http://www.gametrailers.com/umwatcher.php?id=57998

 This isn't so much a blog as it is a demand.

Watch this ENTIRE video. (Yes, even the credits) 

It may very well be the greatest thing since sliced e-bread.

They will be loud, and probably pretty girly sounding.

As you know, I've been primarily focused on playing Rogue Galaxy; and I still am, however what kind of gamer would I be if I ignored my 360? So to take a break from Jaster and company, I decided to throw KotOR into my 360 and swing a lightsaber at things for awhile. While waiting for the game to load, I went into the kitchen to fix myself a sandwich, because it just seemed like a good idea at the time. Then I heard this loud "POP" come from the direction of my room wherein resides my 360 along with all other game related apparati. "censored explitive!" I yelled as I scrambled across my wooden floor in socks, performing a very Tom Cruise in 'Risky Business' like move past my destination and almost into a bathroom sink.

 The TV screen was locked, covered in glitches reminiscent of what the old NES games looked like when they froze, and there sat my 360. Its demon red lights glowing at me, watching me, waiting.... OUT DEMON! I called to it as I jumped towards it and hit the eject button. Instead of ejecting, it decided to start chewing on the disc, making that noise that NO electrical device is supposed to make, unless of course it's literally built to grind things. Like rocks. The red lights were flashing, I assume it was laughing at me and my futile efforts to rescue my game from it's evil clutches. I hit the power button a few times, but that did nothing, I finally just pulled the power cable. I half expected it to stay on, hover into the air, and start spitting pea soup at me. It didn't, I'm just saying it wouldn't have been much of a stretch. I turned it back on via the eject button, once again hoping just to get my game back, and I did. In a sense. It's haloed pretty badly, and will never be of any use again. I'm not TOO bothered by this, as I can pick up KotOR from Gamestop for like 10 bucks. However - my 360 and I are not on speaking terms at the moment. It starts up just fine, and seems to be okay now, but It's done this to me before... lulling me into a false sense of safety. Then it attacks! So I'm thinking I may just rid myself of this machine before it pulls a 'Christine' on me and starts killing my loved ones.

This will give me a reason to upgrade to the Elite, I WANT a 360 - there are too many games coming out for it that I must have. I just don't want THIS 360 anymore. It is obviously evil, and wants me dead. I'm worried though, that maybe MS hasn't worked out enough of the hardware issues that it will just screw up again, I know some people are on their 3rd system already. I bought mine in October 2006. Which I assumed was a recent enough version that I wouldn't have to endure things like this. "it'll never happen to me"  I thought. Of course thats also what teens think about drug overdoses and car accidents. 

I need an old priest and a young priest.

.........and a bottle of Crown Royal XR.

Alright. I lost. I went and bought 'Rogue Galaxy' yesterday. I decided to hold off on Guitar Hero II (360 version) for a bit to see if there's some wireless action coming out for it in the near future. Because damnit, I'm just a wireless kind of guy. Moving on:

Forgoing my desire to first rid myself of my back log. Something I feel really guilty about for some reason... I went to Gamespot and it was there, I was there, my wallet was there. I had had a few shots of Crown after work... Everything I need to make trouble.

So; onto first impressions:

I havn't gotten too far into the game yet, but so far I'm really enjoying it. I like that it's taking it's time building up to the main story instead of just throwing me into it. I like games that give me a bit more history on the characters instead of the 'rag-tag underdog group of unlikely heroes save the earth..........NOW' scheme. Some characters have hinted at whats going on, but nothing definite. The fighting system is the first of it's kind I've personally seen in a decidedly JRPG, and I have to say I love it. It's a great changeup from the turn based systems normally found, and the battle menus are quite intuitive. Also there is a total lack of loading times, which is, in a word: beautiful. One thing I've noticed though - This game reminds me of Star Wars. It's uncanny. Lone orphan raised on a desert planet finds his way onto a ship and begins adventures on a galactic level. All we need are some lightsabers. To those who both are fellow nerds, and have played the game. When the 'opening movie' (after leaving the first town) plays, the first thing I thought was: "This is no cave." George Lucas is gonna sue somebody. o_o As I said, I'm not far, and I havn't even touched the main story, the graphics are exceptionally well done, and shows the PS2s full capabilities quite well. The voice acting is actually pretty good as well, aside from some lines that made me wince at their cornyness. "I'm going into SPACE!" Ugh.  The active conversation or whatever it is can get pretty repetitive, but I'm dealing with it for now - eventually I'll turn it off in the options menu though.

I *may* go for an all out review eventually. I've never actually written one. In fact; this is the first 'first impression' I've ever done as well. No promises. ;-)

I'm trying. I'm REALLY trying not to buy any new games until I've got my backlog beat. I have a filthy dirty habit of buying games and before I finish them, buying another game, then forgetting about the previous one. What I'm left with is a ton of half-way to mostly beaten games. I really want to pick up Rogue Galaxy and God of War 2 for my PS2, and I've come SO close to both of them the last couple of weeks. Seeing them in the store... mocking me from their place on the shelf.

So, my plan is to finish the games I currently have. Right now I'm working on Knights of the Old Republic. I beat the game twice actually a few years ago, but it's one of my favorites, and I rarely make use of the backwards compatibilty of my 360, so I figured what the hell. On a side note, the emulation for this game flat out SUCKS. The videos are choppy and a lot of the audio cuts in and out. I don't have a lot of Xbox games left from last gen, but so far this one has the most trouble.

I was going to play through Crackdown again, just because I was so close to finishing it when my 360 crapped out. I have to admit that I've become a bit of an achievement whore though. Playing back through my 360 games and not seeing that notification pop up kind of gets to me for some reason. Which is part of the reason I picked up an old xbox game. I never noticed before, and as I've said there is no way for me to reset my achievements short of cancelling my account and getting a new one at the sacrifice of my Gamertag. I'd really rather not do that. I'll just have to get over it.

Next on my list is DragonQuest VIII. I can't remember why exactly I put that game down - I was really enjoying it. I think I may have gotten distracted by Guitar Hero. Strange that I'd consider picking up DQ8 again right before Guitar Hero II hits the 360. I've been holding out for that one for a while, and it's definitely in my to buy list.....augh! So many games, so little time.

Not that I go out of my way to seek news on this guy. I had all but forgotten about him until this morning to be honest. However, I have GTA-IV on my tracked list, and when I see J.T.'s name anywhere on this site, it's almost guaranteed to make me laugh. There was a statement issued by our favorite lawyer to GamePolitics, the article I read on here didn't give the full statement, but quoted things from it along the lines of "...my time to strike back.." and "...I will destroy Take-Two!" Talk about a drama queen. We're the losers, and he's quoting Star Wars in his own legal propaganda. Awesome.

I cannot fathom how this man is still allowed to practice law. In fact, if you observe anything he says or does, it's barely what I'd call "law." He practices something more like "crazy" - and I will give him this: He is very good at crazy.

We get it Jack, you're the Empire, we're the Rebels. Just you wait until those Ewoks show up. Then we'll see who's the tough guy!

....riiiiiiiiighhhhht. :roll:

So as I was mindlessly killing... just about everything in Crackdown the the other day, my screen goes blank, and the 360 resets itself. As the disc starts to spin up, I hear this... noise. A noise that the 360 is NOT supposed to make. You know the one. That broken up grinding noise that might remind someone of an 18-wheeler down-shifting at top speed.

I got the tray open, and rescued my game disc and powered the system down. I waited a few minutes and turned it back on, and then there they were. Like the lowest circle of hell - taunting me. Mocking me with their blood red evil light. After about 10 or 15 minutes of cursing, and turning the system off and on, I finally managed to start making it into the dashboard. My XBL account couldn't sign in, but other than that I seemed to have most of the functionality back. It was only temporary, as after a few minutes I'd be kicked out again. In a last ditch effort to save my xbox from a 4 week excursion to an MS Tech bench, I formatted the hard drive.

It works fine now.

However I have now lost -ALL- my saved games. I thought hey, no big deal, I'll just play them again - it'll be fun to get the achievements back. Good times had by all.

Alas - there is NO WAY to reset the gamerscore, or achievements. I had never thought of them as a one shot deal... I assumed that for the sake of replayability you could at anytime delete them. I was actually kind of looking forward to resetting my gamerscore to zero and starting all over. Not that my score was that high to begin with, nothing I couldn't get back with one or two completed games. Plus alot of my score came from friends playing on my account, some titles I don't even own, nor have ever played, so I was glad to be able to go through my own games and get the points myself. Damn.

Having nothing else to do, I present you with a a snippet of a conversation I've just had with my best friend Geoff on aim about 20 minutes ago.

Geoff: damn...i got a conference call coming up
Geoff: maybe i will just go on mute and play some xbox?
Me: good call
Me: Those damn aliens on Gears are in need of some shooting I'll bet
Geoff: yeah they are
Geoff: but that means i am away from my computer
Geoff: or am i
Geoff: thankfully i have the laptop!
Me: technology, is there anything it can't do?
Geoff: my laundry
Me: also, blowjobs.
Geoff: good point
Me: but I'm confident that as we speak there is a group of nerds at a university somewhere working on that
Me: wow. can you imagine what that'd do to society? The day an overweight garbage man named vinny can sit at home on a friday night and bang Jessica Alba for 20 bucks an hour is going to make crack seem like cotton candy.
Me: let the anarchy begin.
Geoff: haha
Geoff: the future has much to give
Me: I predict a shortage of kleenex and lotion.

I have to say I  have really been feeling the RTS itch lately. It's been a very long time since I tested my mouse clicking skills. Too long. Way back, I remember talking with a friend on the phone as I typed 'cc' next to the C:\ prompt in dos. Anyone remember that? The original C&C was NOT a windows game. Oh nostalgia.

Anyways, the game would load up, and after about 10 minutes we'd finally get those damned modems to connect to each other. We had two landlines back in those days for the express purpose of one being dedicated entirely to the computer. This made for MANY very long head to head battle sessions in C&C, Red Alert, Warcraft, Warcraft II, Starcraft, Dungeon Keeper, and who knows how many other strategy games where we made threats at each other well into the wee hours of the morning.

My favorite had always been the C&C series, I stayed with it up to Red Alert, then I guess I got bored with the genre. Plus Westwood Studios had been bought up, and  the sheer magnitude of awesome carried with C&C kind of died with it. Now the long anticipated 'Tiberium Sun' is on the horizon and I for one am looking forward to seeing how my old strategies hold up with the far more advanced AI. In probably one of the best moves they could have made, they're going back to using actual movies within the game, something you rarely see anymore. No one better suited to the best remembered role in that original game than the original Kane himself.

I also want to pick up Supreme Commander. The game just LOOKS fun. Plus the strategy involved and the premise of the tech trees is intriguing. Unfortunately, my computer is likely incapable of running these games. I've upgraded it about as much as I can manage, I've shoehorned in the nvidia 7800GSoc 2 hard drives, maxed the ram, overclocked the video and the cpu, added a massive liquid cooling system, with internal radiator, and a series of fans to help it all not catch on fire. Alas, I'm pushing a solid 3.0ghz on processing power, and that just barely cuts it for Oblivion. Plus I've been putting off a new monitor (old CTS) which makes the graphics capabilities almost null.

I'm considering though just leaving it where it is, and instead switching to a laptop. Since laptops are quickly outmoded, and upgrading them outside of increasing their ram is pretty much impossible. I would want to get the nicest one I can find, without dropping 8 grand on an Alienware. So far, the best gaming laptop for the money I can find is the Dell XPS m-1710. I don't care about the blue ray drive, but starting from the base model, and maxing almost everything except ram (2gb instead of 4) with the 512mb Nvidia 7950, with their 7 to 10% off with a 3 or 4 year warranty, I can grab one for around 4300 and some change. Obviously financed.

To anyone who reads this, any suggestions? Is the Core 2 duo worth it? I know intel is working on, or already has the quad core, but not in laptop form yet. Any help is welcome. Dell is where I keep ending up at, Retail Stores don't have anything that can compare to it, the only way I can see to get better is Alienware, which practically doubles the price. No thanks.

....and yet I find so many.

It seems like I've been ranting a lot lately - and I'd like to say this post is going to be something new, but it's not - and I'm not prone to lies.

To all of you who boast about, or try to up your 'cool' factor by displaying or talking about the fact that you "Bought the Halo 3 demo with a free copy of Crackdown!" some of you going so far as to say you've not even bothered to play the game because all you want is Halo 3. "FTW." Shut up. If that is true - and I sincerely hope it's not - You're stupid. There's no other word for someone that would drop $50-$65 bucks on a FREE demo. That's like paying for a meal to get the garnish. You're not going to touch the food, and the garnish isn't even edible. Crackdown is a great game in it's own right, sure it's not quite as fleshed out as some other games of a similar type, but it's gameplay is fantastic, addictive fun. I don't have to write a review on it, since the same things have pretty much been stated a hundred times over and then some.

Maybe I'm just overstepping here - personally I couldn't care less about Halo. I don't see the reason for the hype, and I won't be making use the demo. It's just another shooter with slightly better graphics than the last version. The story isn't at all enthralling, the character(s) are shallow, and the gameplay is about as exciting as the original Wolfenstein was. Which back then, was actually pretty significant. You would think it'd go stale after a decade or two. With that in mind, I can't help but see the beta/demo whatever as anything more than a tacked on marketing ploy. Apparently a pretty good one too, since so many are out buying themselves a copy. (Of Halo)

Okay, seriously.... what is up with XboxLive and the mass of tools that use it? I've said before how I hate playing online games because I just don't like playing with people I don't personally know. The reason is because the majoity of people I end up playing with or against are all raging bags of hormones with no self control. Plus, I have a thing against people who sound out "pwned", "pwnt" or some other version of that stupid phrase.

On Saturday evening, I was at a party, we were all  around having a goodtime, enjoying some questionable beverages, and talking. As things wound down, as they inevitably do, my friends roomate thought it'd be a good time to play some Gears of War. Why not? I thought to myself.

Now, I bought GoW myself when it came out, but I grew bored with it pretty quickly, and forgot about it. Thus my skills are neither "l33t" nor "uberz". However I figured, it's just a game and, silly me, I wasn't taking it very seriously.

Within a few minutes, I was berrated with insults like I was the fat kid in gym class. I am not directly offended by any of this, mind you. I could care less what anyone thinks of me, especially not some cocky pre-teen whose balls havn't even dropped, and to make the judgement on my chracter based on a video game makes it count even less. Besides, I've had actual physical contact with real females. So I'll always have that over them.

What DOES offend me though is that this is what is expected from gamers nowadays. I am from the older generation of gamers, which I admit, has it's share of whining gashes, but for the most part this bratty, loudmouthed b.s. resonates from the youth. Their high pitched voices betray them everytime. Bit by bit, they are making the old political codgers right about gamers, because that is exactly how they're perceived. Angry, verbally stunted little kids with a Napoleanic Complex. I know it's a cliche to state "They're just games" but.... they ARE. If I can lose with dignity, then you can win with dignity, and vice versa. I know there are a few people out there that are nothing like the ones I'm bi*ching about on here, unfortunately, most of them ARE like this.

There's nothing wrong with a little trash talking, but keep it clever and witty. If you're not good at it, thats fine too, just enjoy yourself. That is the whole point, afterall. Dropping the F-Bomb and calling everyone a dumbass every 5 seconds is not only unoriginal, but it's also incredibly obnoxious.

So, quit it.

pwnt.