Hey everyone. Hope your Halloween was awesome. I didn't dress up myself (though I did have plans to dress up as Indiana Jones), but I did have a friend who dressed up as a gecko and gave out candy to guys and girls goin to cla$$. And then there was my roommate, who wore a SWAT vest while walking around armed with an unloaded Nerf gun, haha.

Is anyone excited else about the release of Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga next week? At this point, I'm more sure than not that I will be buying the DS version next week. It all rides on the reviews. I don't want to blow $35 on a glitchy game. I hope it has all those cutscenes that I've been seeing so much of from the console versions. That's some funny stuff! And I'm particularly excited about the character customization. I'm going to make a four-armed Ewok using Grievous' torso and probably also Darth Vader in jedi garb. Should be very good times! XD

Besides that, I must tell you all about my current mission. I'm on a mission to obtain a copy of Advance Wars Dual Strike. For about a month now, I've been hearing about this game from my brother's best friend. And even though there's a sequel tentatively coming out in January, I feel I must get the first one first. So that's what I'm after atm. I've been scouring the internet for used copies at the cheapest price possible, and it definitely hasn't been an easy quest. But if what my brother's friend has told me is true, this will all be well worth it when I'm playing the game.

EDIT (11.02 - 5:43pm): I have acquired a copy of AWDS, thanks to my local Gamestop. They had only one copy on their shelves, and I grabbed it. Mwhahahahahahahammmmmmmmm :P

I couldn't think of anything else to write and since it's been a while since my last post, I was like "what a perfect time to post this!" So here's my Christmas list. It's not big, by any means, and I'm actually quite happy with it. I mean, it's a quality list. There are no items on it that I feel I'd come to regret asking for down the road. It's the same size as my list was last year. These days (since I've been in college), I've enjoyed having them be small because it means that with two sides of family worth of presents, if I don't get money, I'll be getting either something that was off my list or something I wasn't expecting. And if there's anything more fun to get than something you asked for, it's something awesome that you weren't expecting to get.

And now, without further adue, my list. :D

• Mega Man ZX Advent
• Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings
• Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass

I've seen plenty of topics in the DS forum page about "What games do you want to see on the DS?" I know, because I've posted in practically all of them. I just like to. It's fun to dream, to hope, to wish. So below is my list of games I wish would be announced for the DS. Feel free to comment, adding a list of your own.

1. a 2D Metroid sidescroller
2. Riven DS
3. a fully 3D Pokemon game
4. Golden Sun 3
5. Donkey Kong Country 4

So I uhh, just beat Jungle Climber. I feel so accomplished. And that's a huge thing in and of itself. Because when I beat Sonic Rush Adventure, there wasn't a sense of accomplishment. It was more just a feeling of "yay, I beat the game," instead of "Alright! Booyah! I beat the game, WOOT! *Does DK hand clasp celebratory thing from the end of DKC*" The latter is how I felt just now. I'm still kind of elated. You might be wondering why there's a difference. The answer is perhaps too simple and obvious. The game was mighty challenging, and games these days (at least where platformers are concerned) are just not bringing the heat. If I can beat an entire game without ever seeing the game over screen or if it's possible to beat each level and each boss in a very minimal amount of lives, then there's no challenge there. That was the case with SRA. Once I overcame the learning curve, I breezed through the rest of the game. Granted, there's still plenty to do and those missions are what will give me a hearty challenge, but the main game was lacking, at least compared to DKJC's Adventure mode. ...I feel like I'm ranting, so I'll just get to my point. My point is I just beat DKJC and it took some honest effort and practice and skill mastery (which was awesome) and beating it gave me a true, genuine sense of accomplishment because the game is not a pushover and I'm very glad I chose to get it because I haven't played a challenging platformer since YIDS and before that, not since the N64-PS1 days.

So now on to the epic battle itself. Embarassingly, it took more lives to get through the level than it did to beat K.Rool. Yesterday, I had played through a couple of the "bonus island" levels and got 25 DK coins, which unlocked the Six Crystal Star cheat. Then, I went to 1-2 to rack up some lives and 2-1 to get enough gems to get six stars. And then tonight, I marched over to 6-3 and like a man on a mission, I worked my way through the level (at this point, I want to say that perhaps one of the things I've realized I don't really like about the boss levels is that there's an actual level preceding the boss fight. It's a wee bit annoying.). I got through the first phase of the fight surprisingly quick. And the second part...well, I realized that in order for me to have any chance at all, I was really going to have to keep Diddy alive past the first hit on K.Rool. Eventually, I did manage to pull that off. I dodged the first round of meteors, had no problem with the fireballs, and then hit him again. The only way I ever hit him was by blasting Diddy into his jaw. For the second round of meteors, I used one of my stars to bypass the whole obstacle. The only obstacle I really had to worry about was the wind current swinging. Somehow, I stayed completely alive during both of those phases. I didn't use a star for them, and I never got hit. The battle seemed to just fly by, and I was shocked when K.Rool only had one hit point left. It was pretty much the cleanest run through that boss fight ever. I don't think I'll ever be able to recreate it. But I don't really need to, unless I want to get the one banana coin I missed. Eh, another day.

Well, I just wanted to tell you all the good news. Hope you're all having a great weekend. 8)

Someone needs to go around and pour concrete on the release dates for every single game in development. That way, they can't get up and move an average of three times before each game comes out. It's a little bit ridiculous that every other time I check the release date for a game I'm interested in, the date has been pushed back.

And speaking of "pushed back", I think that the different developers all have the same motto. Do you remember in the song "Be True to Your School" by the Beach Boys that part when the "cheerleaders" yell "Push 'em back, push 'em back, waaay back!" Well, that's their motto. And boy do they take it to heart.

Geometry Wars Galaxies (DS) got pushed back two weeks. Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword got pushed back onto the day before New Years (from a nice release in November). And Mega Man ZX Advent, well, I still have no idea when this game is coming out. Depending on which website you go to, the release date for this game is different. It's either 10.23 or 11.13. It can't be both, people!

I don't really remember if back in the days of the SNES and N64 there were this many alterations to the release schedule. My memory dictates that NP would give a rough estimate for the longest time and then about two months before the game's release, we'd get an official date. Why can't developers do that? They should just keep working on the game, without having given a date, for a long while and then, when they're really confident that if they confirmed a release date they could stick to it, THAT'S when they'd officially come out with a release date. I think that system would be a whole lot better than constantly finding that just as a release date is upon us, it's been moved. A lot less heartbreak, a lot less frustration.

Does anybody else feel the same? There are SO many good games coming out in the next year's worth of time, we're all going to be extremely poor by the time the onslaught ends. I don't think Christmas will begin to cover all of it. And I'm just talking about DS games.

I don't own a 360 or a Wii or a PS3. I don't plan on ever owning one of them. But regardless of that fact, I'm still tracking like 23 DS games, ten of which I definitely plan on buying once they are released. That's nuts. I've never been interested in this many games at once before, let alone handheld games.

By the end of November, I'll have bought two of my definitive ten, Geometry Wars Galaxies and ZX Advent. In the past, it's been the case that only one non-story-intensive game would come out towards the end of each semester that I would then buy and play during study breaks around finals week. This semester, I've already bought two games and then I've got another two on the way. It's crazy.

So I'm wondering: Are your wish lists as big as mine? Do you feel overwhelmed by the plethora of upcoming games?

It's been a while, I think. At least it feels like it's been a while...since I last posted, that is.

Man, what a weekend. And not in a good way. Well, kind of in a good way. I spent the entire wake catching up with all my cousins. We were laughing, downing tons of hard candies, and having an overall good time. But the funeral made me cry, quite a bit. It made everyone cry. I mean, my dad and my uncles and all my cousins. I'd never seen any of them cry before this weekend. But what was great that no matter how sad it was or how much we were crying, the six hours spent at the wake, bonding, prepared us for consoling each other and being all kinds of close all over again on Saturday. That's the one thing I'll never forget. My grandmother's death, no matter how glad we are that she's passed and sad that she's gone, brought us all back together again. All of us cousins were clicking and tight all over again, as though it hadn't been two years. It was beautiful and awesome.

Perhaps the two most heart-wrenchingly sad / poignant moments of Saturday were when all of us cousins (ranging from my 30yo cousin Pete to my 7yo cousin Marc) walked her casket in and then out of the church before and after the Mass, and then when most of us went to the hospital to visit my grandfather (who terribly enough, could not attend the wake/funeral because he had to get the lower half of his left leg amputated due to a blood clot Friday morning) and tell him that Nonna had passed away. We hadn't told him yet because he had to have the surgery. If not, he would have surely died sometime within the next two weeks. We were there, including my dad, his brother, and his two sisters, and they told him. It was so gut-wrenchingly hard to watch him begin to cry, essentially stuck in the hospital bed, in some degree of pain, physically and emotionally. It is the common belief amongst my dad and his fellow siblings that my grandfather got ill because my grandmother did. If she was going to be really sick, he was too. They were going to be in it together. ...He still doesn't know that his leg has been amputated, but he'll find out when the nurses go to change the dressings. That will be a whole other emotional punch to his heart and soul. I've been praying for him ever since Saturday.

I don't know when I'll be able to resume my gaming hobby. I'm certainly not in the mindset to sit there and play my DS, when all I can think about is my grandfather, laying in pain in that hospital bed, all alone, thinking about the fact that his better half has now left him to be in Heaven with God and all the angels. And if that wasn't saddening enough, because I had practically no weekend because I was in Brooklyn nearly the whole time, I still have so much schoolwork to catch up on. I technically shouldn't even be spending the time to type this. Do you think I'm in the mood or mindset to do schoolwork? No, I'm not. I didn't hand in any homework for two of my courses today. Will it hurt me? Probably. But ya know what? I don't care. I'm just in this state of -I don't even know what my current state is. But I do know this weekend has affected me in a very deep way and I have no idea how long it will take to come back to how I was before last Tuesday.

BTW, I apparently dinged lvl17 over the weekend. It was about time. I don't think I ever got all the points I deserved from during that bug/glitch, but I don't really care anymore. So, regardless, go me!

sigh. :|

My brother and I want to buy copies of Myst DS. It has yet to be announced that the game will be released in the US, so for now, it's only in Europe. This means that we'll have to import. I've never imported a game before, but it can't be that difficult. Or so I thought...

Amazon.co.uk apparently can't ship to my address. I assure you, I live in a house in a residential neighborhood, not some cave hidden deep within a forest. I don't know what to do. It seems to be the only place online that even sells EU DS games. I posted a topic on the matter on the DS forum site, but that has yet to help much. So that's why I'm here asking you guys. To all you US citizens, have you had any experiences with Amazon UK? What am I doing wrong that it says it can't ship to my address?