I currently have a 1.5 hour commute to work each day, each way, by Metro and bus. That's 3 hours of travel time per weekday. And now that I have a PSP, it also mean 3 hours of game time per day! Awesome! Wasted time suddenly becomes game time... sure, many may think game time IS wasted time, but at least it's FUN wasted time!

Tekken: DR continues to be totally awesome. I like Lili and Dragunov. The Dojo Mode was a much-needed new feature. Good riddance to The Devil Within. And Tekken Bowl cracks me up.

I'm currently climbing my way through Dojo Mode with 1) my Iron Chef (P1) and Bruce Lee-clone (P2) Marshall Law, and 2) my Atabaque and Pandeiro carrying cordao-de-ouro (P1) and Super Afro/Sexy Goatee sporting (P2) Eddy Gordo. I've got my sights on using Asuka Kazama next.

Just picked up Street Fighter Alpha 3 Max and Darkstalkers: Chaos Tower for the PSP. Can't wait for Guilty Gear next... or PaRappa the Rapper.

For many reasons, but mostly due to both the frustration of not being able to easily get games for my PS2 in the UK because it's from North America and the frustration of the PS3 being so prohibitively expensive, I bought a PSP today. My first handheld console. With Tekken: DR.

It is awesome.

It looks like Tekken DR has either removed or changed every last thing about Tekken 5 that drove me crazy. Again, it is awesome.

Now, if only they would make a VF game for PSP. Why not Final Tuned? :D

This morning, I got Lau to Champion rank on Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution. It took me 638 matches (630 wins/8 losses) to do it. Ugh. It was fun, but I feel like someone who has indulged in too much junk food in one sitting--the sweetness has changed to mild nausea and discomfort. I need to take a break from games (for at least a couple of hours). I know, I'll spend time on GameSpot! ;)

Beating VF4:E with Lau made me think of two things in particular:

1) The person on the VF forum who mentioned getting all 15 characters to Champion rank in VF4:E has some great perseverance! If it takes about 600 matches to get a character to Champion (and I was trying to rank Lau up as fast as possible), then it would take over 9000 matches to get all 15 characters to Champion! (!!!)

2) The increasing number of characters available in the increasing number of fighting games out there is making it less and less possible to learn how to use each of those characters to any degree of proficiency. I remember back in the day of Street Fighter II, I learned to use each of the eight fighters pretty well. But slowly, the number of games and characters, and the fighting system complexity have built up to the point that I've lost the ability to use all characters well. With my top three fighting games alone -- VF4:E (15 characters), Tekken 5 (32 characters), and Soul Calibur 3 (25 standard + 17 bonus characters) -- that's almost 90 different characters to learn how to use! (I'm ignoring the fact that I also own Marvel vs. Capcom 2...) It's amazing and overwhelming to think of how rapidly games expand and develop.

A couple of months ago, I came across someone on a Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution forum who revealed that she or he had raised all 15 characters to the rank of Champion. I was very impressed as I had only one Champion so far, Lei Fei (although my Lei Fei was a Champion's Champion, since I got all the badges, and had a 100% completion rate for all of the arcades in Quest Mode :)).

Inspired by this GameSpot poster, and by my relatively recent appointment as officer on the Virtua Fighter Union, I've been playing VF4:E, trying to get more characters up the ranks to Champion. Right now, I am playing with Lau, and he's recently been promoted to Sentinel. Man, it's slow going! He's fought over 400 matches already... How in the world did that other player have the patience to do this 15 times?!

I've named my Lau: Iron Chef, and I've acquired most of his chef items: the Chef's hat, the wok, and the ladle. I'm trying to acquire the Chinese Chef's Knife. Next, I'm thinking of using either Goh or Pai... or both on rotation. :)

After 47 hrs. 9 mins. and 23 secs. of gameplay since Christmas, I have finally beaten Okami.

My results:

0 deaths +

461 monsters defeated

4246660 yen collected +

224 demon fangs collected

5405 praise earned +

The ones with + at the end were given a top rating by the game, and so unlocked some of the game's unlockables. Looks like I might have to go back, fight more monsters, collect more demon fangs, and beat the game again to unlock the rest.

I can't believe that a single (non-3D fighting) game has taken me so long to play through. But every minute of it was worth it.

Just a quick entry. Another thing I've enjoyed about Okami: On occasion you encounter people who want to compete against you, usually in the form of a race. When you defeat these people, rather than get angry at you or feel ashamed, the characters thank you for the competition and say that it has inspired them to improve. Now here's a lesson that many of us can learn.

Okami is a game that continues to thrill me not only in the beauty of its scenery, but also in the beauty of its promotion of virtue.

Now, if only Issun would be a bit more respectful when talking to and about women... :|

I received Okami for Christmas, and I have been playing it with increasing interest and appreciation for over a month now (having clocked a total of 24 hours of game time so far--unlike some members on GameSpot, the amount of time I actually spend playing games is really quite modest). What I find so noteworthy about this game is how much satisfaction can be derived from doing good and charitable things. The game's concept of praise, which can be used to enhance Amaterasu's strength, is inspired.

I like particularly how the game goes beyond the simple "good deeds" of killing monsters, and includes deeds that are actually creative, life-giving, and life-affirming. Reviving dead trees and feeding animals strengthen Amaterasu more than does slaying demons and exorcising evil spirits.

I am not completely against violence in video games. Martial arts fighters such as Virtua Fighter, Tekken, and Soul Calibur are among my favourite games. I just find Okami such a breath of fresh air in an arena of gaming increasing populated by games where you play anti-heroes rewarded for committing murder, extracting gore, and meeting destruction only with more destruction.

I sincerely hope that Okami is not the end of the attempts to develop games that promote ideas of virtue (again, beyond the virtues of courage and so forth associated with slaying monsters or taking a stand), and I hope that the gaming community remains as open, if not more so, to games that promote creation as to games that solely promote destruction.

The title doesn't refer to an actual rusted switch. It refers to how rusty I feel switching over to play Tekken 5 for the first time in five months, after playing SC3 almost incessantly. I felt like I had started completely over with the game. Because of SC3's 8-way run, I felt like I couldn't sidestep in Tekken. Because of using a block button for 5 months, I keep forgetting to press back to block in Tekken. Because of the smooth movement and ultra-fast response time in SC3, I feel so slow and clunky and choppy in Tekken 5.

I also tried VF4: Evolution, and I had the same rusty feeling.

Man. I think I like SC3 way better than Tekken 5. In theory, I like the idea of an open-hand fighter better than a weapons fighter, but SC3 is just so smooth. I wonder if the 8-way run would work in an open-hand fighter. I know that limbs don't have the reach of weapons, and it would be tricky to have horizontal techniques to stop the 8-way run, but... I just like the freedom of movement in SC3.

Last entry, I was going on about the details in SC2 that I like better than SC3. In SC3, I unlocked all the artwork from Valeria's shop, and I noticed that the SC3 characters' costumes looked a lot better in the drawings that they do in the actual game. I don't know what it is that gets lost in the conversion, but it seems to make a difference.

I started playing Tekken 5 once again with the idea of buying all the items for all the characters, but abandoned the idea within minutes for two reasons:

1) It takes so long get gold in Tekken 5, after beating the game each character and beating the Devil Within, that it just isn't worth the time investment.

2) The items and color changes in T5 just don't seem to add anything to the characters. I don't like the way the items look. The create a character in SC3 has tons more choices. Even the edit feature in VF4:E is much better done. Does VF5 have an edit feature, I wonder? I saw on the Japanese VF5 website, that each character has 4 costumes. Does this replace the edit feature?

So, I've opened my fighting game universe from just SC3, back to SC3, T5, and VF4:E. We'll see how quickly I start itching for a new game. I have Fable: The Lost Chapters on my PC, and I haven't started it yet. We'll see.

So, I've unlocked all of the Ancients in SC3, and I think it was more work than it was worth. The Ancients as a group of weapons of similar colour and design features all wielded by Olcadan, is a cool idea. The Ancients as a set of similar looking weapons without any special abilities use by each of the other SC3 characters seems a bit boring. But, it's done. They're unlocked, and I've got almost everything unlocked in the game, but I still have to finish buying out Valeria's store, and I still have two hard challenges to get gold on.

Blah, blah, blah.

The SC3 forum on GameSpot does a lot of comparing between SC2 and SC3 versions of characters. From the sounds of it, all the SC3 characters have been changed for the worse. They're been weakened, or given cheap moves... Is this really the case? I don't know.

But I find comparison between versions of games fascinating. Especially fighting games. Because, once you've got something good going, you want to keep it going through future versions of the game. Yet, at the same time, you don't want games to become stagnant. You still want room for innovation and creativity.

SC2 was the first SC series game I owned, and I was a bit upset at first by the significant changes in character moves in SC3, particularly Kilik, my favourite SC2 character (in SC3, I am currently without a favourite character, although I lean to Xianghua and Astaroth the most, but for the wrong reason: strong anti-AI moves). Over time, I've grudgingly come to accept the changes to the characters, but only just. Sometimes I wish they were much more SC2.

There are several things I preferred about SC2 over SC3. SC2 just seemed more polished. There were fewer instances of parts of characters going through other parts of characters (e.g. armor poking through capes, limbs cutting through shields, etc.). I preferred the VS. screen in SC2 better, where you would have a bust of each character, facing one another, instead of the full-body shots in SC3. The voices in SC2 were less irritating than in SC3. I've taken to changing the language in SC3 to Japanese so that I can't understand the inane non-sequiturs the characters are spouting. Although I find some of the new costumes to be quite neat ideas, I find they have really changed the flavour of some characters for the worse. I really dislike Nightmare's costumes in SC3. Cervantes's and Ivy's 2nd costumes I don't like. Raphael looks silly. Etc. Again, SC2 came across as smoother, more polished, more unified.

But I do commend SC3 for its innovations. I'm also glad that Necrid and Charade were removed. I didn't like either of those two characters. I like SC3's full roster, and I really like Olcadan and the other newcomers.

Of all the Weapons Masters, which has been the best so far?: Inferno, Edge Master, Charade, Olcadan. Have there been any others?

Want to write more, but have stuff to do. Until next time.

I'm still in the process of unlocking the Ancients, and it's a long, slow process. I tried doing it by beating Olcadan in ToS with each character but, to be honest and expose my gaming ego to the net, I kept getting beaten and started running out of patience. So, now I'm taking the alternate, less impressive and interesting route: taking each character through the tutorial mode to unlock their respective Ancients. I do feel I kind of gave up on ToS (and the chance to make gold while I was unlocking Ancients), but after failing to get to or beat Olcadan six times in a row with Seong Mina, I couldn't continue.

I have 10 more Ancients to unlock, then two more hard challenges to get gold on and then, maybe, after almost five months of playing nothing but SC3, I can play something different (like Tekken 5 or Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution).