I have officially given up on Suikoden III, it's really not a bad game, but I just don't like it's pacing. You go from some fun challanging battles to the game dropping you into a lv 10 area with a lv 1 character and having a fluffy bunny one shot your whole party... sure I could spend some time leveling up, but I shouldn't have to. The game should be designed in a way where it paces and flows smoothly.

I put in Sly 3 Honor Among Theives and just like the previous games before it I love the presentation, quirky characters and comic stealth elements. The first game is still my favorite and while this one is really good I don't think it will change my mind on that decision. The whole Sly Cooper series is an excellent example of what "charm" is in a video game.

I've been working on Suikoden III, it took me a few hours of playing to get over the fact it has no voice acting and no flashy cinematics but I'm really enjoying the old JRPG genre once again now that I've fallen back into the groove. How quickly you become jaded to the old way of playing.

I'm inspired to put some other old JRPGs I've never finished back into my Now Playing list. Starting with the Lufia games on the SNES and Lunar Eternal Blue on the PSX. I played through Silver Star Story on the SegaCD and the PSX remake but for some reason I've never made it through Eternal Blue. Perhaps I was just all Lunar-ed out when I first got it having just finished the remake.

On with collecting the 108 stars of destiny.

I finished up Twilight Princess last night. It was most excellent, but in the end I felt like I had played it before. It was a big homage to the older Zelda games, feeling most like a melding of Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time to me. I really enjoyed it but in the end it just made me feel like playing the Gamecube Zelda because that one actually tried to do something different. I only had to go to an online guide twice throughout the whole game, once in the sky palace and once again in Hyrule Castle. For the spoiler free version in Hyrule Castle, shoot the rope holding the suspicious looking picture with your bow and arrow, you don't do anything to the picture itself of the nail it is hanging from.

I'm going to go back in time and have the next game on my hit list be Suikoden III, I think I'll follow a spoiler free guide for this one because I have a lot of games I'd like to finish and the last thing I need to do is waste an evening of gaming running around lost.

Recently I've gotten a big classic gaming itch. I got my NES down from the attic and quickly finished Duck Tales and Contra, then played through Zelda on the Virtual Console.

I continue to play Valkyria Chronicles when I have a chance and I decided to start playing Twlight Princess on days I don't feel like a strategy game. For some reason I never really gave the game a chance until now and it's very awesome. I recently got a very high end pair of headphones and I've been gaming with them and the most impressive part of Twilight Princess is the audio. It's unreal how much detail they put into the sounds of that game.

So in my last blog I was working on Super Paper Mario, which I finished. It was pretty good but I still like the other entries in the series better... I dorked around with some Gamecube games after that, decided while Sphinx is pretty good, I just can't get over how he doesn't seem like part of the game world. The character movement is very bizarre and I decided I wasn't intrigued enough by it to want to complete it.

So I picked up Valkyria Chronicles and all I can say is wow... oh wait, I mean WOW!!!!!!!

Right now this would be my pick for game of the year 2008, it's so sad that it is selling horribly because it's one of the most finely crafted video games I've ever played. The art style sucks you right in, it looks fantastic at 720p and the characters are very memorable and the story is presented in a way that actually makes you feel a connection with the people in it.

On the portable side I downloaded Hot Shots Golf Open Tee from the PSN and loaded it to my memory stick on the PSP... I really like the idea of not having discs anymore and just downloading PSP games, more battery time, less loading time... you win all around. It's a really fun golf game but my all time favorite is still the N64 Mario Golf.

So I finished up Sly 2 quickly... those games aren't a big challange but they present themselves with such charm you can't help but love playing them.

I decided to pick up something that isn't quite so long and I decided on Super Paper Mario, I'm on Chapter 5 right now and I'm digging the game, although it's more of a Super Mario Bros. game than it is a Paper Mario game. So far the Gamecube release is still my favorite in the series and I miss the RPG elements. Not to say it's a bad game, it's totally awesome, it just seems like it should of been a new game series rather than the latest successor to the Paper Mario franchise. Once I finish up that game I'm going to head back to Gamecube land and try my hand at Pikmin 2 or Eternal Darkness... I'm still undecided.

I finished up Okami over the weekend. At some points it felt like it was getting a little too long but I'm glad I stuck with it and finished the game, as a total package it is amazing. Highly recommended to anyone that likes gaming.

Once that was finished I went back to the PS2 days and started up Jak 3... I'm not sure how I can describe it, but I'm not going to finish it after putting about 4 hours of play-time into it. It just doesn't really feel like an action adventure game, it seems more like a series of mini games (all of which or brutal in their expectations on the player to be absolutely perfect). I like the old school difficultly, but the game just isn't grabbing me and holding on, it just feels like Jak II all over again.

Once I made my decision on Jak 3 I loaded up my old save of Sly 2, (courtesy of the nifty PS2 USB memory card converter thing for PS3... $5 on Black Friday). Turns out I'm at 70% on that game, so I'm just going to spend a couple of nights finishing that off. After that I'll probably delve into a PC game.

I finally finished up Mario Galaxy getting all 121 power stars with both Mario and Luigi. Hooray, time to move on to something else!

I picked up Crisis Core for the PSP from Amazon when they had it on sale for $15, I only got to play it for about an hour but I like it so far. I'm not really a Final Fantasy VII zealot like most people but it's a solid game overall from what I've seen.

Since Mario Galaxy is now finally finished up I've gone back a few years and started Jak 3, I thoroughly enjoyed the first two games in the series and look forward to see it's conclusion.

Other than that I actually got a chance to play some Starcraft instead of just watching it like I always do over at gomtv.net, it would seem that watching a lot of pro Starcraft makes you a better player because my game has improved a lot since my last LAN party even though I haven't spent anytime at all practicing. I'm still approaching Starcraft 2 with cautious optimism, I hope they don't dumb it down like they just did with Wrath of the Lich King.

I've stopped playing WoW once again... I think it may be for good this time because the expansion recently came out and it did not entice me to play at all, so for now, I'm back to being a gamer.

Now that I have time for games beyond WoW I started and finished Bioshock. I really liked it and look forward to the sequel. Now that is finished I've picked up Okami for the Wii. I'm about 13 hours in and I dig it so far. I do find the sequences where you have to use the brush with Sorenso... or whatever his name is to be especially irritating and really just using the brush in general. Most of the time it works great but for unexplainable reasons it will just completely stop recognizing what you draw no matter how perfectly you do it.

I've also been chugging along in Mario Galaxy, due to WoW it had taken me about 1 year to collect 70 stars or so. Now I've gotten 120 stars with Mario and I'm up to 72 stars with Luigi right now, it only took me 3 sittings to get those 72 stars so hopefully I can finish it up soon and get 121 with each character and put another check mark on the list.

Once I finish Okami I think I'll try Resident Evil 4... or maybe go back and finish Eternal Sonata.... Street Fighter 2 HD Remix just came out too, I'm really looking forward to getting pwned online by people that play way too much Street Fighter.

I was on vacation all last week and I got to spend a lot of time with my PSP in the evenings after the little one was down for the night. I played Castlevania just long enough to unlock Symphony of the Night and it was all over from there. I played it every chance I got until I hit 200% completion. Once I finished up that I played through God of War a bit more and that is a really great game from what I've seen, I think I'm probably only about 30% through that game. Patapon is really fun as well, but I think I need to spend some time with the manual as I'm still not 100% sure what I'm supposed to be doing.

I forced myself to spend some time with Final Fantasy XII after I got home from vacation and I think I'm back into the swing of that game again. I'm still very early in the game, I just got taken onboard to Levithan and I'm apparently going to try to break Lady Ashe out of there. What I'm supposed to be doing is clear enough but there were some story scenes leading up to it that just confused me to no end. Perhaps it will all become clear as I continue forward.

In other news I started watching Dragonball Z from the Imperfect Cell saga, fun stuff, I never get bored of watching it.