Hey everyone. Gosh, it feels like it's been so long since I was last on here. In truth, I've been here the whole time, reading your new blog posts, occasionally leaving comments, checking out the DS forum and the forums of my tracked games...you know, the typical visit to the site (well, that's how I roll at least). I just haven't written a new blog post in a few weeks. And there's a VERY good reason for that...but I won't put effort into explaining it here. It's not that I'm lazy, oh no. It's just that...something very traumatic happened to me the day after my last blog post and I haven't been able to write any kind of blog post online since. I wanted to on multiple occasions, but I just couldn't bring myself to actually go through with the action. The fact that I'm typing this now must mean that I'm ready to return to the world of blog posting, at least on a level that includes posting here on GS. If you'll have me, I'd love to return to the party.

Besides my infamous incident, a lot of other stuff has happened. For starters, my Boy Scout troop (the fourth of the four I'd been in over my seven years of Boy Scouting) dissolved. It is no more. Oddly enough, this makes me more happy than sad because the adult leadership around the time my younger brother was trying to get his Eagle project done was so horrible in general and to him that it drove my brother to drop out, weeks before his 18th birthday, not having attained Eagle but having been so close. So, for him, it was more like sweet justice for all the crap they put him through and for me, well, for me it didn't phase me at all. I've certainly never heard of a troop disbanding (oh wait, yes I have, haha), let alone one I used to be in. It would definitely have hit me harder had I actually formed a deep connection with the scouts and the troop. I never felt like I formed any kind of true connection with either of the last two troops I was a part of. So, I'm with my brother, considering this sweet justice and taking the opportunity to reminisce about the good times we had back while we were in our second troop.

In addition to that, this week is my last week Student Teaching. I'm done after this Wednesday. The kids have already decided to throw me going-away parties, complete with real cake (they've all assured me the cake is not part of some intricately orchestrated lie). It might be a tear jerker. I'm probably never going to see any of these kids again in my life, and I've really gotten to know some of them really well. But such is the way it goes. It was certainly fun while it lasted, and I learned way more than I thought I would, even though I was the teacher.

Graduation is May 31st. I've already got my cap and gown and diploma frame. I plan on spending the ten days between this Wednesday and Graduation day playing lots of Etrian Odyssey. I'm down to the sixth floor, and while not addicted, I am certainly enjoying my adventure.

Is anybody else going crazy over the number of quality DS releases coming this June? It's practically one a week for me. I pre-ordered Lego Indiana Jones, Etrian Odyssey II, and FFIV DS (yes, I know this is a July release) about half a month ago. I remain very interested in Soul Bubbles. So yeah, that's a new game a week for the first three weeks of June. Kinda crazy. But, with no school at that point, I think I'll be able to handle LIJ and SB in a single week each. It's EO2 that will take significantly longer. But at that point, I've got a month until the next game I want comes out, so I'm good.

Initially, I was very psyched about FFTA2, which comes out on June 24th I believe. But, I think I'm changing my mind about it. It doesn't seem to look any better or play any differently, and I'm not too keen on replaying FFTA. It was sufficient the first time around. With money being kinda tight, it's bad enough that so many bonafide personal hits are coming out in quick succession (something that has NEVER happened before in my fourteen years of gaming). I have to be especially certain that I want the games I'm buying. I need to REALLY be in love with them. The more I think about FFTA2, the less I think it still deserves a place in my wish list. Maybe I'll demote it to just being on my tracked list, hehe. What are your thoughts?

I know everyone these days is drooling over The World Ends With You and/or drooling over the recent news of the imminent Pokemon Platinum. In the former case, I can't understand why everyone loves it so much. But to each his own, cause I can't stand Jpop or angsty, emo protagonists (I do not consider Cloud and Squall to fall into this category, for the record). And I don't think my brain could handle two battles at once. I can't even handle the hardest songs on GH3's easy mode. As for the Pokemans, I do love Pokemon, but not as much as it seems everyone else does. I own Red, Gold, and Sapphire, and while it was better back in the R/B/G/S days, it's still a quality series. If only they'd throw the series into the realm of full 3D. I have always kinda wanted a Pokemon game for my DS collection, but never acted on it. Platinum's on the way now, but I'd much rather wait out for a Gold/Silver remake. I'd eat that up so fast...

Well, today was the day. The day that everyone was looking forward to. Everyone on GS, even quite a few of the students in my cl@sses at school. Today was the release of GTA IV. And while I don't own a PS3 or 360, I know how crazy the game is and I can only imagine how deep and immersive and loaded with content it is (Denis, pull off a crazy a** stunt for me, k?).

But that is not why I am writing this blog post. Oh no, I have something entirely unrelated to GTA IV to tell you all about, something just as immensely awesome as GTA IV (okay, maybe not as immensely awesome, but pretty close). You see, the cake is ALIVE.

Most of you remember a little game compilation called The Orange Box that came out last fall. It included a little game called Portal that quickly became a minor phenomenon and instantly made its way into gaming pop culture with five simple words that even a preschooler could say: "The cake is a lie." Well, the story I'm about to tell you revolves around that those five words, and no, I haven't created some lame Youtube video. Let's just get that presumption out of the way... As I said before, what I have to say is immensely awesome. Youtube videos are rarely that caliber of awesome, or awesome at all for that matter.

So it was around Christmas time, last year, and my younger brother Dom brought up how awesome it wouldd be if we could somehow make a shirt that incorporated the raspberry cake boss from Super Mario RPG (Bundt; remember him?) and the line "The cake is alive!", which is of course, a very obvious and incredibly hilarious play on the infamous line from Portal. We had a good laugh about it then, and then the idea kinda faded into obscurity, as all awesome ideas not immediately brought to life often do, only being brought up briefly a couple of times since then.

For those of you that don't know who the heck Bundt is or for those that don't remember, you encounter Bundt in the merry town of Marrymore, where you save Princess Toadstool from marrying a very ugly, short, and paranoid man named Booster. The chef iz preparing un cake for ze vedding (hehe), but little does he know that the cake has a life of its own. Quite literally, somehow, the cake is alive. Hence the awesome play on words and the incredibly witty, incredibly brilliant idea for a shirt.

But getting back to the story, let us fast forward to April 21. The school day had just ended, and Kenny (a guy from the AP Calc AB cl@ss), Dan (a guy from the AP Calc BC cl@ss), and a girl named Jessica who is their mutual friend walked into the cl@ssroom. As they did, Kenny shouted "the cake is a lie!" very loudly. That reminded me of Dom's shirt idea and I told them about it. They laughed (even though none of them had ever played SMRPG before (boo on them!)). And then, spontaneously, Mrs. Yeager, my co-op teacher, said simply, "cafepress.com". I'd never heard of the site before, but she said that you can create your own shirts on the site. Immediately, my heart began to race ecstatically and I just couldn't wait to get back to my dormroom to check out the site.

Well, I checked it out and it was surprisingly simple to actually make the shirt. There were tons of options to choose from regarding the actual kind of shirt I wanted to use. Unfortunately though, there was no way to type text directly onto either side of the shirt, although there was a way to upload pics that would show up on a chosen side. I knew I had to find a way to work around this minor obstacle. But before that, I needed to find two things that would make the shirt: a good font for the text and a decent pic of Bundt itself. I stumbled across a great (not just good, GREAT) pic of Bundt on Mariowiki, and soon after, I found the actual font from the SMRPG game itself. This was looking to be even better than either of us had ever hoped! With these two essential elements in hand, I headed on into Microsoft Paint (the crappiest, yet surprisingly among the most useful programs I possess) to create JPG's incorportating my newly-acquired pic and font. Once I had the front and back of the shirt all figured out, I uploaded the two pics (which were merely just two text boxes converted into JPG's) onto Cafepress and positioned everything as I wanted. Seeing the finished product, I was freaking out. It was better than Dom and I could have ever imagined. Heck, Dom wouldn't have even expected me to find the game's font. That was an amazingly clever extra touch. I got home and immediately texted Dom to get onto AIM. He eventually logged on and once he did, I showed both him and Josh (his roommate) the shirt design. They freaked out, too. It was perfectly awesome.

Dom gets the credit for the original idea. I get credit for the shirt's design. Collaborative brotherly effort, for the win. =D

I wonder if any of you have seen this before. There's a few more screenshots here. I hadn't even known this game existed until this morning. It supposedly comes out in June.

Looking at the screenshots, the very first thing I noticed was the art s t y l e. It looks gorgeous. I realized I was having the same reaction that I had back when early screenshots for Yoshi's Island were being released. Certainly not a bad parallel by any means. The game boasts 40 diverse levels over either five or eight different worlds (can't remember which it was). It's actually more of a puzzle game than a platforming game. All I know is that it's got my attention and almost unfortunately, it's gone onto my Tracking List, along with the rest of them.

I am going to be sooo poor after this year. Stupid good DS releases!!! :P

I just stumbled across a community forum topic on OCR about how the gaming industry today is nothing like it used to be, in terms of the quality of the games that are being released. We all know what I'm talking about. There are many games that come out these days, even those that are heavily publicized and hyped and highly rated, that people beat in three days and rarely look at again, unless for another eight hour run-through sometime down the road. Whatever happened to the games you could play for weeks or months that these days, people still love to come back to over and over again? Why can't developers make games like that anymore? Besides the reason that my brother and I just aren't home together enough and just don't have the time to set aside for console gaming, this is another big reason why I don't own a next-gen system. There's nothing really out there, in my opinion, that has lasting replayability. Sure, we didn't know back in the 90's that the games we hold dear to our hearts, like Super Mario World and Link to the Past and Donkey Kong Country 2 and Sonic 3 and whatnot, were going to be considered cl@ssics years later and still loved by millions, but they are. Will the games of today be remembered in the same way? I tend not to think so.

But anyway, getting back to that forum topic, one member wrote the following, pertaining to a personal story (not my own) about a guy and his interaction with a mom picking out games to rent at a Blockbuster for her kids:

"You wanna educate your kid in the proper paths of awesome, you pull out the SNES and let 'em cut their teeth on Super Mario World, Link to the Past, and Super Metroid. Then you bust out the Genesis and let 'em play Sonic so they understand why you won't rent Sonic Adventure 14 or whatever for them, because it's a rape of all that was once good with the world. Know your roots man.

All that's to say, if we all have to know things like the fact that Columbus discovered this rock in 1492, why don't we educate our kids in how awesome games used to be?"

I really couldn't say it better myself. What do you guys think though? I know many of you own Wiis and 360s and must feel like attacking me because I've kinda indirectly bashed your favorite recently released games, but this is how I feel and I'm just wondering, deep down, what you think.

So I've been listening to my DKC123 playlist on my iPod (that's its actual name) an awful lot lately and thought it'd be cool to pose a poll-like question to all of you. DKC123, as you may have already guessed, consists of the full soundtracks from DKC, DKC2, and DKC3. The DKC soundtrack was the first gaming soundtrack I ever cared to actually own, outside its existance in the corresponding game itself. So needless to say, these soundtracks are very near and dear to my heart. But I seem to be digressing. The poll-like question.

For those of you old enough to have played these three games back in the day, what are your top 3 most favorite songs out of all three games' soundtracks? You don't need to go picking one from each game, nor must you make sure you have at least two of the three games mentioned. I'm just curious to know what you guys think are the really great songs.

Now, I suppose that I should post my top 3, since I know some of you will be asking for it if I don't. The problem is: it is really hard for me to come up with even a top 10 from these soundtracks because I love all the tracks so freakin' much. But, for the sake of pacifying the masses, I'll write my current top 3, formed from the three songs I really had a craving for today.

1. Stickerbush Symphony - DKC2

2. Funky's Fugue - DKC

3. Gang-plank Galleon - DKC

P.S. Don't worry if you don't know the actual name of the song. It'd be perfectly acceptable for you to just write something like "The song for the level with all the lava and balloons - DKC2". Nobody would hate you. ;)

Breaks do things to me. They're always like going on weeklong adventures. Going into one, I never know how I'll come out. I can have plans, but even if those plans come to fruition, so much more happens that I could never have expected to happen beforehand.

Over the course of yesterday and today, I won two eBay auctions. In a few days, I will own both a new copy of Professor Layton and the Curious Village and a used copy of Etrian Odyssey (oh btw, that reminds me. I'm no longer planning on getting Nanostray 2 or Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword.). Did I think going into this break that I'd come out of it with two newly purchased DS games, let alone two DS games that I previously had absolutely no intention of buying? You bet your Brawl I didn't! But alas, it has come to pass and I can't wait. I'm going to love playing through Professor Layton again, and the first EO will give me the practice I need for when the second one comes out this June.

I guess that brings me to my next topic: tentative future game purchases. Things haven't exactly gone as I forsaw they would at the time I wrote my previous entry listing future purchases I'd make, but it happens. I will most definitely still be buying Lego Indiana Jones and Lego Batman, as well as FFIV DS and FFTA2, when they eventually come out. I'm on the fence about Mushroom Men, even though it seems more and more awesome with each new shred of news/media. And I'm about 80% certain I'll be making a trip to teh local Gamestop soon after Puzzle Quest: Galactrix comes out. That leaves The Force Unleashed, which I really want, but a purchase depends solely on how the DS version comes out, since I don't own any of the other systems. I would really like another Star Wars game, though, so here's hoping.

On one last note, do any of you by any chance know how to convert SPC files tinto MP3's? I know it's a stretch, but I'd really like to know. Because I have no idea.

Some of you who read my "5 things" post are wondering how the heck it is that I've almost died three times. Well, here are descriptions of those incidents, for your reading pleasure:

1. One time when I was three, my whole mom's side of the family was visiting at my grandparents' house. They have a pool and I was in it with my dad. My uncle was not in the pool, but was hanging out talking with my dad. All my cousins and my brother were drying up inside the house. I was laying on an inflated cellphone-shaped floating pool pad thing. I wanted it to move, so leaned over to paddle with my arms. I guess I leaned over too much and I fell in. With my eyes open, I was sinking to the bottom of the 4ft pool. I don't know why I didn't just come right up, but it took my dad to realize I'd disappeared to turn around and grab me and bring me above the water's surface. I was gravely traumatized of being in water from that point on, until my teen years.

2. I was at a pool party with my Cub Scout den. I was hanging out in the shallow area and not going into the deep water (because of fear caused by near death experience numero uno). One of my fellow patrol members motioned for me to come join them on the other side of the pool. They had all kinds of pool toys with them there and were having tons of fun. He told me it wasn't deep and that I was going to be perfectly okay. So I started to walk over. Well, you know those steep, slippery slopes that some pools have to go from shallow to deep really quick? Well, I slid down one and all of a sudden, I was drowning. It caught me completely off-guard. I was going under. The parents were present but not by the pool, really, so they missed all of this. My friend, however, did not. He immediately came to my rescue and carried me back to the shallow area. He apologized, and I forgave him...and then didn't go back in the pool again for the rest of the afternoon. And this didn't help relieve my fear of water any, needless to say.

3. I was about 12, I think. 12 or 13. And I was going hiking with my cousin and his dad (the same uncle from story #1) and a bunch of the other scouts and their dads from his scout troop. It was an awesome hike because we went onto highway roads and down an actual stream and up snowy mountainsides and through forests...it was just insane. Well, while in the snowy areas, there was one part where you really couldn't see how wide the trail was. I apparently misstepped and started to slide down this mountainside. It was really steep. It wasn't a cliff, but you could see the nearby lake and a town not far away from the mountain's base and I was about to find myself sliding really fast down towards all that. My cousin must have immediately sensed something was wrong because he spun around and grabbed me before I slid much at all. It felt like much longer than a split second to me. I really could have slid/fallen down, but he saved me. I don't know if I'd have died, but it was pretty f***ing scary regardless.

It's late so I'll make this short. I just beat Professor Layton and the Curious Village. I highly recommend it to any DS lover who even remotely enjoys intriguing stories and/or puzzles. It's very charming and satisfying and the story was just top-notch. Even though I had a strong inkling of what was going on when I was only halfway through the game, I still kept going to see if I was right. Man, how awesome was it to know that I was! But getting back to the point, I really think everyone should check this one out. There's already a sequel announced and I'm very excited about it.

I've rated the Professor.

1. I am an Eagle scout.

2. I've almost died at least three times (I say at least b/c I only remember three particular incidents).

3. I used to live in New Jersey (and loved it).

4. My favorite color is blue.

5. I played bass drum in my high school's drumline all four years and played cymbals in UD's drumline for two years.

Got tagged by zxv33

I choose to tag.... NeoJedi, theRHYMENOCEROS, minishdriveby, platyphyllum, and Rhen_Var.

I beat Mega Man ZX Advent tonight. I've got mixed reactions to the game, but overall I think it was a pleasant, enjoyable experience. I beat it on "Beginner's Mode", but I still found it to be rather challenging.

I also recently beat Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga. I beat the Story Mode back in January, but last week, I found everything in every level. I only have two score multipliers left to unlock and then I have everything unlocked. I'm at 98.3% completion. It was really fun.

And now for perhaps the most shocking, surprising personal gaming news to come in years. After the last couple of years avidly saying that I had no interest in getting a next gen system, my brother and I may be chipping in together to get a Wii. Maybe. There's a list of at least five games that are out already that if we had the system, I would get them. In this day of not having much time to play, this is still okay because we only own about eight games for the Gamecube...but we play them a lot. The only issue here is money. I have enough to pay half the total cost, or the whole bill, but that doesn't leave me with much because I technically don't have much to start with. We're too old for our parents to chip in toward our material purchases, so this is a big thing. I can't say for sure at this point whether or not we're actually going to go through with this, but I will say one thing: it's kind of a good thing that it's so hard to find Wiis these days. While we keep an ever-vigilant lookout, we'll have time to really think about whether or not it's truly worth it. If we come to decide it's not, then there'd be no harm done.

EDIT: For whatever reason, I mentioned that I was interested in five Wii games but did not list them so you guys would know what they were. Well, here they are (and I apologize for my stupidity...it was late):

1) Super Mario Galaxy

2) Super Smash Bros. Brawl

3) Warioware: Smooth Moves

4) Twilight Princess

5) Lego Star Wars: Complete Saga (I'd only get this if I suddenly came across additional monies)