrett is also annoying, on account of the fact that I dislike trying to read black/southern sterotype speech xD Also, he has anger issues O.o

I like Tifa and Aeris pretty well... Tifa brings Cloud down off his high horse, which pleases me. Aeris is pretty cool... Not really amazing, but a cool character.

The plot so far (I just got to the part where Cloud actually meets Aeris, and you run from Reno and his goonies) is kind of bleh, but I'm in the very beginning, so I don't expect it to be amazing yet.

This is my opinion of the game so far, take it or leave it :P I figured I'd give my friends a little feedback on my FFVII play, seeing as how it's been a week since I got the game xD

Well, I have decided to re-buy a Ps2. If you didn't know, I had my second Ps2 die on me a long time ago, and have never felt the need to buy a new one. However, recently, I have had strong urges to go and play some of the older FF games, as well as do some replays through the KH games, things like that. I found a friend who is willing to sell me his Ps2 for only $50, whereas it would probably cost me around $80 or $90 to buy a used one at Gamestop, so I'm pretty excited. I also have a friend who has a copy of FFVII, so I'm gonna borrow that from him when I get my Ps2. Then, I think I'm going to try to hunt down FFVIII and/or FFIX, maybe do some bargain bin hunting :D

In other news, I'm around 15 hours into Lost Odyssey, and I'm on disk 2 of 4. Looks like this one is gonna take me a while xD It's no Final Fantasy, but it's pretty fun. The story is very well put together, and the characters are very easy to connect to. I'll probably do a full review, and another update on it when I finish the game :P

There's not much else going on in my gaming world at the moment, other than eagerly awaiting the release of UT3 for the 360. I love the Unreal series xD So...That's all folks! :P

First off, my profile is a lot older than I have actually been on GameSpot. I created a GameSpot profile forever ago apparantly (although I don't remember doing so O.o), and just now decided to actually start using it.

Now that that's out of the way, we can get to the real purpose of this blog. My name is Billy, I live in Kentucky, and I am a very avid gamer. My gaming life started out when I was very young, around 7 years old probably, and has kept growing ever since. I play a fairly wide variety of games, including RPG's, Shooters, a few racers, MMO's, Action/Adventure games, Platformers, and I sometimes play an RTS from time to time, depending on whether or not it's simple enough for me to understand. A few of my favorite titles are: The Legend of Zelda (any of the series, really), The Final Fantasy series (I've only had a chance to play a few of the games on account of my Playstation exploding...twice...), Kingdom Hearts 1 & 2, the Halo series, Resident Evil 4, The Super Smash Bros. Series, The Guitar Hero series, and many many other that I don't have time to list.

Outside of gaming, I enjoy spending time with my girlfriend, reading, writing (sometimes, depending on my mood), listening to music (Hard Rock mainly), playing cards, and whatever else I can find to do in this BFE town I live in. I'm a pretty big history nerd, in case you ever need that bit of information about me...

There's not much else about me to tell; I lead a fairly boring life :P If you'd like to know anything else that I have neglected to mention, feel free to ask... And that's about all I have to say, so bye!