I just looked over my reviews and realized that around 20 of my 37 reviews aren't that good...I mean they're ok but really not that good.....SO....I'm going to have to edit them a little. Which will take friggin forever...

Anyways on a good note this weekend was pretty cool (four day weekend :D). I went over my friend's house, played some Halo, basketball and such...of course I have a project due on Tuesday but who cares about that?

Coinsedently, I got Level 11 today and I also got level 11 on my friend's Halo 2 game on XBox live. Ain't that something.

Have a friggin group project due tomarrow that I should probably be working on now but I'm not. Ah well. I hate how whenever you have a lot of homework you know you want to do it.....but you don't because you can't bring yourself to doing work with nothing in return. So you end up doing it in school the next day or copy from someone. Eh.....

It's after Valentine's Day pretty much and now I get that kinda depression where I see a buncha people with balloons and candy and hearts and crap and wonder when I'm gonna get something besides pity candy for Valentine's Day....ah well...

To everyone who's much luckier than me on Valentine's Day, HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!!!!!

By the way this Hitch thing won't work forever. I don't like the idea of being a date doctor....especially when I get nothing in return.

The weekend is over and valentine's day is up. But guess what? My friend James is what you would hear girls talk about saying hes so hot and whatever. Anyways apparentl;y he can't talk to girls for his life so he wants me to help him. He's giving girls he knows MY s/n so that I can talk to the girls and he can get all the action. Do you believe this? This is going to kill me I know it. Somehow some girl will say to a girl I know "I have James s/n!". Then she'll tell some girl I know who will say that's my s/n and somehow I'll get screwed I just know it.

But until that day, I am Mike Hitch, date docter. (By the way don't say that name too quickly).

Well this weekend I played Halo a little and then sat down and did nothing. I think it was somewhere between when I lied down on my bed for awhile and when I turned on the TV to watch...ugh, Danny Phantom, that I realized it was Valentine's Day again and I am dateless, again. Ah well, there's always next year. Oh ya, wait a sec, I said that last year. And the year before it, and this one time I had a date on Valentine's Day but maybe that was a dream.....I dunno.

Just another day in which nothing happens. And I go to school. Waiting for Spring Break to come. Again.

Countdown until college: 3 years and 7 months.

Countdown until date on Valentine's Day: .......priceless?

Well the Super Bowl is coming up. And I bet two dollars on Pats because, well let's face it, they're going to kick ass. As much as I want the Eagles to win it's not going to happen. Wish the Packers would've been here but once again I guess not.

.............that's about it.......I'm bored right now.

Many years and I still can't believe it.....

Does anyone truly remember the Dreamcast? What had happened to it? Let's take a trip back in time, shall we?

Around the time Dreamcast was said to come out, people thought of it as something innovative and new. Sega, afterall, with it's fist system Genesis was considered by many to be perfect and gave Nintendo a huge run for it's money way back when. The sega Saturn unfortunately, was an unfortunate downfall in Sega's history and causes a shudder today when spoken around gamers. Was it the fact that Dreamcast's predececer Saturn doomed it because the fans of Sega and other gamers had lost fate? Possibly. But it's interesting that so many gamers out there decided not to side with the Dreamcast even though it had superior graphics and technology among other systems. Even competitive enough to go shoulder-to-shoulder with the PS2. DId they know something others didn't? Why were they so sure Dreamcast was going to bomb, even when they hadn't even seen it.

Sega had developed a very solid piece of hardware and made it easy to develop for. Sega had developed some of the most innovative and imagitave games the industry has ever seen. Couple that with the fact that the Dreamcast had graphics and sound far better than any of it's competition, it seemed everything would be poised to roll it's way. As all the rumors indicated though, Sega's window of opportunity not only closed but completely shut.

Sega did do a lot of things wrong though. Because of Sega's infamous Saturn the public was openly hostile and the press just flat out ignored them. Srga didn't have many friendly software house after the Saturn crumbled into history. Saturn's code was notoriously hard to code for. Sega had a large mountain to overcome.

So they teamed with Microsoft, who ported Windows CE operating system to the Dreamcast. This delivered top notch support to their licenses which should have gave the developers a profit. It didn't work this way. The Win CE was notoriously slow and provided horrible results for any developer with the talent to write onto it's hardware. The Dreamcast's tools, while more refined than the Saturn, were much less robust than they had thought.

Developer support wasn't quite as good as Sega said either. Complaints were made public for what was percieved as a bungled attempt at marketing the title. But still, they had a piece of hardware vastly superior to anything else on the market. They had great games with solid gameplay from day one in the US. Many thought that they were going to steal competitions thunder with a system as cutting-edge as the Genesis. Apparently they were wrong. Many PS owners were quite content with staying with Sony on through the next few years instead of taking another side.

Sega couldn't quite convince people that their Dreamcast, while assurely better, could provide more gaming thrills. A common complaint was that Sega did not have as good a launch of games as the PS2 would have. As great as Dreamcast's first launch of games were it couldn't match Sony's release schedule. Nobody's could. And noone expected it would. But why would gamers change their choice of gaming when they were content with Sony? It's odd that better games with superior graphics and the far-off promise of modem play wasn't enough.

Sega did what they had to though. With better technology, waiting would cause them to go face-to-face with Sony which would be disastrous. An early launch with great games was the result. All of Sega's internal divisions were broken into nine divisions and were their own company, and each company was handed two rules: 1.) Support Sega first and foremost and 2.) Innovate or die. A stream of games with perfect to near-perfect reviews spewed forth like Soul Caliber, Phantasy Star Online, and Resident Evil: Code Veronica, but to no avail.

Didn't it used to be true in the game industry that if you could deliver good games consistently, the press would rave about you and the public would support you? That seemed to no longer be true as Sega found out. A constant spew of great games and a better ratio of good:crap games than any system in memory and still none would buy. A company that played the poor hand as perfectly as possible, delivered top notch goods, and really gave their all, still could not turn a profit.

The downfall of the Dreamcast should not be a good thing by ANYONE that enjoys video games. It's a travesty to see so much talent, so many good games, and so much fun flushed away by a jaded press and an apathetic public. It's a loss for all of us.

Why have I spent 20 minutes of my life typing this? Because I feel that the gaming industry is no longer about games. It's about marketing, and budgets and sticking to the tried-and-true. Maybe I'm slow, maybe it's been like this forever and I'm just noticing. But as a fellow gamer, I feel that since the Dreamcast's fall the world of gaming was completely changed.