Let's reminisce about the first time we played Street Fighter for a moment.

My inaugural game was Street Fighter II': Special Championship Edition for the Sega Genesis which I bought at a church sale when I was about 9 years old. I never heard of Street Fighter before and I just wanted a new cart for my Genesis. The label had a picture of Bison kicking Guile in the face, at the time it looked like it was an overbite-ridden army dude flying towards a blonde army dude with hairy forearms but I thought to myself: "this looks awesome".

I was oblivious to the fact that special moves existed and I just pressed fierce punch with M. Bison in every match because it looked cool. I also never noticed that there were other sets of punches and kicks until I played it with a six-button controller. Eventually I got bored of hitting one button constantly with Bison. That is until I learned how to perform specials, after throwing my first fireball with Ryu I got obsessed with learning everything I could about the hidden depth. Everyone seems to mispronounce at least one character's names and I was no different, I thought Guile's name was pronounced "Gew-Lee" and proceeded to call him that for about a couple of years.

I, regrettably, never liked going into arcades so I never heard any of the crazy rumors going around about secret characters and insane special moves (along with missing out on the long-gone arcade experience all together). I even recall there being a group argument with my elementary school friends about whether or not Blanka and Zangief were brothers because they had the same chest hair. Everything from learning the basics in Street Fighter II to sinking tons of hours into Alpha 3 and even blindly looking past the fact that the infamous live action movie has the merit of being absurdly horrible when I was younger, I've been inputting quarter circle motions into d-pads for what seems like an eternity now.

Last week I was forced into watching Role Models and it actually turned out to be a good movie but that's not the point. The point I'm trying to get at is about a certain scene in the movie. The scene in question is when 2 people are shown playing a game on the Xbox 360, it's great and all that they're playing a game but what bugs me is HOW they were playing it.

Anytime I see people playing games in movies/tv shows they're always-always wildly flailing their thumbs on the analog sticks and buttons but when the camera cuts back to the screen of the game, the characters are not doing anything else but running around.

I don't know, whenever I see that, it kinda ruins my immersion in the movie since I'm thinking to myself how fake it looks. Maybe I'm just nit-picking or maybe I'm the only person who doesn't flail my thumbs around on a control pad like a mad person but these actors can probably convincingly cry on cue but why can't they convincingly look like they're playing a game? Why am I putting so much thought into this...

• First Game Console Owned: Nintendo Entertainment System
• Console During 16-Bit Era: Sega Genesis
• Favorite Genre: Fighting
• Favorite Character: Travis Touchdown
• Favorite Series: Metal Gear Solid
• Game Spent Most Time Playing: Street Fighter Alpha 3 (Playstation)
• Favorite Childhood Game: Dr. Mario (NES)
• First Game Completed: Super Mario Bros. 2 (NES)
• First Game Hated: Home Alone 2 (NES)
• First Game You Thought You'd Like But Hated: Turok 2: Seeds of Evil (N64)
• Controller Throwing Inducing Moment: Fighting the last boss of Tekken 5's arcade mode Jinpaichi Mishima
• Toughest Boss Ever Taken On: Tidal Wave from Transformers (PS2)
• Worst Game Ever Played: Mortal Kombat: Special Forces (Playstation)
• Worst Movie Based On a Game: Bloodrayne
• Worst Game Based On a Movie: Bad Boys II
• Games You Like But Probably Shouldn't: Dragon Ball Z games
• Most Valued Game In Collection: Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (PS2)
• Favorite Piece Of Game Memorabilia: Guitar Hero II promotional guitar pick
• Game Most Looking Forward To: Super Mario Synchronized Swimming, you know it's probably going to be made soon.

In anticipation of Grand Theft Auto IV's release I decided that I should finally finish Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and today I finally finished the game. It's not really the fact that I finally finished, it's that it took me 3 years to finish it (I think it's kind of embarrassing to admit actually). That's right, it took the span of 3 whole years for me to finish a game, months after I first got my PS2 I started San Andreas and months after I got my PS3 I got around to finishing it. San Andreas is a great game but I somehow got sidetracked with other stuff and I've completed numerous other games during these 3 years. Looking back I guess I now can finally tell horrible games apart from ground breaking great games. What a day full of epiphanies it has been.

I'm not really sure what it is but I've come to a point where I just don't feel like playing any games anymore. Is it the overwhelming influx of games being released during this year and next or the increasing aggravation of the ever-growing fanboy population? I'm not sure what it is exactly. All I know is that my consoles have been powered off for an extended amount of time now and I have no real interest in playing any more games. This all could be a just some weird phase or a permanent state of mind but we'll see I guess.

So today turned out to be a really good day, in the wake of all the TGS news I went out and like blew away close to 400 dollars on games, accessories, and movies. The thing that made this whole thing oh so great was the little box waiting at my doorstep when I came back home, my "Red-Ringer" finally came back from repair (well in a way since they sent me a new 360) and that was the final sprinkles on this ice cream called a day. Oh, plus I bought Warhawk (I'll admit that I only wanted a Bluetooth headset) and well, I'm pretty horrible at it since I was killed 6 times and accidentally killed myself like 3 times. I'll just keep trying though....haha.

So yeah, I bought Heavenly Sword and Lair today while I was out eating lunch with friends, bringing my PS3 collection number to a staggering 4, and those are basically the last of my purchases for the PS3 this year (unless Tekken 6 comes out this year).

Although I haven't yet given freedom to Heavenly Sword from it's plastic shink wrap, I played Lair for like an hour today and there's 2 things that caught my attention.

1. The game straight up crashed while I went to the leaderboard screen....which you know, isn't a good thing.

2. Flying whales are totally awesome, in one of the missions there's a flying whale dropping soldiers off which brought a slight chuckle.

The game has an amazing soundtrack but it DOES INDEED have the flaws that everyone keeps talking about (I swore a couple of times trying to control my dragon), but yeah, dragons and flying whales are enough to keep me interested in the game.

That's all for now.

I'm going to talk about a bunch of things that crossed my mind lately in the video game universe.

- What's up with all these delays in the shipping dates of games lately? It seems like everytime I load up a gaming website, there's news of a game being delayed a week or being delayed until next year. I don't know, weren't delays in shipping dates a rare thing in the past?

- Why is everyone complaining about the length of games? Once people read that Heavenly Sword took about 7 hours to finish, they quickly picked up their pitchforks and torches while telling others that they will not be playing the game now since it's "short" (although I'm not really hearing the same amount of complaining over Stranglehold's finish time). Is there really something wrong with playing a 7 hour game? I personally like games like that since I usually loose interest half way into a 25 hour game. Ofcourse not all games will be massive 40 hour adventures but if all games took 25-30 hours to complete, I'd be too intimidated to even jam the disc into my console.

- Finally, where's my crimson Xbox 360? I've sent it in like a month and a bit ago to get repaired but still have yet to see it arrive at my doorstep. I've got a bunch of 360 and original Xbox games to play but no console to play them on. All I really do now is play PS2 games/Super Rub-a-Dub on my PS3 and a few virtual console/mini games on the Wii. There's a huge empty (relatively cool) gap in between where my Playstation 3 and my Nintendo Wii stand right now.

That's all for now, I'll just go stare blankly at my copy of Stranglehold untill I fall asleep.

A week after my purchase of my Playstation 3, my Xbox 360 decided to die, not even a year after I bought it.

First came freezing and crashing while playing games or watching videos then finally it flashed me the dreaded "3 lights of death".

Now all I have is a white paper weight that glows red, hopefully I'll be able to send it in for repairs and a new heat sink.

This is all going to be a pain in myside, from calling in to shipping to the horrible wait that comes after.

Now all I have is my PS3 and Wii, the great 3 demoted back to a meager 2.

Almost a year previous I had purchased an Xbox 360.

A couple of weeks ago I had purchased a Nintendo Wii.

Today I have finally purchased a Playstation 3.

The tri-force of next-gen is complete so-to-say.

Now I have 3 more machines in my living room sucking the electricity out of my house.

But I'm glad.