Most of the times, whenever you try a new food, or go to a new restaurant or meet this new person you ask a friend what do they think about it, is the food great? does the restaurant have a nice vibe? is this new person interesting? Depending on their opinion you add that to your judgement and decide what to do. It does not matter if the review is good or bad as long as you can trust it, it works for you.

Game reviewing is pretty much the same thing, you look at a video from someone else's experience playing the game and based on that you decided wether to buy it or to put your money into something else or if it's even worth playing. A decent review takes in account the good and the bad things in a game objectively, gives credit when credit is due and mentions the game's flaws or improvements it could have made. Sounds pretty simple and yet the reviewing process can vary a lot from reviewer to reviewer.

Haven't you ever wondered why sometimes a game gets a 9 here a 6 there and a 10 in another place? One could easily blame the site, "meh they're delusional how did they gave it a 6 the game is really good jabba jabba" well it's not the site or the reviewer, it's the experience, the main reason we like or dislike games is the emotions it makes us feel while playing them, feeling that on games from the same publisher (Metal Gear, Mario, Halo) makes us defend the series and feeling that on similar games makes us defend the genre, we stand up when someone criticizes them, but the truth is we're not defending the series or the genre or the publishers we're defending the experience, we defend the joy we felt while playing them.

Think about two people who play Metal Gear, one has so much fun trying to be sneaky and clearing missions without being detected replays the levels several times to get familiar with the enemy, doesn't mind getting caught every now and then he sees every mistake as a lesson and lives the story as muchas snake, he has such an amazing experience playing the game that it easily makes it into his favorites list, in fact he probably plans to make a playthrough in a cardboard box. The other one keeps getting caught starts to get frustrated dislikes all the silent secret agent stuff and prefers to go all out gunning people and keeps losing, doesn't even finish the game and sets it aside puts it below a stash of games for it to rust in dust.

Then ask each of them to write a review, the first one will say how inmersive the game is, he'll probably compliment the story the creators the gameplay the publishers the guy that made coffee at kojima productions hideo kojima himself, encouraging everyone to play the game to feel the same joy he felt. The other one will say how bad the game was, he'll butcher the gameplay destroy the story, trash talk the series and the genre itself, discouraging everyone in ording to prevent them for playing it so they can avoid the torture he just endured. One does not have to be a genius to realize that once the score comes into the equation these 2 guys will probably give completely different scores but that's not based on the game itself it's based on the experience they had. Now, is metal gear a good or bad game? See for yourself :P

Anyone can set up a video camera take some gameplay footage and talk about the game, but reviewing is more than that, is trying to share your experience of the game to the rest of the world is trying to explain the way the game made you "feel" sure you do it by talking about technical things like the gameplay, graphics, sound, story but they're all affected by the emotion produced by the game, a reviewer that is 100% objective has no enjoyment is just a machine that clears a game gives a score and moves on to the next one. It kills the purpose of gaming.

Now the problem comes in when we let reviews affect our judgement, we decide the fate of a game based on the score it got, I see this everyday at the boards. The game got a 6? Not good enough for me, this site gave it a 4.5 this one a 6.3 that one a 3.2 while there is a tendency at the end of the day it is you who should decide not a score, not the experience of someone else but yours.

When you let a review influence your judgement is when you lose sight of the value of your own experience as a gamer

"Because to influence a person is to give him ones own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone elses music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him"

Quote from: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Reviews should be a guide, not a veredict. It's not about the quality of the camera or the footage or the fancy words we use it's about sharing an opinion, an opinon of a friend, one that we can trust. At the end of the day it is you and only you who should decide what to do, to have your own experience to share it with the rest of the world

Wow it's been almost 6 months since my last blog entry, well I certainly need to change that.

It's amazing how can you get caught in life so much that you lose track of most things. College sucks most of my life, this past semester was awful. Lemme share the story

Ok so the semester started on march and ended this friday, my god was it hard, I had to take 8 courses my schedule was usually from 8 to 1 most of the days, one would think "well you get out at 1 so you can have the rest of the day for yourself" (Yeah right) I had to study a lot after that.

On a regular day I took my bus home at 9:00 pm I remember one day me and my friends got kicked out because it was way past closing time in the campus around 11:30 pm. I had like 0 time for gaming whenever I could I would grab my psp and do some on the go gaming but still it wasn't enough, eventually my time it gamespot got reduced from an hour to mere minutes of me using someone else's cellphone to check the forums and check everything was in order I missed A LOT of the gaming industry news, missed E3, comic con and many other stuff, In fact the other day I was at the campus cafeteria and I overheard two people talking:

"Oh you heard bout this new Zelda for the wii u?"

"Yeah it's pretty cool they're remaking majora's mask, oh and that RE6 looks pretty good too, looks like a movie it kinda lost its survival horror theme, now it looks like an episode of 24"

"Yeah totally, I remember the days where I would play resident evil on my playstation with my brother I had to keep him close so I didn't get scared, it's like everything is changing now, they even released this new pokemon black2 game"

That's when I chimmed in

"They're releasing a new Zelda?! And resident evil is already on 6 also there's gonna be a new pokemon game?! What? Who? Where? When? :o"

They took their android cellphones to show me some news and then I knew I was so behind everyone.

Right after I got out of the semester I went to get some beer with friends who haven't seen me in a long time and it was nice worrying about nothing for a change, yesterday in fact I played my first game in a looong time, Inversion I think it's called reminds me of gears of war it was pretty decent and I sucked big time at it :lol:

This semester promises to be an easier one (less time consuming) I plan to manage my time properly this time around. As for GS things have changed a lot while I was gone, some users left some have returned, I don't even remember how to moderate properly but I think I'll start slow. It's so good to be back hopefully some of you guys still remember me!

Until next time

See ya! :P

And I needed an excuse to post a blog :P

Sup everyone, been a while since I wrote something here, it's just that I see the "Post blog" button and the thought of having to type a couple of pargraphs makes me feel soo lazy.

I've been doing great, good on college, good on life been playing a lot of RPGs lately (at the same time) It's kinda shocking the amount of leveling up you gotta do on an RPG.

Say I start with Final Fantasy V, I'm fighting against some boss called Atomos or something, I'm too weak, level up my party for 5 levels and beat him I decide to put something else, Final Fantasy I fighting against Tiamat, I have to level up a little and then beat it, I decide to try a different thing, Disgaea (the max level is 9999 so yeah I gotta do a lot of power leveling there). I've been wanting to get back to Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops but I just can't find where the rations are!! Whenever I try a mission Snake is hungry, his comrades are hungry and soldiers don't drop enough rations to feed all of them so I've avoided that game for a while.

After a few months of not having a cellphone my dad made a new contract and they gave him a new phone, he gave me his old blackberry 8520 for me to use, which is quite the improvement from my old nokia phone from 2007. I'm happy with it, it may not be the newest stuff out there but if it survived 18 months with my dad as the owner...it'll probably survive a nuclear explosion so the thing is sturdy as hell.

Finally I saw the Grammys the other day, I was really happy that the foo fighters got 6 nominations and they won 5 of them (imagine! each band member took home a grammy lol ) they only lost to Adele who won all 6/6 grammys and even Dave Grohl said before the ceremony that Adele has done an amazing job and she totally deserves to win. Still 5 Grammys is a pretty outstanding feat :o

Best Rock Performance

Best Rock Album

Best Long Form Music Video

Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance

Best Rock Song

Album of the Year (Nominated)

And I'm really happy, they did that record in Dave's Garage, they didn't use any computers they used old tape machines that while offering a pretty good quality has no room for editing so what you play is what you get, if you mess up there's no fixing it, even with that though they managed to produce an amazing album. I'm just gonna leave this here. This is what Dave said in his winning speech and it's very true

Best Part is....he basically insulted half of the people in that room :lol:

Until Next Time

See ya!

Merry Christmas to you all!

I hope you have the best of times with your family and that you all get what you wanted.

Have fun everyone!

Got kind of emotional during Toy Story 3?

I just saw it the other day and well the movie was great, it caught my attention right from the beggining because, it was my childhood, I remember being just like Andy Back in the day, same age, playing with toys, creating adventures on your own bedroom, having such a great imagination at some point in life I kinda lost that feeling so when I saw Andy playing with them one last time I felt a bit nostalgic, and a little sad too, (I didn't want to cry my little nephews were with me so I had to be all tough :P) but still, it was a great movie.

I heard they were planning on making Toy Story 4 but I think they should just leave it there, the ending was perfect no need to ruin that with a sequel then again, they can always make one when my generation is all grown up and Andy has a kid or something.

Best part of the movie? Ken hands down, he's so far in the closet he's reaching Narnia :lol:

Until Next Time

See ya!

Waiting for final grades, I finished my final exams last week and now I have to wait for the teachers to put the grades online, it could be like any other wait, but the suspense is killing me!! happens everytime and when one teacher from that one subject you had trouble during the semester takes longer than usual to upload the grade then it just makes it worse.

I'm even having dreams of the grades! People please just upload the goddamn thing already! :x

Anyway I just had to rant about that :P

Until Next Time

See ya!

For the past 3 days I've been trying to shut down my laptop and it just won't budge, I let it run out of battery, I removed the battery and nothing, right now I'm leaving it at sleep mode everytime. I've considered hard shutdown you know like, pressing the power button for a few seconds but I've heard horror stories from people who did that, I've also considered restoring the system to a week ago where it was fine but I don't know, I'm just guessing now.

Anyone experienced something like that? I could use some suggestions :(

(Yeah I had to find an excuse to write a blog after all this time)

Until Next Time

See ya!

Finally, after two weeks waiting my new psp is here, well actually my first one.It's a green 3000 psp from the metal gear solid pack.

A couple of weeks ago I was planning on getting a psp but I didn't know which one to choose, I couldn't afford a new one (ebay and amazon had some really sky high prices for a new one) I wanted something cheap and good looking. Ebay provided more real photos (instead of using stocks) and I decided to shop there. For days I kept window shopping until I saw it. A white psp 2000 with the game, a memory card, usb cable and pouch. I decided to buy it.

Since I don't have a paypal account or credit card there is a company here that does the buying for you for a small fee (as long as you bring the money) and since most people don't ship outside US it helps too. Anyway I bought the thing went home and to wait for the confirmation email that the transaction was done. Seems that, since it was a saturday the guys decided to close early and buy my thing til monday, my surprise was that on Monday I got the email that said "the item was not in the page at the moment of the payment". Now of course it wasn't on the page you ***** you were lazy and decided to wait til Monday!!!

Anyway, they told me to go the next day and bring another item URL so that they could buy it, I decided to gather all the psp's that caught my attention starting for the green one.

The deal seemed pretty solid, PSP green, used, slight marks of use, comes with battery and charger. I was a little sad that it had no memory but I just wanted to get it over with. They made the payment and I waited my two weeks.

Today I decide to go and pick it up, I didn't expect the original packaging or a new psp I mean it was used at least it should show some signs. I was in a rush so I checked it briefly while I was at the company's office, it came in a regular box, well protected and no visible scratches on the back! "Jackpot!" I thought.

I was so excited to play thsi thing when I got home so I went to an electronics store and bought a memory for it, a 2GB one, 22 bucks for that with pain in my heart, I bought it, as well as some new headphones.

When I got home and I show my sister the psp she tells me, oh is so pretty when she looked at the back side, then I went to the kitchen to grab something and she says "EWWWW what is that??" I thought it was just some sticker the seller had or something, not it was not.

You see, when people say it contains scratches due to use or it's been used only one time when I was at camp then I left it on a drawer or, the system has a few scratches barely noticeable, you expect one or two few scratches.....not a ****ing huuge scar across the screen. Well I may be exagerating but the thing has a slight scratch on the screen it's noticeable but not enough that it interfers with the gameplay. I guess it's what I get for buying a used one.

That's not the worst part though, when I opened it to insert my new sandisk memory card of 22bucks I see one thing that literally made me scream F***!!!!! (like that meme face). It had a "SONY" 4GB memory card on it. And I had just opened my "sandisk" memory card with 0 possibility of returning it. Damn! 22 bucks wasted there :cry:

Well I'm off to play the new psp, I'm thinking on buying a new green cover to replace the scratched screen but I don't know I'll wait and see how I feel about that scratch

Until Next Time

See ya!

Trolls really trolled the Greatest Game Sidekick.:lol:

They killed Midna, Zero, Navi, Companion Cube as soon as this whole thing started, but I'll never forget how Sephiroth was trolled out of the competition on round one back in last year's contest......oh the reactions!!

I can see the Semifinal bracket now and it has two sides, on one side the troll's hard work "Einstein and Launchpad Mcquak" since tails is pretty much dead and on the other side "Otacon and Dogmeat" the only real poll there. I voted for Otacon I can see him going to the finals but my hopes of him winning are next to none.

Don't get me wrong I'm not mad about the trolls "ruining" the competition, it actually makes it more interesting, seriously! if trolls weren't there we all know Luigi would probably win. It adds a little twist to the whole thing and besides, if fans were so loyal to their characters they would all come and vote for their sidekick to keep them from losing.

There is one thing though, GS is the one that benefits from this whole thing at the very end, this whole competition's purpose is to increase the activity on the site and possibly atract new members. More activity = more add views = more money. In the end the trolls are being trolled by CBS.

I just can't picture Chris Watters in an episode of On the Spot saying "So the Greatest game Sidekick has ended and Launchpad Mcquak has won" I hope it doesn't end that way. I plan on voting for whoever is in the finals against Launchpad/Einstein. Who are you rooting for? the troll side or the fan side??

Until Next Time

See ya!

//

Anyway here it is